The Spring Orchid Never Fades, and the Garden Blooms

Everyone in Huachao Continent has a flower blooming over their heart.

When they turned sixteen, all the children in the city recorded their blooming day in the Flower Almanac.

Everyone but Lan Shuyao.

Her flower has spent ten years blooming and ten years closed, yet it has never opened even once.

Her gift is "closing." With a touch, she can make every flower along an entire street close obediently. It's one of the most useless abilities in the city.

The city’s most prestigious surname was paired with its lowliest flower.

When other people's flowers bloomed, their families held a banquet. On the day hers bloomed, her mother left.

Her mother left behind just one sentence: "When you have a flower, put it by the door. Your mother will know how to find her way back."

Later, she joined the Flower Society's Seventh Squad, alongside four girls just as unwanted as she was: one who could only take a beating, one covered in thorns, one who never spoke more than eight words, and one who always served everyone a meal first.

They took on the most ill-omened jobs: collecting empty flowers. Flowers that would not wilt, could not stop, or had eaten away their owners' willpower. Only she could collect them.

She would walk over and lay her hand on one, and the flower would close.

She was the only one in the whole city who could do it.

But she gradually realized that every flower she closed for someone else made the door in her own heart weigh a little more. Keep closing them for too long, and it would lock forever. A locked flower would never bloom again in this lifetime.

So should she keep closing them?

She hadn't thought about that. There was only one thing she wanted:

She wanted her own flower to bloom once, and to place it by the door.

Her mother had said she would come back when the weather grew warm.