The Empress's Card Game Is Designed to Blow Assassins' Minds!

[#Empress #Substitute romance #Power struggle between two princes #Two formidable leads flirting #Hilarious, satisfying romance]

The thing Chu Zhao regrets most in this life is teaching her substitute emperor, Shen Cangming, how to play Fight the Landlord.

By day, she's a treacherous chancellor wielding power over the court. She lays down three gold-foil cards: “Three corrupt officials and a bomb. Young Master Xiao, you're on duty in my bed tonight!”

By night, she's an empress in imperial robes, smashing a secret compartment with her jade seal. “My bedchamber connects to the Chancellor's estate. Are you here to ravish me or assassinate your sovereign, my dear?”

Xiao Jingheng: Thanks for asking. I'm in the bridal chamber, and I just got blasted away.

As the head of an assassin organization, all he wants is to kill the tyrant and avenge his massacred family. Instead, Chu Zhao tricks him into marriage and uses him as her blade. Every assassination lands right on a corrupt official's waistband, and he's forced to watch the empress and her male consort put on a “double act.”

Shen Cangming, with his hair sticking up in every direction, wails, “Chancellor! They stuffed firecrackers in the latrine!”

Then he changes into his imperial robes in a secret passage. “Guards! Blow the corrupt officials' ancestral graves into a springtime wonderland!”

Until the day Xiao Jingheng lifts Chu Zhao's dragon robe and sees a double-phoenix tattoo beneath her collarbone, perfectly matching the jade seal.

And the male consort he had dismissed as useless is using a loofah scrubber to carve a secret order from the former crown prince into the bathhouse wall...

Identity reveal warning

Empress: Chancellor by day, sovereign by night, the queen of split personalities

Substitute: A fake crybaby, a real emperor, with the jade seal's code hidden in his abs

Assassin: Kill the tyrant → kill corrupt officials → fight his way into the empress's bed