She Took a Blade to Lord Li's Heart

A scalpel is her weapon, and her dowry.

To save her wrongly imprisoned younger brother, genius surgeon Bai Yanqiu is forced to sign a “marriage to bring good fortune” contract with Li Zheng, head of the Li family. The terms are chilling: a tracking chip implanted under her skin, a dutiful-wife act to comfort his critically ill grandmother, all in exchange for giving her brother a chance at survival. She enters the wealthy family with a scalpel in hand, only to uncover layer upon layer of bloody conspiracy. The old lady’s medicine contains a slow-acting neurotoxin; a bloodstained shirt at an industrial accident points to an unsolved patricide case from twenty years ago. And when Li Zheng touches her, the curse that causes physical revulsion doesn’t take effect.

When Li Zheng’s uncle injects her with HIV, when poisonous gas billows from the old lady’s fake-funeral coffin, when her brother screams through brainwaves, “There are bones in the concrete,” Bai Yanqiu brandishes her blade beneath the surgical lights: cutting open a poisoned Guanyin statue, dissecting skeletons buried under layers of lies, and cutting her way into Li Zheng’s frozen heart.

On a deserted island after a shipwreck, he mutters through a fever, “Yanqiu, don’t go...” During an explosion at the courthouse, he kneels and holds up a surgical light as she stitches her own artery. Beneath Antarctica’s ice dome, a brain-transplant operation using a clone waits beneath the cold gleam of surgical lamps. From the curse of arsenic poisoning to a century-long genetic war, the marriage that began as a conspiracy ends with Li Zheng donating part of his liver and bone marrow, and Bai Yanqiu wielding her scalpel to save the world.

“Mrs. Li, please book an appointment.” She smiles and gestures toward the cardiology clinic.

Surgical lights around the world shine on for them, because love is the most brilliant medicine of all.