The Substitute Bride Physician: The Prince’s Heartworm

Snow falls over Yujing, and the faint scent of herbs drifts through the air. She is Yun Zhao, a frail princess forgotten in a secluded valley. Her medical skills can bring the dead back to life, yet they cannot change her own fate of dying young. He is Xie Lin, the ironhearted Prince of Zhenbei who commands fear across the northern frontier. His armor is soaked with the frost of the wilderness, while a fatal love-insect curse coils around his heart, beyond anyone's power to break.

A blizzard brings him, gravely wounded and on the brink of death, to the door of her clinic. She saves his life with acupuncture, unaware that the man before her is the betrothed she was forced to marry off to someone else in childhood. He drinks the medicine she brewed with her own hands, unaware that this pale woman is the wife he has never married, yet has carried in his heart for years.

When she enters the prince's manor to cure his cursed affliction, she finds her half-sister smiling sweetly in her place beneath the red wedding silks. Hiding her true purpose behind the guise of a physician, she sneaks into the imperial mausoleum by night and sends messages through the flames of war. Amid the whirlpool of schemes and ambition, she and Xie Lin tread carefully, their feelings for each other quietly taking root.

When a plague becomes a butcher's blade in the hands of her half-sister and their foreign enemies, she uses the blood of her own heart as a catalyst. Her hair turns white as frost as she obtains the cure that will save the people. In a fit of fury, he sets the land ablaze for her, his iron cavalry storming city walls. Amid a sea of blood, all he asks is that she be given a chance to live.

As her true identity comes to light, she turns out to be a lost princess of an enemy nation. With their countries at odds and their love torn between impossible choices, he gives up his title and casts aside his military seal. Taking her bloodstained hand, he journeys with her into the endless sands beyond the frontier. From then on, he offers her a realm stretching for thousands of miles as her bride-price, and builds a paradise that belongs to them alone.