“My Lady, do you know that being reborn is a curse that makes you live by dying?”
On a spring night in the thirtieth year of Yonghe, Shen Heshou swallowed her last breath amid poisoned wine.
Ten years of misplaced devotion, and the whispers between her husband Xu Zhiyuan and her cousin Bai Yujiao mingled with the taste of blood in her throat. Only as she died did she realize that the “Heart-Nourishing Draught” had contained a slow-acting poison for three thousand six hundred days.
When she opened her eyes again, the fourteen-year-old Lady Ji'an had her hair unbound. She stumbled upon Bai Yujiao secretly handing a gold-thread enamel bracelet to a mysterious figure. This piece of evidence, which should not have surfaced for another five years, had become a harbinger of death much too soon.
Reborn with memories of her previous life, she vowed to tear apart every conspiracy, but then she encountered the most dangerous variable: Xie Zhaolin, an official of the Court of Judicial Review. The cold-blooded, sinister powerbroker of rumor was still a youth with his hair tied in a high ponytail. A vermilion mole at the corner of his eye was as vivid as blood, and the tip of his black iron brush lifted the jade hairpin at her temple. “When the Lady uses the Bai family’s secret art to evade people, she looks just like the masked girl who rescued me from the fire three years ago.”
A pair of case files slowly unfolded.
Poisoned wine at the imperial banquet concealed an old grudge from the White Deer Academy twelve years ago. A nursery rhyme on Vermilion Bird Street foretold that officials would bleed from all seven orifices. Amid the flames of war on the northern frontier, a secret letter proving treason came to light... And she gradually discovered that beneath Xie Zhaolin’s false eunuch identity lay the blood feud of his family’s annihilation. “If Shen Heshou hadn’t wiped out my family, you would have been my wife.”
He taught her to calculate every move and manipulate human hearts. She taught him to identify every herb and counter every poison.
When the enamel bracelet on Bai Yujiao’s wrist bore the seal of the Beirong king, and the vermilion mole at the corner of Xie Zhaolin’s eye became the key to breaking the formation, she realized that in this game with the realm as its stake, the sharpest blade was the silver needle she had left beneath the apricot tree ten years ago.
Xu Zhiyuan wants your life. Lu Zhengnan seeks power. I only want you.
