[Traditional historical romance + reborn revenge against scoundrels + devoted, sweet romance + palace and household intrigue]
The heroine is clear-headed and does not let romance cloud her judgment.
After enduring humiliation and scraping by as a concubine-born daughter for over a decade, in her previous life she was sold into a brothel and sexually assaulted by a man in a temple...
Her biological father cruelly abandoned her and her mother. Only when his precious son fell gravely ill and needed her blood as a medicinal ingredient was she allowed to return to the family...
In her previous life, the legitimate daughter of the family had an affair with her fiancé and became pregnant. She forced the heroine to let her marry into the prime minister's household first. Then, using the fact that the heroine had the same face as the emperor's favorite woman, she cruelly branded a plum blossom mark onto her face and sent her into the palace to help her scheme for the throne. She heartlessly took the life of the child in the heroine's womb with a bowl of abortifacient soup...
Even her own younger sister was tricked by her fiancé into the prison cells of the Court of Judicial Review. He forced her to watch as her little sister was tortured to death by a pack of beasts less than human...
Reborn into a new life, she would never trust anyone again. She was determined to send every person who had bullied her or those she loved straight to hell!
She plotted carefully at every turn. Even when people called her a worthless lump of stone, she remained unmoved.
Everyone said that Chancellor Lu, who held power over the entire court, was seeking the hand of a woman from the Duke's household: a lowly concubine-born daughter, and a stone-faced beauty famous throughout the capital.
Li Qi, the exalted emperor of Great Wei, curled his lip and sneered. “A stone?”
Then the woman who had writhed beneath him on the couch in the Hall of Morning Sun, who had drained the very marrow from his bones, could not possibly be a stone transformed into a green snake, changing her nature and substance. Had he become like Fahai in the tale, entangled by the green snake until he lost his cultivation and fell into demonic corruption?
Yet in his heart, he could not have been more pleased. “She really is a temptress!”
I was drawn in by the description of the Green Snake entwining Fahai, which appealed to my tastes, but I don't quite understand why the female lead offered herself to the emperor at the beginning and then tried to distance herself from him later. Shouldn't she have used him to deal with her enemies?