Reborn as the illegitimate daughter of a disgraced official, she is exiled to the northern frontier and forced into servitude. On the way under guard, she scrapes vermilion lacquer with her fingernail to forge a travel pass, staking her life on one desperate gamble!
She thinks her calligraphy will help her survive, but the cold-faced general catches her red-handed. “Forgery is punishable by death. You have two choices: die, or become my adviser. Your life and death will be in my hands.”
She sneers. “Be your pen? Fine. But what I want is the right to match wits with you!”
From then on, disguised as a man, she wields her brush like a blade. When military pay is embezzled, she forges a memorial; when sand is mixed into the army’s grain, she tests the soil and exposes the fraud; when plague breaks out, she fights to survive the flames!
She reorganizes battle reports with modern management techniques, exposes “poisoned accounts” with her knowledge of chemistry, and even turns the Crown Prince’s “favor” into a “ledger of ashes” that bursts into flame!
When everyone thinks she is nothing more than a pen on the general’s desk, she reveals her trump card: “My father was the scapegoat in the imperial examination fraud case three years ago!”
She does not seek to clear his name. She will write A Rhapsody of the Poor with blood for ink, and burn the entire world of the powerful that devours the weak to the ground!
The cold-faced general says, “You take charge of civil affairs, and I’ll handle the shadowy schemes. Together, we’ll claim this realm.”
