[Strong heroine + Power struggles + Palace intrigue + Fictional world + Tragedy + Highly intelligent characters + Angsty romance + Multiple perspectives + Unexpected surprises + Coming-of-age story]
Wild grass devours bones; blood soaks the Yan Sea.
In this chaotic age, human lives are worth less than weeds, and the cries of the living are crushed beneath the war. Until the unprecedented founding empress, using her own flesh and blood as ink, wrote the grief-stricken “Song of Yan.”
“Across the northern land, a thousand miles of snow lie frozen; cold winds sweep through the mountains and rivers. Drunk on music and song, I sing aloud, a carefree young noble, living for pleasure. I raise my cup to the moon, then look back and suddenly meet a beauty. Her slender wrists are pale as frost and snow; shyly, she hides her red lips. From a lofty tower, I gaze at the bright moon. The troubles of bygone days seem like idle concerns.”
“Who could have known that overnight, storms would rise and fall, and those whispered smiles would be no more? I long for you, yet taste nothing; I hold rouge, yet know no tears. War rages, corpses blanket the land and stain the rosy sky. Tears stream down as I bury my heart in grief. Time slips away between my fingers; my mournful song echoes through the river city.”
She is the founding empress of the Ten Domains’ Yan Dynasty, and a player trapped in a game of political intrigue.
With her brilliant mind, she stirs up the tides of power, yet cannot escape the blade of fate. She builds an empire in a world at war, only to end up utterly alone.
Love and hatred burn to ashes; schemes and calculations come to nothing. This tragedy, spilling out of poetry, was destined from the beginning to stain the land with blood.
Set around the Yan Wang Palace on the northern frontier, this novel tells the fictional history of the Ten Domains’ Heavenly Dynasty and the Great Yan Dynasty through the perspectives of five members of the Yan clan.
P.S. The story moves slowly at first, but an unexpected surprise awaits later: a transmigrator will appear!
Overall, it looks good. There is actually a setting of the living dead in the Machiavellian novel, but it is not clear who the heroine is at this stage.