Wei Jian makes a living shaping dough into faces. The most outrageous job she ever took was pretending to be a princess and accompanying Jin Xiaoxiao to Jiangnan.
But just as she faked a faint on a bridge to lure in a mark, Jin Xiaoxiao was tortured to death.
Before she died, she dumped the Yuzhou clothing shop, more than twenty martial-arts-trained employees, and the whole mess of “living on in her place” into Wei Jian’s lap.
Then Jin Xiaoxiao’s subordinates cornered her. “Our mistress died horribly. They even gouged out her eyes! Please keep up the act and avenge her!”
Worse, the “fish” she had lured in turned out to be Regent Liang Ye. The moment they met, he mistook her for the real princess and forced her to put on another disguise: this time, to enter the palace in place of the runaway Eighth Princess, Jin Yaoyao.
Fine. It was just playing a double substitute, wasn’t it?
She was used to pretending to be other people anyway.
But after entering the palace, she realized this scheme was even more fake than her dough masks. The emperor treated the “princess” as a bargaining chip for a political marriage and couldn’t even tell whether his own daughter was real or not.
Liang Ye’s guilt hid a secret. The person he rescued back then was Jin Yaoyao, but he mistook her for the person from the northern wilderness whom he had failed to protect.
Even the Jiangnan boy who had once captured her heart had become General Jiang, blocking her path with a sword. The mole beneath his left eye was unchanged, but he looked at her like a stranger.
Even the Chancellor’s family, Jin Xiaoxiao’s maternal relatives, could only wipe their tears in secret when they saw her, not daring to mention her identity as the Ninth Princess.
And worse still, people lurking in the shadows had already set their sights on the lives of the Eighth and Ninth Princesses…
Wei Jian clutched the token and hid in a corner by the palace wall, cursing under her breath. If she’d known pretending to be someone else was this hard, she would never have taken that box of gold! But when she glanced at the pale blue chain around her neck, her eyes reddened despite herself.
Jin Xiaoxiao, I found the family you wanted for you. But not a single person in this palace truly cares about you.
