Before she turned fifteen, Lin Jinyu's biggest dream was to save up ten taels of silver, buy a big house with a courtyard, and eat braised pork every day.
To make that dream come true, she sparred with her mother every day, secretly wrote melodramatic stories for money, and occasionally tricked her unlucky older brother, the family's champion eater.
She thought she'd spend her life as an unremarkable little rich woman in Jiangnan.
Who knew the heavens were completely insane? In a single night, her family was destroyed.
Her mother was shot to death by a hail of arrows at the execution ground, her father's head was hung from the old locust tree at the town entrance, and her brother died in her arms.
That greedy little girl who was too scared to kill a chicken was forced to pick up a knife.
She fled and killed along the way. When she ran out of soldiers, she raided bandit strongholds; when she ran out of food, she seized the great clans' stores.
She kept fighting in a daze, and by the time she came to her senses, she had become the founding empress, commanding a hundred thousand Black Armor troops and crushing the old aristocratic families beneath her feet.
But what did it cost?
Her childhood friend, who used to write stories with her, drank the poisoned wine she bestowed upon him. Her old companions, who called her "girl," died one after another on the eve of dawn.
"Is being emperor fun?"
"Fun, my ass. This dragon throne digs into my butt. It isn't half as comfortable as the little stool I used to sit on."
