The Brocaded Tale of the Girl Si

She is Jiang Si, daughter of a once‑prosperous noble house now in decline. A single, unusually vivid peony draws her into a chain of mysteries, and she fights with everything she has to escape a fate that feels like a waking nightmare. In the struggle, she finds herself almost too exhausted to love anyone at all. He is Prince Yu Jin, the seventh prince—unrestrained by convention and indifferent to rigid propriety. At a plum‑blossom banquet meant to select his future consort, he brings all seven green plum branches—symbols of the seven candidates—and places them before her. He tells her that there may be thousands of possible choices, but the only one he wants is A‑Si.