The Substitute Bride Empress: My Heart Scales Awaken, and I Rise Against the Heavens

On the night snow fell over the northern frontier, Yun Zhaoyue clutched half of a bloodstained jade pendant and stepped into the tyrant's bedchamber. The phoenix crown that should have belonged to her elder sister weighed painfully on her neck, and Xiao Jin gripped her chin hard enough for the crack of bone to ring out beneath his soft laugh. “My empress, you look lovely when you tremble.” He had seen through the substitution-marriage scam from the start, waiting only for his prey to bare its fangs. When an assassin's blade slashed through the bed curtains, she drew a gold hairpin and plunged it into the attacker's throat. Her ruthless strike finally kindled a bloodthirsty fascination in his eyes.

She endured the gnawing of the mind-probing Gu as she played the part of a meek woman. But when she sobbed in the grip of a nightmare, she heard the crisp snap of the insect crushed by his bare hand. His blood-chilling laugh came from the darkness: “Tears eat deeper than Gu poison.” He watched coldly as the court officials drove her to the brink, but when someone offered her poisoned wine, he crushed her wrist. “The canary I keep is not for others to feed.”

A secret letter from Lu Chenzhou tore away every tender illusion: her sister had fled the wedding to lure her into a trap and make her the vessel that would awaken the Heart Scale. Meanwhile, the curse marks spreading across Xiao Jin's chest could only be undone by cutting out the blood from her heart. Facing off on a frosty night, she held a knife to his chest. He tore open his clothes to reveal the hideous burn marks, then took her hand and pressed it against his heart. “You want to save Yun Li, and I want to break this curse. Why not wager on which of us will cut out the other's heart first?”

On the night a palace coup engulfed the walls in flames, his hands trembled for the first time as he cut through her chains, then stood before her drenched in blood. Three months later, a masked female official brushed her fingertips over the new scar between his brows. Her smile beneath the veil was bitterly cold. “Your Majesty, have you mistaken me for someone else again?” Behind her, colored-glass lanterns illuminated the twin Heart Scales pulsing in her palm, a mark that fused sacrificial fire with destiny. The meek bride who once took her sister's place had long since