A story of Wei Yan, and of Chang Yu and Xie Zheng, in the world where Jinzhou never fell Wei Yan died hated. A regent with eighteen years of blood on his hands, executed in the autumn, buried far from the capital under a name he chose never to clear. He had his reasons. He always had his reasons. They were the kind a man takes to his grave on purpose. And then he wakes, in the cold, on a wall at Yanzhou, years before the worst of it. The woman he has loved his whole silent life is alive and sixteen and standing beside him. The disaster that unmade the world is two hours from happening. And this time, he knows exactly how it ends. What he buys with that knowledge is not glory. It is an ordinary world. A peaceful reign, a sunlit border town, a fierce girl who grows up to make her own name as a general and the serious boy who loves her in secret for twenty years, a cook no one can read, a scholar who stays warm, a prince with no monster in him. Everyone he failed in the other life gets to live in this one, free and happy and faintly bored, and not one of them will ever know there was another world, or what it cost the quiet old minister at the edge of the room to take it off them. A gentle story about second chances, the people we would save if we could, and the particular loneliness of being the only one left who remembers the life that never happened.

Alam ni Georgette na siya ang huling babaeng papasok sa isipan ni Zrael kung ang pag-uusapan ay makakasama sa buhay. Hindi nga ba at noong lang sa mismong kaarawan nito ay tinawanan lang nito ang tsismis na narinig ukol sa lihim niyang pagsinta dito? Kaya naman ganoon na lang ang gulat niya nang halos maglumuhod ito sa harapan niya upang isuot niya ang engagement ring na ibinibigay nito. Subalit dagli ding napalitan ng nag-uumapaw na inis ang pagkagulat niya nang ipaliwanag nitong magkukunwari lang pala silang engaged para tantanan na ito ng matchmaker nitong lolo. Ani pa nito kung iyong mga karaniwang nakakarelasyon daw kasi nito ang ipapakilala nito sa lolo nito ay hindi maniniwala ang matanda na seryoso na ito at nagbabalak talagang magpakasal. But by introducing her as his fiancee, someone who was the exact opposite of his gorgeous and sexy bevy of women, his grandfather could only believe it was really true love that prompted him to look beyond her unattractiveness. Sa madaling sabi, sa opinyon nito ay siya ang Beast sa Beauty nito kaya dapat ay maniwala ang lolo nitong pang-fairytale nga ang lovestory nila.