Lin Yuezai had lost her memory.
When she woke, a young and handsome emperor was keeping watch by her bed. He told her, “A-Yue, you are the person I love most.”
So she believed him.
She waited for Lin Jingxing to return from court, threw herself into his arms, and linked her arm through his at the lantern festival, smiling as she called him her husband.
Lin Jingxing knew it had all begun with a lie, yet he still lost himself in it.
He had given her a false identity, but received her genuine love in return.
He knew it was like drinking poison to quench his thirst, but he was content to do so.
Until the great victory on the northern frontier.
Prince Regent Lin Jingyuan marched south with forty thousand black-armored troops and reached the banks of the Luo River.
The capital’s garrison formed ranks across the river. The entire court believed the Prince Regent had brought his troops to force his way into the palace and purge the emperor’s court of corrupt officials.
Lin Yuezai thought so, too.
Until the man looked at her through rank upon rank of armored soldiers and called out, eyes red:
“A-Yue.”
She began dreaming of another version of herself.
She dreamed of a bloodstained street on the Qixi Festival, a kiss beneath a flowering tree during an autumn hunt, and of traveling a thousand miles to the southern frontier for the sake of a man named Lin Jingyuan.
At last, she remembered
Before she fell in love with Lin Jingxing, she had already loved Lin Jingyuan deeply.
But regaining her memories did not take everything back to how it had been.
The love she had once felt was real.
And so was the love she felt after losing her memory.
She fled from the two men and took temporary refuge at the Gu residence, hoping to untangle this impossible relationship.
But later, she discovered
That Gu Chongyue, the ever-gracious, composed Chancellor who treated the realm like a chessboard, was the one who had offered up the Gu worm back then.
He was also the third man she could no longer pretend was an outsider.
Lin Yuezai lost her memories once, and gained a lover.
Theme: Even after loss and forgetfulness, we can still find the courage to rediscover ourselves and our true feelings
