Rising as a Phoenix on a Bed of Bones

The heroine presses her poison-stained lips to the Ninth Thousand-Year’s chest and leaves a kiss mark: “The eunuch faction and the wicked consort are the true gods of this man-eating palace.” She tears off her human-skin mask, revealing her scars, and raises the late emperor’s blood edict: “You kneel to me, not to the phoenix throne, but to the power over life and death.”