In the fictional Great Yin, male authority is absolute, and any woman who joins the army brings ruin upon her entire clan. Ling Zhao, a modern Chinese sniper and military doctor, falls through a rift in time during a mission in an avalanche. When she opens her eyes, she is a disgraced empress condemned to be buried with the dead. Beside her coffin lies the young emperor, Li Che, afflicted with the “Hundred-Day Soul-Severing Gu.” Their lives are bound by a blood pact called “Mother and Child, One Fate”: if she dies, he goes mad; if he dies, she perishes.
Ling Zhao uses surgical scissors to take down guards and her sniper skills to strike fear into three armies. She carries the young emperor out through a sea of corpses in the morgue, then puts him through thirty days of hellish training to create the first “Phoenix” women’s army in history. She seizes military power, breaks into the palace, and beheads Prince Duan. Using modern battlefield medicine and intelligence analysis, she advances step by step through a deadly game woven from political schemes and Gu poison.
With the hundred-day countdown underway, every breath is a battlefield: she takes a general’s head from a thousand paces away and lays a close-quarters combat kill zone within the palace walls. On the bloody night the imperial city falls into chaos, she performs a blood transfusion on the young emperor with her own hands, burning herself out to help him rise as the ruler of all under heaven.
The history books are burned, and her name is lost. All that remains is the Phoenix banner flying in the wind, telling the world:
“My fate is mine to command, not Heaven’s! Even a deposed empress can overthrow imperial power!”
