The Jia family's fall was as slow as it was inevitable. Extravagance, corruption, and the loss of imperial favor eroded their foundations year by year. Servants schemed. Officials investigated. Relatives fled.

The Grand View Garden, once a paradise, became a ghost of itself. Its pavilions emptied. Its flowers bloomed unnoticed. Dai-yu, her health broken by sorrow, died on the night of Bao-yu's wedding to Bao-chai — a marriage arranged by the family to consolidate power.

Bao-yu, holding the bridal veil, expected to see Dai-yu's face beneath it. When he saw Bao-chai instead, something inside him shattered. He never fully returned to the mortal world after that night.

In the final pages, Bao-yu renounced the world, becoming a wandering monk. The stone, his tale now told, returned to its place at the foot of Greensickness Peak. And the scholar who read the tale closed the book and wept.