Record of Wind and Lotus

In the first year of Yongxi, the new ruler of Great Yu ascended the throne at the age of ten. The Empress Dowager governed from behind the curtain, while Chief Grand Secretary Pei Heng answered three questions on the palace steps. When he left court, half a memorial, still unfinished, was tucked in his sleeve.

He had mastered the Three Systems of Divination and used tortoise-shell divination to foresee strange signs in the fortunes of both the nation and his family. Yet he dared not speak of them openly. Instead, for nineteen years he filled a blue-cloth-bound journal with 3,217 entries. In his study, he also used a tortoiseshell shard to weigh down the answer that “no one must ever see.”

Ten years later, Pei Heng died. The following year, his posthumous honors and official rank were stripped from him; a year after that, his family was confiscated. On the night of the confiscation, his three-year-old granddaughter, Pei Fenghe, was escorted out through a side gate by her wet nurse and an old servant. She carried half a yin-yang coin, a farewell letter, and half of the Book of Cultivating the Heart in her arms.

Seventeen years later, the orphan He, who worked beneath the eaves of a rice shop in Shengjing, used a pen, a ledger, her martial skills, and her understanding of people's hearts to rise from the streets like a hidden dragon, all the way to the palace gates to demand justice. Those who had once knelt to see the Chief Grand Secretary off now knelt before her.

The Record of Fenghe tells how a girl grew from a crack in a door into a roof beam, and how the rise and fall of one family reflected the sickness of an entire dynasty. The wind rises among the lotus flowers. It has not yet stirred, yet the whole city is already filled with it.