On the cusp of adulthood, a single imperial edict thrust her into the inner palace, where she became a puppet empress.
She had thought she would spend her life imprisoned behind vermilion walls, but on her wedding night she tore open a blood-soaked truth: her birth mother, Su, had not died of illness. The former emperor had cut the marrow from her spine to make elixirs; beneath the armor of her elder brother, Yehe Qing, who guarded the northern frontier, lay the wolf-head tattoo of the Xiongnu royal family; and every cup of tea Emperor Xiao Jianqing drank carried the medicinal fragrance of her profoundly yin blood.
A curse spanning three generations began to spread through the inner palace:
- A substitute corpse in a bronze coffin looked exactly like her;
- Beneath the Directorate of Astronomy’s star chart lay a hundred infant skeletons with tattooed faces;
- Deep inside a living tomb on Wolf Mountain at the northern frontier, the drums of a twin-sacrifice ritual had sounded without pause for a hundred years.
When the soul-devouring Gu awoke from the ice marrow, Ye Xiwen learned that she was its host. She struck a fire and burned her phoenix crown, wielding her yin blood as a blade to carve open the shocking game hidden amid mountains of corpses and seas of blood.
“A phoenix rising from the flames? No. I’ll burn these nine tiers of palace halls along with me.”
Power struggles and curses entwine, while devotion and betrayal are born together.
A legitimate daughter is no pawn, and an empress is no puppet. This time, she will burn through this ravenous realm and become the only one to direct the game in a world torn by chaos.
