When I was a child in my hometown, there was a boy surnamed Gao who couldn't speak at the age of five. Every day, he would sit silently by the river in front of the village.
When I was fourteen, I married into the prominent Gu family in the countryside. As my wedding carriage passed by, I learned that the boy had died ten years earlier, murdered by his stepmother. His lonely grave lay far from the family cemetery.
Later, during the factional strife of the Zhenglong era, the entire Shi family was convicted. My husband's family, trying to avoid disaster, planned to drown me in a pond. I escaped in the middle of the night and hid behind the boy surnamed Gao's grave. Only then did I escape that fate.
By a twist of fate, I was chosen to serve in the prince's residence... More than ten years later, I returned to my hometown as the Dowager Consort of Prince Wu. On the road, the carriage suddenly stopped because the livestock refused to move. I got out and saw the boy's grave, and at last understood that fate follows its own course.
Living a second life, I returned to the streamside from that year, where the willows swayed softly.
This story explores ideas from classical philosophy through the perspective of a reborn noblewoman. Though written from a woman's perspective, many questions are explored through discussions between the male and female leads. The righteous heart of Heaven and Earth knows no gender.
Shiyu is the male lead's childhood nickname, taken from the line, "To test jade, burn it for three full days; to discern timber, wait seven years." The famous couplet continues, "The days when Zhou Gong feared the slanderous rumors, and Wang Mang seemed humble before he usurped the throne." For quite some time, the male lead remains shrouded in obscurity. In the female lead's first life, his story ends before it can even begin. In her second life, he is silent for five years, then makes a stunning debut.
Had he died in those days, who could ever have known what was true or false about his life?
