When Jiang Hanyuan was thirteen, in her father’s military camp, she first laid eyes on the man whose courtesy name was Jinmei.
At that time, the young Prince Anle, acting in the emperor’s stead, came to the frontier to reward the troops. Amidst the cold gleam of silver hooks, he laughed away cups of wine; clad in his archer’s robe astride a white horse, he shattered the frosted dawn of the desert beyond the yellow sands.
Many years passed—so many that Jiang Hanyuan had long forgotten that autumn morning—until one day she was told that he had asked her father for her hand, intending to make her his wife. By then, he was already the Regent of the capital, seated high in power, his authority overshadowing the court.
She was willing to be his vanguard, to level mountains and fill seas, to open new lands for him—even if it meant death, she would have no regrets. Yet, apart from herself, no one else in this world would ever know that the swift horse chasing the wind, the arrow’s cry piercing the sky on that frontier morning of late autumn, had once been the single bright color in the desolate dreamscape of her girlhood.
No one would know.
In this lifetime, never again.
