In the shadow of Kampong Bahru’s crumbling
shophouses, Mei Lian stumbles upon a sealed jade
box buried beneath the floorboards of her late
mother’s hawker stall. The box contains a scroll
bearing her clan’s name—Lian—and a faded seal
from the Qing Dynasty. The discovery triggers a
memory: her grandmother once spoke of an
ancestral oath to protect a secret that could
disrupt the balance of power in Southeast Asia.
Mei had spent decades as a senior bureaucrat in
the Ministry of Culture, but retirement had left
her adrift. Now, she finds herself drawn back
into the world of intrigue when a group of
masked men raids her home, demanding the scroll.
They call themselves the Black Orchid Society, a
clandestine order sworn to reclaim lost imperial
artifacts. Mei refuses to hand it over, not out
of defiance, but because the scroll mentions her
father—a man she believed dead, who had vanished
during the 1960s Merdeka struggle.
Her only lead is a former NS buddy, Rajiv, now a
private investigator with a penchant for
gambling and hawker centre gossip. Together,
they trace the scroll’s origins to a forgotten
temple near Pulau Ubin, where colonialera maps
suggest a hidden vault beneath the ruins. The
temple, however, is protected by a system of
ancient mechanisms—gears and levers that require
precise knowledge of Confucian rites. Mei’s
grandmother had been a scholar of such things,
and the ritual must be performed by someone of
her bloodline.
The heist begins under moonlight. Mei and Rajiv
navigate flooded tunnels, dodging traps set by
the society’s agents. At the vault’s heart lies
a jade disc etched with symbols that match those
on Mei’s grandmother’s ring. When she places it
in the mechanism, the temple trembles, revealing
a chamber filled with scrolls and relics. But
the society arrives, led by a woman Mei
recognises—her estranged aunt, Li Hua, who had
cut ties after Mei’s father disappeared.
Li Hua offers Mei a choice: surrender the disc
and forget the past, or face the truth about her
father’s fate. Mei chooses the latter. The disc
reveals her father was not killed but imprisoned
by the society for knowing too much. His final
act was to encode his betrayal into the jade,
ensuring only his bloodline could unlock it.
As dawn breaks, Mei walks away with the disc,
her mind heavy with the weight of filial duty.
She returns to Kampong Bahru, where the scent of
char kway teow fills the air, and begins
rebuilding her life—not as a relic of the past,
but as a guardian of its secrets.
