Who Will Send the Brocade Letter?

In the eighteenth year of the Yongchang era, after Shen Zhiwei, daughter of a Jiangnan salt merchant, loses her father, she takes a secret recipe and heads to the capital. Someone lays a trap for her by the Qiantang River. Prince Jing, Xiao Jingcheng, is secretly investigating the transport routes, so he rescues her on a stormy night.

"You aren't carrying a rouge recipe, young lady. You're carrying a death warrant." He cuts open the brocade box she clutches tightly, revealing half of a tiger tally.

To uncover the truth behind her father's death, she enters the competition to become an imperial merchant under the pretense of presenting a treasure, navigating abacuses and flashes of blades. He has spent years laying his own web, using an air of ill health as a cover while he cleans up the corrupt officials. Amid a tangled game of ledgers and intelligence, they become each other's sharpest blades.

When the lights suddenly go out at the palace banquet, she takes a poisoned arrow for him. Then she smiles and says, "Your Highness owes me a life. Why not spend the rest of yours repaying me?"

In front of everyone, he breaks off his engagement to the Commandery Princess and presses the bloodstained tiger tally into her palm. "It should have been this way all along, ever since you planted that Jiangnan rainstorm in my heart."

I thought I'd make enough money to become the richest person under heaven, but instead I won the prince's heart.

I thought I'd catch a little fish, but instead I hauled up a bright moon.

This novel and its characters are entirely fictional. Any resemblance to actual people or events is purely coincidental. Do not imitate.