To wait for someone, she went alone to England, making a living from astrological charts and tarot as she lay low in the fog along the Thames for thirteen years.
Thirteen years later, Qi Baye boarded a red-eye flight to Heathrow with a compass in hand. The old stories of the Jiumen had turned to dust, and he thought of himself as nothing more than a down-on-his-luck fortune-teller who had fled to escape trouble. Then, on a London street, a dark red bracelet slipped from the wrist of a strange woman...
One reads Eastern fate, the other Western star charts. Chinese divination verses meet tarot spreads; Plum Blossom Numerology clashes with astrological dice. The same fate is parsed and interpreted through two systems, and their clash somehow pieces together an astonishingly complete picture. The hexagrams are a pretext, the readings an excuse. Every encounter between Eastern and Western divination is a cautious test of the waters, and a tentative step closer.
On a rainy night in the fog-shrouded city, the lights of White Mansion warm both stomach and heart in a foreign land. He teaches her to read the ancient Shu symbols on bamboo slips; she helps him put away the cold rain and wind of the English streets. From sharing a place to staying by each other's side, from suspicion to trust, when the Western book of divination finally turns to its last page, the needle of the Chinese compass can no longer point anywhere but toward one person.
As it turns out, the sky lantern Buddha Ye lit burned away the old grudges of the jianghu and ignited the fuse of a new story. Thirteen years of careful planning, all for the chance to brush past each other once; a whole chart of fate calculations, and in the end, the answer is...
Heaven and earth are the board. You and I are both the calamity and the solution.
Old Jiumen fanfiction · Qi Tiezuo x original female lead · Meeting abroad · Chinese divination vs. Western fortune-telling · A slow-burn romance in the foggy city
Theme: At last, you and I meet
