Shen Qingshuang had spent over a decade as the chancellor's cherished daughter, growing up alongside the princes. Calling her a pampered young lady would hardly be an exaggeration. But after she insisted on marrying the man she loved, everything changed.
On their wedding night, her husband, Lu Jingqi, personally made her swallow a Heart-Eating Gu. Three years of imprisonment, fingers severed and bones broken: she became a bloodied pawn on the chessboard of power.
Her family was falsely accused, her father and brothers were near death, and a desperate letter reporting that Yumen Pass had run out of grain seared her heart. On the day she confessed her guilt before the emperor, her childhood friend, the new emperor Xiao Chengyu, stared at her with bloodshot eyes and banished her to the Music Bureau.
The Music Bureau was a lightless hell. An iron hook pierced her bones, yet amid the humiliations inflicted by the powerful, she glimpsed clues to corruption in the grain transport system.
Gu Yanzhi charged into her life, treading through blood. Beneath the nine-petaled plum-blossom mark lay an old centipede-shaped scar, the one she had clutched when she fell into the water as a girl. He tore apart the lies that had stained her virtue, drew his sword to sever the secret grain-transport contracts, and placed the bloodied blade in her hand. “Some vendettas have to be avenged with your own hands.”
