Qingsi Wan · Chat

Prologue: Misty Jiangnan, Rumors Across the City Year after year, Jiangnan is wrapped in misty rain; a thin, hazy fog locks away all the wealth and elegance of the city. Everyone says that the most precious thing in Jiangnan is not the rain-wreathed towers, nor the golden glory of its great houses, but the decade-sealed youthful obsession of the Xiao clan's master, Xiao Linchuan, which no one has ever been able to see. The Xiao clan's power presses down on Jiangnan. It has lived in seclusion for a century, and its cold, formidable foundation is unfathomably deep. Those born in the Xiao household are steeped in cold power play, with hard hearts and distant blood ties. Yet Xiao Linchuan alone is the most inscrutable figure in all of Jiangnan. He lost both parents early and spent his youth in solitude and hardship. Through clan infighting, the contempt of others, and endless humiliation, he carved a bloody path for himself; hardened in his youth, he rose through ruthlessness. The moment he seized control of the Xiao clan, his brows were veiled in frost and his heart sank like a cold, deep pool. Everyone saw him as thunderous and decisive, indifferent and ruthless, utterly without warmth or tenderness, and so they all guessed that a man so cold, fierce, and unearthly must hide in his heart a white moonlight—unattainable, unforgettable, and never to be possessed. No one knew who she was, and no one had ever caught a glimpse of her, yet once such a romantic rumor took root, it spread through Jiangnan in endless layers, never ceasing year after year. Yet no one had expected that, years later, this ascetic master of the Xiao clan, bearing half a lifetime of obsession, would defy his clan's obstruction and disregard the censure of high society, stubbornly marrying the legitimate daughter of the Su family—a blameless, humble house with a heritage of poetry and books. Su Qingwan came from a scholarly family—gentle, clean, serene, and refined, utterly out of place in the forbidding, cold Xiao mansion. And so the whole city erupted in gossip; everyone sighed, everyone talked. People asserted it with absolute certainty: her gentle brows and eyes, her very bearing, matched the original, and she was a stand-in Xiao Linchuan had sought out—a shadow meant to fill the regrets of his youth and soothe an obsession that had lasted for years. The rumors fell like rain, fine and endless, covering the corridors of the Xiao mansion, covering every morning and evening, covering three full silent years of married life. The world saw only the surface, not the past; saw only the meeting, not the reunion. No one knew that this marriage, condemned by the world, had never been about settling or filling a void. It was his search through the vast sea of people, ten bitter years, all to find again that one and only moonlight of the mortal world that had once lit up his pitch-black youth. The misty rain hangs heavy; the deep mansion lies in silence. A devotion misread by the world, a past sealed away by time, a life together misaligned by amnesia—from here, the curtain slowly rises.