[Ruthless, sharp-tongued top x sickly beauty with a seductive streak bottom]
[Two male leads + sweet on the outside, dark within + size difference + arranged marriage to true love + devoted to each other]
Lin Ci is the least favored eldest son born to a concubine in the Chancellor's household. His birth mother died young, his stepmother treats him cruelly, and his father uses him as a pawn.
In the winter of the fifteenth year of Xianning, he is framed and disgraced. Carried in a small sedan chair into the Duke of Zhenguo's residence, he becomes the second lord of Xiao Heng, the heir apparent.
On their wedding night, Xiao Heng watches him cough up blood with cold eyes and says only, “Hard to kill.”
He really is hard to kill.
Hard enough to claw his way back from the King of Hell, hard enough to survive the deadly inner quarters, and hard enough to eventually turn the entire Duke of Zhenguo's household into his chessboard.
*
At first, everyone says that Young Master Xiao has taken a sickly husband who won't live three years.
Later, that sickly man starts managing the accounts and affairs, then rises by leveraging every advantage. Later still, the court is shaken, Lin Zhiyuan's household is confiscated and he is sentenced to death, and only then do the officials realize that the delicate beauty who spends every day with medicine is the hand stirring up the storm.
And the powerful Young Master Xiao, who holds sway over the court, is as docile as a tamed wolf only in front of that sickly man.
When everything has finally settled, someone asks Lin Ci, “When you married Xiao Heng, was it truly of your own free will?”
He thinks for a moment and smiles without answering.
Only Xiao Heng knows that night, his Ci Nu held him close and buried his face in the hollow of his neck, his voice soft and gentle
