COLLECTION · Series · 2018

烟花易冷

Original title

In the twelfth year of the Republic of China, the second young mistress of the Yi family, the leading wine magnates of Tingzhou, died suddenly. The Yis maintained that their second daughter-in-law had been killed by renowned local physician Leng Bingkun through the misuse of drugs, and bribed the police to have him taken into custody. Shocked to learn of her father's imprisonment, Leng Ruyi sought help everywhere to no avail, and with her family pharmacy then smashed, she was left with no way out and reluctantly accepted the condition proposed by the Yis — to marry, in the name of a luck-bringing wedding, the sickly second young master Yi Siwen, who had just lost his wife. She meant it only as a stalling tactic to secure her father's safety, little knowing that it was a trap laid by the Yi family's Thousand-Day Wine Workshop to obtain the Leng family's ancestral secret recipe for medicinal wine. Though mentally prepared, Ruyi still could not adjust to the coldness of the great household: her chronically bedridden husband Siwen treated her as invisible, her father-in-law was stern and scheming, her mother-in-law professed Buddhist devotion while remaining bitter and ruthless underneath, her eldest sister-in-law addressed her as sister yet confronted her as an enemy, her younger sister-in-law was eccentric and sharp and quarreled with her out of jealousy, at night a madwoman in the mysterious old house often let out piercing cries, and added to all this were rigid and exacting rules — everything left Ruyi stifled and longing to escape. In such an intricate household, how will Ruyi handle the tangle of relationships and find her own place? Can she untie the knot in each person's heart and cure their inner afflictions? Who is the madwoman in the old house, and what hidden story lies behind her? How will her relationship with her husband Siwen develop? Her former lover Lu Shaoqi, returning from studying abroad and learning what had happened, gave up his promising future to become a manager at the Yi wine workshop, preparing to find a chance to take Ruyi away. Caught between the husband to whom she is wed and for whom feelings are gradually growing, and the lover whose devotion to her runs deep, how should Ruyi choose? With warlords running rampant, the workshop collapsing, the people suffering, and Master Yi having lost his eldest son, in the moment of crisis he entrusts the workshop to Ruyi and Siwen. Can Ruyi set aside past grievances, break through the warlords' oppression, drive off the forces of evil, and revive the Thousand-Day Wine Workshop? Amid the rolling tide of history, what legend will Ruyi go on to forge?