Shadow Operatives

Shen Yanfu is crunching potato chips when he transmigrates into the body of a covert agent. He shouts “Salt Fu, rise again!” at a salt jar and even dares to play with a lighter in the Secret Pavilion. The ridiculous antics of a modern office drone stand out all the more in this place where people are devoured alive.

Only Shiyao can make him quiet down.

That girl is the Secret Pavilion’s most ruthless poison strategist. The needle in her embroidery can pierce through the court of the Ji Kingdom, and her misty-moon handkerchief is stained with the blood of slaughtered families. When she jokes about “making the old and weak give up their grain” and “wiping out a village to stop an epidemic,” her fingers are always rubbing the frayed corner of the cloth.

He recognizes that frayed corner. When she was eight, she hid in the woodshed, trembling as she clutched that handkerchief.

Their childhood promise was crushed long ago by political schemes. Now the flame of a transmigrator collides with the embroidery needle of a poison strategist.

Will he help this beautiful madwoman embroider the chaotic age into a blood-red peony, or drag her away and reclaim half a clean handkerchief?

(Secret Pavilion dossier: “Shen Yanfu, suspected aberrant; Shiyao, nineteen poison schemes, children’s embroidery hidden beneath her pillow.”)