The Game of Imperial Power, the Scroll of the Realm

Everyone said Su Wanli, the legitimate daughter of the Duke's estate, was a frail beauty who could barely walk without gasping for breath and had little time left to live.

But no one knew that she was also the master of Tingfeng Tower, the greatest intelligence network in the martial world, as well as a royal orphan of the previous dynasty, pulling the strings from within a glittering world.

At a palace banquet, the Crown Prince and the aristocratic clans joined forces to pressure her into marriage. Before everyone's eyes, she covered her mouth and coughed blood, staining her handkerchief red and cementing her reputation as a dying woman.

No one saw the clear, frozen calm in her lowered eyes.

And no one knew that someone reached out from the shadows and asked, “Shall we work together?”

With a soft laugh from her sickbed, she replied, “We can use each other.”

And so, an alliance born of scheming was quietly forged.

She wielded salt and iron as blades and the waterways as a net, launching a bloodless war against the economic lifelines and steadily devouring the aristocratic clans' centuries-old foundations;

He used military power as his shield and the imperial court as his chessboard, drawing every open attack toward himself while clearing a path for her moves in the shadows.

Together, they foiled conspiracies, quelled border unrest, and cut down political enemies, going from testing each other to entrusting one another with their lives.

He had seen her most ruthless methods, and had also seen the desolation that flickered in her eyes when she sat alone by a solitary lamp late at night.

She saw through the thunderous ambition beneath his gentle exterior, and knew that even after he donned the dragon robe, he still kept that original, all-or-nothing faith in her: “I trust no one in this world but you.”

When the game for the realm was finally settled, he asked, “Will you stand beside me and share this land? What do you say?”