From the Start, I Was a Good-for-Nothing: The Empress Dowager's Master Plan

Her family was wiped out, and she became a substitute! Overnight, she went from the pampered, beautiful, and brilliant legitimate daughter of the Lin family to a plaything in Prince Rui's household! Worse than death itself, the person who saved her life turned out to be the culprit who killed her entire family! To avenge her family, she swallowed her pride, played along, and plotted carefully at every turn. Because her face resembled another woman's, she rose step by step from a lowly concubine in the Crown Prince's residence to his secondary consort, then empress, and finally the empress dowager. After taking power, she reopened the investigation into her family's massacre, only to discover that the real culprit was him! Prince Rui? A stepping stone! The Crown Prince? A ladder to success! Love? Not a chance! Family? The grass over the graves of her blood relatives is already three meters tall! Friendship? Her Majesty the Empress Dowager remembers there are still a few sweet-talking people in the inner palace! Freedom? She bought it with decades of groveling, painstaking scheming, and more than a hundred lives! P.S. The heroine is patient and clear-eyed, a woman of the ancient world who loves power, not men. She is single-mindedly using others' influence to climb to the top! (Pathetic and meek at first, then an exhilarating power fantasy later.)