"The cannibals in this deep palace never need to see blood. They hide the knives in the juice of impatiens flowers, wrap them in the baby's swaddling clothes, and embroider them under the mandarin duck brocade quilt."
In the third year of Jianzhao's reign, frost fell, and the hairpins of the Lin family's twin sisters were dyed blood-red.
Lin Wan'er huddled in the secret passage holding the blood-stained gilt pipa, listening to the sound of the cracking of silk as her eldest sister hanged herself. From then on, there was no more eldest daughter of the Minister of Industry in the world, only Lin Baolin, the queen of the guilty minister.
She once thought:
The poisonous snacks in Jiaofangdian can be detected using the silver hairpin
The emperor's pillow whispers are worth exchanging sincerity for
It wasn't until I personally took over half of Shen Zhaoyuan's lungs that she spat out before she died that I realized that this man-eating palace loves to grind tenderness into a boning knife.
When the last string of the gilt pipa breaks, revealing the yellowed secret message inside——
"Wan'er can be discarded"
It turns out that from the day of the Hairpin Banquet, everyone knew:
She was just a stand-in for her eldest sister Jin Chan to escape from her shell, a certificate of submission from her father to the Queen Mother, and a living chess piece used by the emperor to dismantle the aristocratic family.
"Then let this palace be used as a sacrifice."
On the night when Lin Wan'er burned the edict, the doors of the Nine Layers Palace opened one after another. Thirty-seven ever-burning lamps crashed to the ground in the firelight, illuminating the new emperor's facial features similar to those of his old friend.
