In the rigidly hierarchical Shen household, being a concubine-born daughter was Shen Qingci’s original sin. Like a wisp of smoke trapped within the deep halls behind vermilion gates, her talent and brilliance were deliberately buried by the mistress of the household and her legitimate elder sister.
At a flower-viewing banquet, she casually recited the line “In the cuckoo’s cry, rain drifts like smoke,” catching the attention of Xiao Jingyan, heir to the Marquis of Wuan. That single glance kindled a light in her life unlike any she had known, but it also provoked fiercer jealousy and persecution, nearly costing her life in the lotus pond.
To break free of her shackles, she was forced into a hasty engagement and sent south to Jinling, only to discover the true face of her fiancé, Xu Mingyuan: he had cheated in the imperial examinations and abused his first wife to death. In her darkest hour, the white jade tea-flower hairpin the heir had given her was her only hope.
From then on, she was no longer a concubine-born daughter passively at the mercy of fate. Armed with evidence and carrying the burden of her mother’s family’s wrongful conviction, she stood shoulder to shoulder with him and dared to enter the imperial court, facing the emperor himself. When the century-old injustice against her family was finally cleared through her efforts, she truly left “Shen Qingci” behind and became “Ruan Qingci.”
Once, smoke and sorrow were trapped behind vermilion gates. Today, she takes up her brush to write a new chapter. See how this wisp of “deep-set smoke” scatters the gloom, takes learning as her foundation and brilliance as her soul, and becomes a radiant light that illuminates the world around her.
