On a blood-moon night in the twenty-third year of Jiajing's reign, seven strange corpses appeared one after another in Linjiang Mansion. When Hanyi Guard Qianhu Gu Yunshen cut open the throat of the deceased, what rolled out of the green chalcedony was not a Gu worm, but half a rouge button dyed with cold plum fragrance.
Pei Xueyi, a new luther player from the Jiaofang Division in the south of the city, held a human bone pipa that could weep blood. The blood dripping from the cinnabar mole at the end of his eye can light the prison warden's lamp. When the silver bell rings on his wrist, the three hundred medicine puppets who were buried in the mine three years ago come back to life on a rainy night.
"The prison rope that Gu Qianhu cut off back then is now tied around your own neck." The boy in scarlet clothes smiled and stabbed the peacock feather into his heart, and the two-headed snake spit out the message from the flesh and blood, "You still have six days to hear it clearly before the heart-eating poison attacks -" He bit the tip of his tongue and sprayed blood on the surface of the Xiuchun knife, "What on earth was I buried under the third cypress tree on the east side of the execution site seven years ago."
When the bronze key was inserted into the alchemy furnace of Qianyuan Hall, Gu Yunshen saw his own face on the mirror wall of the secret passage - the fourteen-year-old man was holding a blood-stained knife, and the young prisoner kneeling at his feet had a faded peace knot exactly like Pei Xueyi's tied around his wrist.
There are rumors in the government and the public that the former commander, who has turned into bones, is writing the last pardon order in the palace with the blood of green clams. The surface of the jadeite ring in Gu Yunshen's arms suddenly became hot, and the lower half of "Partridge Sky" protruding from the inner wall of the ring actually fit perfectly with the newly tattooed tattoo on Pei Xueyi's back.
In this life-and-death situation that spanned seven years, the most deadly thing was never the knife in the heart. But when Gu Yunshen finally understood the sentence "use love as a guide and life as a guide" on the remaining scroll of the medicine puppet technique, the tattoo on Pei Xueyi's collarbone was already covered with the Soul Calming Talisman carved by him himself.
The idea: How can a stigmatized soul, crushed by the gears of power, use love as a blade to cut through the cocoon of historical lies, and complete a poetic resistance to systemic violence in a desperate situation where the blade and the medicine lead each other.