Chu Ningyue transmigrates into the body of an illegitimate daughter planted in the palace as a pawn, bound to a villain system that forces her to provoke the tyrant to buy herself another day of life. To fool everyone, she wraps herself in a shell of arrogance and cruelty, speaking sharp words while inwardly she yearns for the famously ruthless and suspicious emperor's beauty. What she does not know is that the man she calls "tyrant" can hear her every thought, and he is slowly discovering a truth that shakes both his throne and his heart.

Hua Qing Tang, a modern bronze restorer, wakes in the body of a girl at the Turning Wind Furnace, where she can hear the cracks and pressure in every piece of bronze she touches. When the brace inside the spirit-tool furnace snaps, that power saves her life and A La's, then draws her into the investigation of a batch of bronze that was illegally requisitioned. Following identical cut marks, she and Lu Huai Zhen trace three sealing formations around a fragment of an ancient mirror, the very fragment she restored before being pulled through the crack of light, and the only door back to her old life.

Minh Chau, a third-year history student, touches an old compass during fieldwork in Viet Bac and wakes in 1947. Rescued by a resistance platoon, she slowly becomes a soldier while the compass shows her fragments of the future. Knowing who may die but unable to escape time’s cruel rules, Chau must choose when to intervene and when to endure. After seven years of war, she returns to the present carrying a promise to recover the remains and keepsakes of the comrades she left behind.