The palace intrigue will unfold later. The story hasn't even reached a third of the first volume yet, but the outline is already all done
I'm trying a different style, of course with a brand-new perspective. I'll mark it at the start of each chapter, so look forward to it!! After all that I've been through, I'm unstoppable!
"I'll forge this phoenix crown from my enemies' bones and blood."
On the night the Xuanlin Guard massacred the city in the ninth year of Chengping, eight-year-old Shen Zhaohuang swallowed her mother's eyeball in a cellar.
That eyeball, which concealed half of the Lihuo Jade, left a permanent scar in her throat and etched into her memory the grudge against the seven beast patterns on the Xuanlin blades.
After ten years in hiding, she crawled from the Jiaofang Bureau, where she had been a "human medicine cauldron," into the ninefold palace. The Shangyi with a blade beneath her tongue, the noble consort in red with ink-black hair: every identity was a poisoned blade. When she wrote the word "Langya" into Emperor Jingming's palm, she glimpsed a cinnabar mole on his neck, identical to her own.
"Are you the one moving the pieces, or a soul trapped on the board?"
Her childhood friend, the Privy Councilor, concealed a right arm wrapped in golden threads. A silver needle buried in the Virtuous Consort's spine could control people's minds. Even the late emperor, who died suddenly, had left behind a box of bloodstained sophora flowers. And the Xuanlin Guard that slaughtered the entire Shen family had been wiped out three months before the massacre...
In this heart-burning game, with the palace walls as its furnace:
The beloved substitute consort she had personally trained calls her enemy "husband" in her own voice on the night she is summoned to the emperor's bed.
