Shen Zhiwei, the illegitimate daughter of the Jiangnan Salt Commissioner, was forced to take her elder sister's place and marry into the Eastern Palace as a Secondary Consort. On her wedding night, she discovered that the crown prince had been poisoned with a deadly toxin, and she herself was caught in the traps of the imperial palace. Armed with her late mother's Shennong's Notes on a Hundred Herbs and an embroidered Xuanji diagram concealing secrets from a former dynasty, she used her medical knowledge to expose schemes. On a stormy night, she saved the lives of innocent palace maids and formed her own faction, the Xuanji Society.
Behind the vermilion palace walls, she had to navigate between the crown prince, whose body was poisoned and whose thoughts were inscrutable; the empress, a master of illusions who was ruthless and vicious; and the ambitious Ninth Prince, who was disabled. From the deadly frame-up of a “false pregnancy to compete for favor” to the double trap of “divine punishment” at the Cold Food Festival, she used medicine as her blade and intelligence to break through each crisis, struggling to survive one brush with death after another.
