A woman has always sat upon the throne of the Great Yong Dynasty.
Yet the seventeen-year-old empress, Zhao Lingjun, is nothing more than a puppet. The powerful Wei clan has controlled the court for twelve years. Her birth mother was branded with the shame of regicide, and the jade hairpin engraved with the character for “kill,” hidden in Zhao Lingjun’s sleeve, is the only thing her mother left her, as well as the key to a blood debt.
To reclaim imperial power and discover whether her mother truly killed the late emperor with her own hands, she wears her “coughing illness” as a mask and lays a deadly trap within the palace. She stirs the people with the “heavenly fire burning the lanterns” at the Heaven-Worshipping Ceremony, then joins forces with the old imperial clan to launch a coup.
But when the flames soar, victory is not what awaits her. Instead, she is branded a “demon empress who deludes the people” and becomes a wanted fugitive. On the road to exile, she meets the wandering swordsman Yan Li, whose features closely resemble the late emperor’s. He carries half of a jade hairpin just like hers. Only when the two halves are joined does the cruelest truth emerge: her mother was a scapegoat, the Wei clan murdered the late emperor, and the ancestral rule that “a woman must be emperor” was merely a fig leaf for the relatives of the empress to seize power.
From puppet to fugitive, from avenger to destroyer of the old order, Zhao Lingjun carries her bloodstained jade hairpin through a mountain of corpses and a sea of blood. When she cleaves apart the stone stele inscribed with ancestral laws before the Imperial Ancestral Temple, the world finally hears her declaration: “The one fit to sit upon this throne is neither man nor woman, but a person with a conscience.”
This is a game of power, lies, and awakening. She makes the phoenix palace her board and the burning lanterns her signal. In the end, what she means to burn away are the shackles that bind everyone.
