Long ago, when the goddess Nuwa repaired the dome of heaven, she melted down thirty-six thousand five hundred and one stones. She used thirty-six thousand five hundred of them; the last one she cast aside.

This rejected stone, having been tempered by the goddess herself, possessed consciousness. It lay abandoned at the foot of the Greensickness Peak in the Great Fable Mountains, where it spent millennia observing the world.

One day, a Buddhist monk and a Daoist priest passed by. The stone, longing to experience the human world, begged them to take it. The monk inscribed words upon it and carried it to the mortal realm.

Thus began the great novel sometimes called 'A Dream of Red Mansions' — the story of a stone that became a young nobleman named Jia Baoyu, who lived and loved and lost in the grandeur and decay of an aristocratic family.

The stone's narrative begins with a warning: 'Truth becomes fiction when the fiction is true; reality becomes unreal when the unreal is real.' What follows is at once a love story, a family saga, and a meditation on the nature of existence itself.