The Endless Game of Intrigue

At the gambling table, Xiao Wujie lost another thirty taels of silver. This was already the seventh time today he had deliberately exposed a weakness. Every object tore open fissures in his memories: the red sandalwood dice cup was steeped in the cold sweat of a eunuch from the previous dynasty, while the gamblers' jade pendants retained the coded whispers of secret agents planted by powerful ministers. The bloodline that had guarded an imperial tomb for a thousand years seared his spine day and night, while the seven-layered death trap laid by the current Grand Secretary had reached its third stage. “Brother Xiao, you can't even hold the dice steady?” When the physician's daughter used a silver needle to expose the poisonous insect hidden in his sleeve, her fingertip brushed across the blade mark from the Ministry of Justice's massacre of an entire household three years earlier. In the medicine pouch at her waist lay Soul-Severing Powder, capable of poisoning half the capital. Who, exactly, was closing the net in this gamble? In this deadly mystery, the most fatal thing has never been calculating every move, but the eyes that suddenly go blind upon touching the truth...