The Villainess and the Strategist

The inner palace of the Great Yong dynasty is a fathomless abyss, and the martial world a vast web. Shen Zhaoxue, daughter of a disgraced official from the previous dynasty, is forced to swallow a bowl of poison by her stepmother and reborn as Lu Minghuang, the illegitimate daughter of a merchant family. In this life, she hides her breathtaking beauty behind a gentle, virtuous facade and carefully advances with her mastery of incense-making. When Pei Yanzhou, a brilliant strategist from a humble family who never leaves anything to chance, comes to her with fragments of the previous dynasty's imperial jade seal, two masked players face off over a game of chess on a rainy night. He means to put a puppet prince on the throne; she means to bring down the entire Lu clan. Blood stains the steps before the Golden Chime Hall as they become each other's blades, piercing the hearts of the great clans. Yet when red candles glow beneath the bed curtains, they reveal the hideous old scars on each other's backs.

★ Two utterly unhinged leads who love and fight each other: she slips a deadly poison beneath his teacup, while he hides a tracking parasite in her sachet. A deadly game of push and pull between evenly matched opponents.

★ High-stakes twists within twists: the seemingly innocent maid is a secret agent from the previous dynasty, while the ailing heir has mastered bone-shrinking techniques to disguise himself as a male courtesan.

★ Fresh takes on traditional elements: incense-making becomes a deadly weapon, the hexagrams of the Book of Changes conceal troop deployments, and even the wine they share at their wedding is laced with poisonous parasites.

★ Pure, unrestrained satisfaction: the villainess tears off every shackle of emotional manipulation, the strategist treats the world as a chessboard, and the unhinged prince falls for her through his own delusions.

When bloodstained incense ash drifts across Vermilion Bird Avenue, the two Black Lotuses finally clasp hands amid the corpses of the great clans. Beneath her phoenix coronet and embroidered wedding robes, she bites his Adam's apple and laughs softly. "Chancellor Pei, did you know that even our wedding wine was laced with a love parasite?"