During the Yong'an period, Shen Heng went to Qionglinyuan Caomuzhai in the capital to study medicine at the behest of his late mother. This garden, which brings together talented women from all over the world, is actually a hunting ground set up by the emperor to continue the "Cicada Sloughing Art" for three hundred years - every three years, a talented woman is selected as a parasitic vessel, and her flesh and blood is used to continue the emperor's consciousness.
Shen Heng's mother, Du Ruo, was the "unfinished container" who escaped last time. She hid the fragments of the truth in a sapphire bracelet, a half-page medicine book and a copper hairpin. In the process of searching for his mother's remains, Shen Heng met the embroiderer Su Xiu Niang, the actor Liu Hanyan, and Gu Guizhou, the keeper of the nine-story tower who had been silent for ten years. The three formed an alliance in the face of a common destiny and tried to interrupt the cicada's transformation at the Qionglin Banquet.
However, Shen Heng finally discovered that she was the final vessel chosen by the emperor - her blood was the only "cicada vein" that could carry the power of cicada sloughing in three hundred years. When the pupal chamber collapsed, she drank the self-prepared "non-shedding" medicine and turned into an inparasitic body. The emperor collapsed and the chrysalis chamber collapsed. The price was that all her memories of her mother, Gu Guizhou, and this garden were burned together with the power of parasitism. Many years later, the shopkeeper of a medicine shop in a small town in the south of the Yangtze River only remembered that he was called "the apprentice of Cao Mu Zhai".
Intention: "Every tree and plant has its own time, and so do people." This is not saying "let nature take its course", but saying: I have my own time sequence, and I decide when it starts and when it ends.