Merely a Performer

In an age of chaos, life is a living hell and all people are players in a cruel game. He is the performer whose smile can topple a city in a bloodstained palace, and the male courtesan who serves the new emperor from his bed. Ying Hehua was born in a wilderness of bones and nearly cooked and eaten as a child. He scraped out a living amid the chaos, only to end up in the pleasure quarters, dressed in finery and playing the beauty. Beneath his gorgeous, feminine features lies an ambition crushed by the world, then painstakingly pieced back together by his own hands. She was once the cherished daughter of a salt merchant in Jiangnan, her character polished by poetry and books, her wisdom forged by law. Zhusun Wangshu once sang of spring beneath a sea of sweet peas, but in the blink of an eye, her family was destroyed and the noblewoman of a grand household was reduced to a slave. When the classics meet a world that devours people, she casts off her finery and takes up her sharpest weapons, vowing to topple the most powerful nobles with nothing but her words. The imperial palace is as deep as the sea. He curries favor with the tyrant and the empress dowager, hiding a blade in his flowing sleeves. The court is a furnace. She navigates between brutal officials and corrupt ministers, tempered by its flames into pure gold. From mutual loathing and suspicion to entrusting each other with their lives, two people torn apart by fate gradually draw close amid the thunder of a collapsing dynasty