Reborn in a Year of Famine: The Legend of Empress Xiao

[Glow forges a blade through years of famine; an orphan girl rises from nothing to rule the realm]

After a century-long drought in the Bai Ze Dynasty, she is reborn as an abandoned girl by a dry well.

When the mind of a modern ecology PhD meets the golden finger of “plant mimicry and empathy,” luminous mushrooms bloom with eerie blue light on rotting wood. Someone cries out in the night that a monster has appeared, but she clutches a handful of spores and laughs coldly: “This is a crop that will save the world!”

From gathering herbs in the mountains to becoming the master of the Caiwei Pavilion, she uses improved rice seeds to pry open a crack in the tyranny and grafted fruit trees to seize leverage over the powerful.

At court, the cold-faced emperor grips her wrist. “Miss Xiao, is it my throne you want?” The glowing birthmark on her forehead catches the candlelight as she slides a memorial across the imperial desk. “Your Majesty is mistaken. What I want is for granaries across the land to be full, and for the people to have no fear of winter.”

When her “Plant Emotion Compendium” exposes a poison plot in the palace, and famine relief policies become bargaining chips for the phoenix seal, see how an ecology PhD uses scientific thinking to shake a feudal dynasty and make a cold, hard lone-wolf emperor wage war for her sake.

The glow illuminates not only the grain stores of famine-stricken people, but also the dawn of blood hidden for twenty years beneath the dark red scar over the iron-blooded emperor’s left eye.