At the end of a long alley on the border between yin and yang stands a shop that never sees sunlight, called Ashen Bone Studio. Its owner, Shen Yan, tends a roomful of glimmering white Remnant Bones and has wandered the mortal world for a thousand years. People say she can glimpse the past through the spiritual Remnant Bones and resolve the lingering regrets of the dead, but no one knows that she has never guarded her collection of cold, beautiful artifacts to save anyone.
She is waiting for someone. Waiting for Xie Jingchen, her Daoist partner who dispersed into soul fragments a thousand years ago to protect her.
The Remembrance Comb, the Spirit Fingerpin, the Homesick Flute, the Twin Hearts Sword... One blood-soaked Remnant Bone after another finds its way to Ashen Bone Studio, each concealing a past filled with love that could never be attained. There is the doomed resolve of a princess who lost her kingdom, condensed her life force into a comb, and gifted it to an enemy prince, only to die by his blade; the sorrow of a blind junior sister who turned the spiritual roots in her fingers into a hairpin to secure her senior brother's path to immortality, only for him to push her from the Executioner's Platform with his own hands; the desolation of a young general who condensed his broken soul into a flute and played for his betrothed, slain in battle, before being buried with her beneath the yellow sands; and the tragedy of two Daoist partners, one righteous and one wicked, who forged a sword from the spiritual roots in their spines and went to their deaths together.
Shen Yan helps others fulfill their final wishes, but cannot untie her own knot. She believes that gathering the deepest regrets of the Seven Sects will let her defy fate and bring Xie Jingchen back to life. But when the seventh strand of regret returns to its place, and the array that restores spiritual power roars to life, all her memories of the past come rushing back. Only then does she understand: in the immortal tribulation a thousand years ago, it was never he who sacrificed himself for the Dao.
It was her. Shen Yan, whom he had personally placed at the heart of the array and drained of every spiritual root.
Her embers turn to ash, her regrets vanish into nothing. Before she can utter even a single word of hatred, she scatters into dust across the sky. And he, who possesses eternal life over the Three Realms, has forever lost the girl who used to smile and call him "Jingchen."
[Grass has been planted]😘