The moment the South Sea pearl rolled down into the snow, Shen Yingluo knew that this magnificent cage would eventually swallow up everything she had.
As the daughter of a guilty minister, she entered the palace with the hope of reviving her family, but she fell headlong into the abyss of power and conspiracy. The concubine's musk bird's nest hides the cruelty of annihilating her descendants, the tip of the empress's phoenix hairpin quenches twenty years of resentment, and the tender eyes of the Nine-Fifth Lord hides a trade-off that is more piercing than poison.
When allies turned into life-threatening ghosts, when the flesh and blood in her belly became bargaining chips in palace battles, the girl who would cry at the red plum when she first entered the palace finally learned to smile amidst the light of swords. She polished the silver hairpin with the moonlight of the broken jade pavilion, disguised herself as a Jiangnan woman, and played every step in the intrigues of the chess game - from a disgraced nobleman to Shuyi who wields power in the harem, from a passive chess piece to a chess player who overturns the world.
The blood letters in the underground palace of the imperial mausoleum, the secret letters from the Zhenguo Palace, the half of the jade pendant left by the late queen... When the layers of fog were lifted, she was shocked to realize that she had been destined for death by others. And is the peace pendant given by Xuan Ling himself a token of redemption, or another more sophisticated shackles?
Love and hate within the red wall are like fire cooking oil, and life and death in the field of power are like a game between fingertips. She climbed up on the bones, but saw the remains of her original intention at the top. In this life-threatening gamble, who will have the last laugh? Perhaps in the deep palace, there is never a real winner, only the survivors who survive.
