On the dragon throne of the Dayong Dynasty, a woman always sits.
The seventeen-year-old empress Zhao Lingjun is a complete puppet. Her maternal relative, Wei, controlled the government for twelve years, and her biological mother was nailed to the pillar of shame for "regicide." The hosta with the word "kill" engraved on her sleeve was the only thing her mother left her - and it was also the key to the blood debt.
In order to regain the imperial power, and to find out whether her mother really killed the late emperor with her own hands, she used the "cough disease" as a guise and set up a deadly situation in the palace: she used the "sky fire and lantern burning" in the ceremony to incite people's hearts and united with the old members of the clan to launch a mutiny.
But when the flames soared into the sky, what she was waiting for was not victory, but a warrant for "the demon queen deceiving the public". On the way to exile, she met Yan Li, a knight-errant whose features resembled those of the late emperor. He actually had half of the same jade hairpin in his hand. The combination of the two hairpins revealed the cruelest truth: the biological mother was the scapegoat, the late emperor died at the hands of the Wei family, and the ancestral system of "women are emperors" was originally a fig leaf for the exclusive power of maternal relatives.
From a puppet to an exile, from an avenger to a rule-subverter, Zhao Lingjun walked through a mountain of corpses and a sea of blood while holding a blood-stained hosta. When she split open the stone tablet in front of the Ancestral Temple, which was full of ancestral inscriptions, the whole world heard her declaration: "The one who can sit on this dragon chair is never a man or woman, but a conscience."
This is a chess game about power, lies and awakening, and she uses the phoenix palace as the board and the burning lamp as the guide. What she wants to burn in the end are the shackles that trap everyone.
