A Stunning Strategy: Power and Passion Reign Supreme

In the winter of the twenty-third year of Longqing, Su Wan awakens in a bloodstained bridal sedan. The soul of a forensic pathologist who once performed autopsies on a thousand corpses is trapped in the embroidered body of a new bride in the marquis’s household. Silver threads in her face veil are laced with arsenic, a gold-plated sedan roof conceals hidden arrows, and her wedding gown, embroidered with secret canal-transport accounts, is soaked in snake venom. This “accidental” wedding is actually a deadly plot by the Marquis of Yongning’s household to seize the salt-tax revenue of Jiangnan.

She takes up her willow-leaf autopsy knife and cuts through the hypocrisy of the powerful. She detects lamp oil in the sacrificial stove sweets, reveals corpse marks in the river lanterns, and finds secret messages hidden in embroidery needles. Even enemy arrows become pieces in her calculations of human nature. The world only knows that Miss Su is an astonishing embroiderer and a miraculous physician, never suspecting that the Illustrated Mirror of Qingfu beneath her pillow conceals a map of the northern frontier, or that the silver bangle on her wrist is coated with peacock gall, an antidote to a hundred poisons.

The Prince of Zhenbei, Wen Que, rides through the bloodshed, his sword tassel bearing a chi-dragon jade pendant that matches hers. The bloodstains on his palm mark an old wound she stitched up three years ago. He watches her inspect her phoenix crown for poison, burn her wedding dress to create a spy’s disguise, and turn the nuptial wine into an anesthetic. Suddenly, he throws a bloodstained tiger tally into her medicine furnace. “Since Miss Su intends to cook up this empire, why not refine me into one of your ingredients as well?”

When a peacock-feather embroidery pattern conceals the mechanisms of the imperial tomb, and the notes of a scorched-tail zither decipher enemy codes, Su Wan finally realizes her rebirth is part of a plot. The unparalleled secret strategy hidden in the chi-dragon sedan clasp is linked to the identical gu patterns on her and Wen Que’s hearts. It turns out the “corpse” she stitched up in the mass grave had already carved the lifeblood of the dynasty into chains meant to bind her…