On the first day after Shen Qingci was reborn, her legitimate mother smashed her over the head.
In the ancestral hall, an ancestral tablet struck her temple, and blood ran down her chin. Outside the door, her half-sister laughed sweetly. "Just admit it, Sister." In her previous life, this was where they had forced her to press her fingerprint onto a document and sent her to the Pingyang Marquis's estate as a concubine. Nine years later, she died in a woodshed. This time, she shoved her legitimate mother right back.
She exposed the poisoned tremella soup plot in front of everyone. She reclaimed control of the household. Then Grandmother handed her an old silver hairpin. Hidden inside its pearl was a roll of silk, bearing eight characters: her mother's final words, and the origin of the massacre that had wiped out the Shen family. The twentieth day of the twelfth month. Xuanmiao Temple.
Among the ruins, she met Pei Yun. The Regent had burned paper offerings at her grave all night in her previous life. In this life, he returned five years early and watched over her until she turned thirteen, all to wait for her to hear one sentence:
Your mother is still alive...
Shen Qingci rose to her feet. The blood spilled in the ancestral hall had not been shed in vain, and her mother's old hairpin had not been hidden for nothing. She would unravel the Pingyang Marquis's scheme, overturn the emperor's game, and grind everyone who had wronged her in her previous life into the dirt, one by one.
The silver hairpin and the imperial edict: the fire from thirteen years ago was about to burn again...
This novel and its characters are entirely fictional. Any resemblance to real people or events is purely coincidental. Please do not imitate.
