The Rouge Case Files

The third year of Jianwen, New Year’s Day. Suzhou Prefecture, the execution ground at the vegetable market. Snow fell heavily. Shen Yuying knelt on the execution platform, the blood beneath her knees already frozen solid. Forty-seven members of her family stood in a row beside her, from her grandfather to her youngest cousin. The embroidered spring knives of the Imperial Guards gleamed cold blue in the snow. The execution official’s vermilion brush hovered above his desk, like a drop of blood about to congeal. She heard her grandfather’s final words in the wind and snow, spoken as calmly as when he had taught her to distinguish colors in the rouge workshop: “The Luo lineage would rather be shattered than debased.” When the blade fell, she did not close her eyes. She watched her blood spatter onto her grandfather’s long robe, steeped in the scent of rouge, like safflower juice bleeding across rice paper, shifting from crimson to deep purple before merging with the snow all around them. Endless darkness swept over her. Such injustice! Her vengeful soul would not rest! Shen Yuying jolted awake. Above her was a lotus-colored canopy embroidered with the plum blossoms she knew so well. The air carried the crisp scent of plum blossoms steeped in snowmelt, the unmistakable fragrance of the Shen family’s rouge workshop. She lay frozen in bed. Outside the window, maids chatted merrily. In the distance, she could faintly hear her grandfather scolding the apprentices, his voice full of vigor. Her mother was instructing the kitchen to prepare Laba porridge, her voice as gentle as ever. There were exactly twenty days left until the day of the execution in the snow. She had returned, back to a time before any of it had happened. This time, she would not let that blade fall. But when fate caught up with her once more, no amount of effort could turn aside the inevitable death that awaited her. A thorough investigation revealed that the family tragedy was tied to a struggle for imperial power. A humble merchant girl, she would stake everything she had and defy heaven to change her fate!