Startled Cup

Su Jingzhan, the legitimate daughter of the Prime Minister in the Great Yin dynasty, trusted her half-sister Su Lingwei and the Third Prince, Zhao Heng, in her previous life. They stole the military tally and framed her for colluding with the enemy, leaving her to die in a sea of flames. As the fire consumed her, she swore through tears of blood that if she ever lived again, her enemies would pay for their crimes. When she opened her eyes, she had been reborn on the day she fell into the water at fifteen, the very day Su Lingwei’s schemes began. In this life, she casts off the shackles of being “virtuous and demure” and becomes a sharp-tongued blade. She tears into her scheming half-sister, outwits her biased stepmother, and carefully maneuvers through the treacherous court. Using her memories of her previous life, she seizes Zhao Heng’s resources for his bid for the throne, befriends the cold-faced God of War Xiao Che, and lays her plans in secret. She vows to reclaim the military tally her mother left behind and expose her father’s secret dealings with a rival nation. From the schemes of the inner residence to the bloody struggle over imperial power, Su Jingzhan wields strategy as her shield and ruthlessness as her spear. Along the road to revenge, she and Xiao Che go from testing each other to sharing life and death. As the family secrets buried in the past, the flames of war at the border, and the bloody power struggles of the imperial harem intertwine, she discovers that this game of revenge has long been tied to the rise and fall of the dynasty, and that her fate with Xiao Che conceals a startling secret capable of overturning the world.