A Widow Raises a Child: From Saving a General to Ruling the World

When Han Yuqin opened her eyes, she had become the mother of four little ones. Her mother-in-law swept her and her bundle out of the woodshed with a broom, spitting curses as she went: “You curse-bringer should have been gone ages ago!” Han Yuqin gripped the half a coarse-flour flatbread in her bundle, the only thing she owned, and dug her nails into her palm. On her very first day in this new world, she had become a widow saddled with four children.

But who was she? A top student at a medical university in the twenty-first century, she'd seen her fair share of hospital troublemakers. Was she really supposed to fear a few foulmouthed country women? She wiped the tears from her youngest child's face and gave a cold laugh. “You want to trample me? Let's see who breaks a leg first!”

Rescuing General Qi, whose body was covered in poison, out in the wilderness was an unexpected stroke of good fortune. She used herbs to purge the poison, and when the bloodstained man opened his eyes, her fate became inextricably tangled with the affairs of the court. She took down the treacherous ministers who controlled the army's grain supplies, put down a border rebellion, and even saw through the old emperor's poisoned wine at a palace banquet. Most impressive of all, on the night she helped the Third Prince take the throne, she set a trap within a trap in the imperial study as a woman alone, making the entire court witness the new emperor's ascension.

Some later said that Madam Han of General Qi's household controlled half the empire's medical network. Others claimed that a plaque reading “A Healer's Benevolent Heart” hung in the new emperor's study. As for Han Yuqin, she merely held a child dozing in her lap and smiled at the medicinal herb garden in the corner of the courtyard. All she'd done was raise four little ones and make a life of her own.