When the thirteen-year-old Pei Shuyao stepped into the palace, she was just a young girl from a high family who was given an exception because she looked exactly like the queen's younger sister who died young. As a child, she knelt on the peony-patterned gold bricks, not knowing how this palace with red walls would reshape her destiny.
In Fengyi Palace, the queen treated her like a biological sister, teaching her how to mix fragrance and identify poisons, read history and participate in politics, but also warned her about the way to survive by "seven points of sincerity and three points of defense". In the royal study, she and Lu Zhao, the general's son, read "Orchid Pavilion Preface" together, and the friendship between childhood sweethearts quietly grew in the fragrance of ink; while the young uncle Xie Mingjin always broke into her world with sweet people and secrets, and the innocent and dangerous bond between the three became the brightest spark in the palace.
But there is no innocence within the palace walls. Concubine Chen's witchcraft frame-up, concubine's abortion conspiracy, Qin Tian Prison's attempt to overcome the rumors... Every crisis is a bloody lesson. The "On Salt and Iron" taught by the empress coughing up blood, the memorials that the emperor asked her to review late at night, and the blood-stained military reports sent by Lu Zhao were all tempered into sharp power in her hands.
From the cowardly girl who was challenged to memorize the wrong "Peony Ode" to Madam Shengshou who holds the Phoenix Seal and frightens the Sixth Palace; from the little girl who hides in the library to share the candy, to the powerful man who handles three secret letters at the same time on a rainy night. When she finally planted the pomegranate tree at the old site of Fengyi Palace, Chunyang at the age of thirteen had become a legend - this deep palace taught her the cruelest rules of survival, but also gave her the hottest sincerity.
