Eternal Morning Star

In the ninth year of Yongle, at the Lantern Fair by Changmen Gate in Suzhou.

Xu Huaijin, a scholar from a poor family, guessed the riddle beneath a revolving lantern. The answer was the name of a star, and also the name of the man who had set the riddle: Shen Chang Geng, proprietor of the Changfeng Trading House.

That was the first time he learned that someone could have the word "long" in his name, yet be fated to live a short life.

Shen Chang Geng treated him like a younger brother, teaching him to keep accounts and read people, and staying by his side through the hardest winter. But he never noticed that Xu Huaijin's gaze had long since changed. When he finally did, all he wanted was to run. He wasn't afraid of people gossiping about him. He was never going to live long anyway. What he feared was that the upright Xu Sanlang would one day have people pointing at his back and calling him a "cut-sleeve."

Xu Huaijin had never cared about fame or official rank. That changed when, in the rain outside Hanshan Temple, he saw Shen Chang Geng sheltering a widowed mother and her orphaned children, then turn away and cough blood into his sleeve. At last, he understood: to protect someone, he first had to climb high enough.

From the examination halls in Yingtian to the new capital in Beijing, from mourning observances to announcing the successful candidates before the throne, they stole a few years of warmth together beneath the lamplight amid the storms of the Yongle reign.

But Yongle, in the end, did not mean eternal peace.

During the Lantern Festival in the first year of Xuande, Chang Geng fell. That autumn, Prince Han Zhu Gaoxu raised an army in Le'an, only to be swiftly defeated. An old letter dragged Xu Huaijin into the purge that followed.

It was not until he stood amid the snows of Liaodong that Xu Huaijin learned what had been in the box Shen Chang Geng burned before he left.

A poor scholar pursues × a frail beauty yields

Theme: Beneath the web of Confucian propriety and imperial power in the prosperous Yongle era, one kept to the shadows while the other pursued the light. They fought with everything they had for a life together, only to become the Morning Star and the Evening Star, gazing at each other across dawn and dusk, never to meet again.