◎A dream of a beautiful, fragile treacherous minister◎

Song of White Snow

Prologue: A Dream of Falling Blossoms

On the eve of her transmigration, Qu You had a strange and bizarre dream.

The corridor was cold and narrow. Under the moonlight, the vermilion palace walls stretched off into an indistinct distance, towering and forbidding. All around her was silent enough to hear a needle drop, and only after a long while did the long, drawn-out sound of the water clock drift over from beyond the layered walls.

She was sitting on the ground—kneeling, to be precise. She hadn’t noticed the humiliating position she was in until she tried to get up, only to find both legs so numb with pain she could barely feel them.

Beside her stood a bronze rain vat. In the hazy moonlight, she could make out the reflection of a young girl in it—hair done up in twin loop buns, hairpins and skirts in disarray, and what looked like traces of blood on her still-childish face.

Then, in the darkness and moonlight, she suddenly heard the clash of shackles.

Out of the vermilion shadows, a man in white slowly walked forward.

He wore a white cloak, his temple hair disheveled, his complexion paler than fresh snow. Every so often he had to stop to rest. Two sword-bearing jailers followed close on his heels, matching his pace; even though he walked so slowly, neither said a word.

Before Qu You could react, the man had already seen her.

His eyes were a pale amber, framed by long, drooping lashes. He looked to be not yet thirty, yet his frame was gaunt, thin, and stooped. Qu You stared at him in a daze. He, in turn, undid the white fox-fur cloak around his shoulders and, with some difficulty, crouched down in front of her, draping the single winter garment he had over her shoulders.

Only then did Qu You notice that beneath his cloak, heavy chains bound his hands and feet, and even his slender neck bore one. The chains pressed down heavily on the white inner robe beneath them, fresh blood seeping through the mottled stains—wounds that were hard to look at.

His hands trembling, the man tied the sash of the cloak for her without saying another word. The white jade ring on his ice-cold, bone-like finger brushed against her ear, sending a shiver rippling through her.

Qu You watched his crow-feather lashes tremble ceaselessly; as he lowered and raised his gaze, they traced the outline of a pair of indifferent, narrow phoenix eyes. At the high outer corner of one eye was a tiny red mole, almost too small to notice.

Such a beautiful face—dignified, aloof, upright—and yet, because of that red mole visible only at this close a distance, it carried a touch of worldliness.

Qu You unconsciously clutched the white fox-fur cloak tighter, wanting to speak, but her throat only produced a dull, voiceless catch. The man had already risen and left. Dragging his wounds and heavy chains, he had to stop and cough after only a step or two, and it was a long while before he disappeared into the dim depths of the moonlit night.

She ran her fingers absently over the pattern on the bronze vat beside her, suddenly feeling a strange sense of familiarity.

Before long, the two jailers who had gone off with the man came walking back the way he had disappeared, blood-stained instruments of torture in hand, their low conversation carrying with unusual clarity through the narrow corridor.

One of them said, “Brother Liu, strange to say, isn’t he the first to walk out of the Imperial Prison and the Three Judicial Offices with his whole body intact?”

The other said, “Brother Fang, mind your words. Do you even know who that was just now?”

The jailer surnamed Fang said nothing, so Brother Liu went on, “Hah, you haven’t been here long, have you—not to even recognize the Chief Chancellor.”

The jailer surnamed Fang said, puzzled, “I’ve certainly seen our reigning Chancellor, Chancellor Su, but…”

He paused, then said in surprise, “Ah, could it be him?”

Brother Liu said, “Who would have thought it. His Majesty proved soft-hearted after all, and let him go home to Lin’an. It was a close call, that decree—yesterday when I went to fetch him, he had only a breath of life left; he nearly died right there in the prison.”

The jailer surnamed Fang spat. “No shortage of people in this world hoping for his death. If you ask me, even walking free, he won’t live much longer… Still, come to think of it, he’s awfully young.”

Brother Liu hesitated. “Yes, and his face doesn’t match the rumors either. Truly, you can’t judge a man by his looks.”

The jailer surnamed Fang said, “Zhou Tan is infamous through and through—now he’s finally getting what’s coming to him.”

Only a few sentences passed between the two, yet they set off an earthquake in Qu You’s heart.

Zhou Tan?

When Qu You chose her major for university, she hadn’t yet settled on where her interests lay, and had followed in her mother’s footsteps by studying law. It wasn’t until her graduate entrance exams that she realized she was a thoroughgoing lover of literature, history, and philosophy through and through, and switched to ancient history for her postgraduate studies. Drawing on her undergraduate legal training, she specialized in the penal codes and laws of the Yin dynasty, continuing all the way through to her doctorate, and writing a fair number of papers along the way.

By her count, she had been researching the laws of Great Yin for six years now.

This field was dry as dust. Her senior schoolmate, who studied cuisine and regional customs, had already published two books and become a minor academic celebrity; her advisor and fellow students, who worked on the romantic historical figures of Northern Yin, drew packed lecture halls every time.

Her own research was cold in the extreme—there weren’t even a handful of specialists in the same field in the whole country.

Her advisor had once asked her why she was so devoted to the laws of Great Yin, and she had given the question real thought.

The history of Yin filled volume upon volume; its legal treatises alone spanned four scrolls, encompassing twelve reforms both great and small. The Yin legal code had been revised twenty-four times in total, the largest revision coming during Emperor Ming’s Chongjing era, with the supplementary additions known as the “Decree of the Fallen Blossoms.”

From the perspective of a law student like Qu You, the clauses the Decree of the Fallen Blossoms added to Yin law didn’t even seem to come from the hand of an ancient person at all—there was a heavy admixture of ideas from an era when Western and modern legal systems had fused with tradition, which she found endlessly fascinating.

It was a pity that even though the Decree of the Fallen Blossoms had been pushed through with tremendous force at the time, it was eventually abolished all the same.

She had racked her brains trying to identify who had chiefly drafted the Decree of the Fallen Blossoms, but the person was entirely unnamed, leaving no trace in the historical records, and even those with any connection to the matter were few. Only in an obscure corner of the collected writings of the reigning Chancellor of the time, Zhou Tan, did she find a vague, unattributed inscription of three characters, dedicated to someone unnamed—

“Having heard the Way in the morning.”

Zhou Tan was a notoriously treacherous minister, yet it was he who, during Emperor Ming’s reign, pushed through the reforms with an iron hand. Qu You found his ruthlessness chilling, yet also felt a flicker of admiration for him.

And she was deeply curious just what tangled connection he might have had with that unnamed person.

Qu You had combed through the history of Yin from end to end and found no clue at all; amid the boundless sea of documents, she had drifted off to sleep, only to dream herself into the single winter garment on Zhou Tan’s body.

That gifted cloak, and the trembling, slender hands that had given it to her, coalesced in her heart into something like a mournful sigh—so this was what it meant to be a beautiful, fragile treacherous minister.

In a daze, Qu You recalled that the pattern on the bronze vat beside her was, in fact, the lotus motif popular in Northern Yin.

But the dream cut off abruptly at that very moment. The two jailers carrying the shackles had not yet walked far when Qu You’s hand sank into the rainwater in the bronze vat, and she was suddenly, completely swallowed by a suffocating sensation like drowning.

When her vision brightened again, she saw a hazy, misty rain.

Zhou Tan sat beneath the eaves of a long corridor, his gaze fixed unmoving on an apricot tree before him, tied with red silk ribbon. The apricot blossoms were in full bloom—it must have been the third month of spring.

A thin blanket lay over his legs against the cold; he looked much the same as when he had given her the cloak, except that a lock of hair at each temple had turned white. Outside the humble tiled cottage, someone passed by holding an umbrella, discussing him without the least reserve.

“I hear the person living here used to be a great villain. Now he’s dying, down to his last breath, and not a single physician will come to treat him.”

“Do enough evil, and Heaven is bound to punish you!”

Hearing this, Qu You felt a strange stirring of injustice on his behalf.

The history books recorded all the great evils he had done in his lifetime, but they would never record that on one bitter winter night, he had once given his own cloak to a young palace maid to keep her warm.

Zhou Tan seemed to hear it too, but he paid it no mind at all. His gaze, calm, rested beneath the apricot tree, and he smiled faintly. He drew a handkerchief from within his robes and pressed it to his mouth as he broke into a deep, wracking cough, the sound gradually swallowed up by the crisp patter of falling rain.

The handkerchief was soon soaked through with blood.

He slowly lowered his hand as well.

The white jade ring slipped from his finger and rolled down the steps in front of the eaves, and only then did Qu You realize she was standing right there beneath the apricot tree.

Had he been looking at her all along?

The sickly, frail treacherous minister in white looked at her with something like tender, lingering affection, blood staining his chin. As if realizing he must not look his best just now, he wiped at it with the handkerchief, but the cloth only came away with more blood, staining even the snow-white front of his robe.

Qu You walked toward him and heard him murmur, low, “If there is a next life…”

He never finished the sentence. The apricot blossoms began to fall, rustling down.

Death opened and closed without a sound, and yet she found herself grieving, feeling an injustice, a faint sorrowful lament, for this person who had lived a thousand years before her.

The great dream sank deeper and deeper, until Qu You woke with a start, drenched in sweat.

Before her was a carved wooden lattice window. It took her a very long time to realize that, this time, she was not dreaming.