"He offered me a blood-red camellia as a betrothal gift, so I used a white camellia to mourn his soul."
During the Yongqing era, the deep palace was filled with the scent of camellias, poison steeped in ambition and lies.
Crown Prince Bai Pusheng wears a look of compassion, yet at the Peony Night Banquet he crushes a bloodstained camellia with his bare hands and forces the songstress Yang Jinzhao to become his concubine. The world says the prince has been bewitched by her beauty, but no one knows that the zither music of "Crane's Cry Across the Nine Heavens," drifting from the Eastern Palace night after night, conceals the ragged breaths of someone being dosed with secret medicine from the previous dynasty.
Yang Jinzhao wears the face of a peerless beauty, while the black jade bangle on her wrist conceals a deadly scheme devised by Mo Pei, her childhood sweetheart. She watches coldly as the Crown Prince acts out a love as deep as the sea. When his illness leaves him dazed, she touches the arrow wound over his heart, where the deadly poison of Su Yuan, the Duke Zhen's legitimate daughter, has lain for seven years.
The day white camellias bloom across the imperial mausoleums, Jinzhao has a new piece on the board. She smiles as she drinks the abortifacient, yet when the Crown Prince, eyes bloodshot, forces the antidote down her throat, she notices the beauty mark at the corner of his eye, identical to her own. Over twenty years in the deep palace, blood on the imperial bed soaks through twelve layers of phoenix curtains, before finally becoming a blizzard of snow on the day the new emperor ascends the throne.
**"You want this empire to endure forever. I want this blood debt repaid in blood."**
That year, the Jiaowei zither in Chengming Hall snapped its seventh string, which wound around the throats of two people. He was the doomed general on her chessboard; she was the cinnabar mark carved into his aching heart, impossible to remove. When the Mo army's banners were planted atop the palace walls, the diseased camellia trees suddenly burst into lurid bloom, just like the blood-red flower trembling at her temple the night they first met.
**"Love is the sharpest arrow through the heart."**
**"Neither of us deserves a happy ending."**
◆ Court intrigue
Good looking, recommended
Very beautiful author The author's writing style is very good. Even though he said he should practice his writing, I was still deeply moved 😢😢😢