A Good-for-Nothing Heir’s Survival Guide to Palace Intrigue

Modern-day overworked office slave Lu Yan dies suddenly after pulling an all-nighter, then transmigrates into an old palace-intrigue novel as a character with the same name: a good-for-nothing prince of the Dayin dynasty who doesn’t survive past the third chapter.

The original Lu Yan is the Empress’s legitimate son, but he is frail from birth and knows nothing. His brothers treat him as a nobody, while the women in the harem use him as a stepping stone. In the end, he quietly dies after an “accidental” fall into the water, without even receiving a posthumous title.

Looking at the pale, gaunt face in the bronze mirror and recalling the wretched fate awaiting him in the novel, where he is “made to stumble,” “poisoned,” and “framed,” Lu Yan decides to change his destiny by any means necessary:

- Palace intrigue? He doesn’t understand it, but he understands human nature. The concubines’ smiles hiding knives and the princes’ insincere pleasantries are all, to him, variations on workplace manipulation.

- A good-for-nothing? He’ll admit it, but he has a brain. He uses modern knowledge to improve his health and logical thinking to unravel plots. He treats the harem as a “workplace,” the princes as “competitors,” and the emperor as the “ultimate boss.”

- His goal? Survive to the end, and maybe see whether these ancients can come up with any new tricks as they scheme against one another.

He never expected that his only aim of staying alive would turn him, step by step, into a “dark horse” feared by the princes. Nor that, after being dragged into palace intrigue despite wanting nothing to do with it, he would discover that the cruelest schemes conceal the deepest helplessness. And the cool, aloof Noble Consort who was supposed to end up with the Crown Prince in the book seems to be looking at him in a way that’s gradually straying from the plot...