In the first year of Yongtai of the Great Zhou Dynasty, Shen Qinghe, a 16-year-old tea merchant's daughter, was selected to enter Yeting because of her beautiful appearance. He originally thought that he would be able to leave the palace after five years of peaceful service in the Shangshi Bureau, but when he was delivering meals in the imperial garden, he encountered the imperial concubine's conspiracy to frame the wise concubine. Before Qinghe could see clearly the blood soaked in Fang Shu Jin's swaddling clothes, he was sucked into the bottomless whirlpool.
In front of the copper furnace where the Shang Palace Bureau was interrogating overnight, the aunt in charge stuffed half of a broken mutton-fat jade pendant into her hand. Qinghe looked at the jackdaws passing by on the dark red palace wall, and suddenly remembered that the maid of the Huanyi Bureau who died suddenly three days ago also had such crescent-shaped burns on her wrist. She swallowed the sweet taste in her throat and pressed her fingerprints stained with impatiens juice on the confession.
From sweeping the palace maid to being the personal maid of the imperial concubine, Qing He learned to use silver hairpins to test out eighteen kinds of poisons in seven years, and could accurately avoid the guards' defensive route when the bangle sounded at midnight. When she finally knelt in front of the emperor holding the secret letter of the imperial concubine's affair with Qin Tianjian, she saw the sinister new emperor stroking his hands and smiling, his bright yellow sleeves sweeping away all the evidence in the case: "Does Shen Shang Palace know that the secret medicine that made the baby cry in Concubine Xian's coffin was actually the loquat ointment you presented to the concubine?"
The palace doors suddenly closed at the winter solstice. Qinghe held the orphan of the medical girl who drowned in Taiye Pool and looked at the new snow that was about to melt at the corners of the eaves. Three hundred and twenty wind lanterns inside and outside the red wall lit up one after another, illuminating all the "accidental" encounters and "unexpected" deaths in the past twenty years. It turned out that they were all exquisite falling sounds.
