The Deposed Empress Takes the Throne

She was not reborn. She survived. Shen Zhiwei died once. In the dungeon of the Cold Palace, they made her into a human husk, cut off her hands and feet, and gouged out her eyes. She listened as her husband and her closest friend chatted and laughed. She bit through her tongue and killed herself. Her blood spattered a jade pendant, and when she opened her eyes again, she was eighteen. But she couldn’t remember. She knew only three things: her father would be executed in three days, there was a musician in the Music Bureau, and war would break out on the northern frontier in five years. As for how to save her father, enter the palace, and claw her way from a human husk to empress, she had forgotten it all. Then she would figure it out as she went, and take her chances. For three hundred taels, she bought the strangest musician in the Music Bureau. He had aphasia and could only speak through music when his emotions ran high. She had fragmented memories and couldn’t tell premonitions from hallucinations. They used each other, deciphered each other, and became each other’s only “accomplice.” She taught him to kill. He took blades for her. She raised an abandoned child in the Cold Palace, but when he sincerely called her “Mother,” she drove her sword into his heart with her own hands. Sincerity was the most dangerous thing in the world. She had taught him that, and taught herself as well. She arranged to have herself deposed, left the palace, raised an army, and took the throne. Every step was meticulously planned, and every step cost her someone. Only after she finally sat upon the dragon throne, holding her musician as he died in her arms, did she discover that even her “rebirth” had been designed by someone else, and that her “victory” had been handed to her. But she would not start over. This life had hurt enough. She chose to write down her true feelings and carve them beside the Yellow River, waiting for someone who might never come.