Flower Skirt & Painted Mask: Treading the Spring Blossoms

Flower Skirt & Painted Mask: Treading the Spring Blossoms Plot:

On the town's Spring Festival, Su Wanyi—wearing a crimson flower skirt and a butterfly-patterned painted mask—sneaks out of the ancestral hall and stumbles into the Xie family's wisteria-shrouded "forbidden courtyard," knocking over the medicine bowl of Xie Zhao, a sick young master confined for years. Xie Zhao is so cold that even the spring breeze avoids him, but this girl—whose laugh feels like peach blossoms falling into tea—turns his world upside down: she replaces his herbs with candied cherry blossoms, drags him to climb the wall to watch the spring fair, and even says, "You're prettier than the magnolias outside." They agree to meet at dusk daily, yet Xie Zhao hides that his "confinement" is to guard a secret medicine that keeps flowers blooming forever. Wanyi doesn't know her mask is the only token from the little girl who saved him from a wildfire a decade ago. As the spring fair drums grow louder, the scent of the secret medicine overlaps with the mask's butterfly pattern—Is their encounter a coincidence, or a "spring promise" spanning ten years?