Four months after Shen Yunwan married into the Xiao family, she knelt in the snow for three hours. She was the daughter of a convicted official, taken in as a concubine by the Xiao family because of a feng shui painting her father had left behind. Hidden in the painting was the secret of the dragon vein beneath the Xiao ancestral tombs. But she had no idea where the painting was.
All she knew was that whenever Xiao Yan came near, memories that did not belong to her surfaced in her mind: heavy snow, a short blade engraved with the character Yan, the piercing agony of a blade through her chest, and someone crying out to her in utter anguish, "A Wan!" Xiao Yan was frail and coughed up blood, neglected in a remote courtyard. But Shen Yunwan noticed that the old scar on the web between his thumb and forefinger was in the same place as the scar on the person who killed her in her dreams.
She began investigating and uncovered the truth behind a three-hundred-year-old game of chess: for generations, the Shen family daughters had all been "bait," cast into a well to hook the Xiao family's undying soul. Her mother took twelve years to climb out of the well. Her grandmother forged a second hook. Her father spent sixteen years shaping a stone that would hold the seal, carving names, and pushing at the door, all so his daughter could leave this game. And she was the final piece of bait, as well as the final hook.
"Use the hook as bait, and the bait as a hook." Her father made only one mistake in the character he carved in his entire life, hiding the way to break the game in her name. She had to walk the path her mother had laid, recite the names of three hundred Shen daughters, and gather back, one by one, every strand of bait line from the past three hundred years. And Xiao Yan, the man who killed her in her previous life, had guarded the door for her for three hundred years in this life. The scar on his hand, the blood he coughed up, and the paper covered in the words "A Wan" all pointed to the same answer: this time, he would not let her walk alone.
"When the bait is gone, the shore will open on its own. Mother will be waiting for you there."
