A Heart of Splendid Schemes

Accountant Su Yao was reborn as Su Yao, an orphan from a merchant family, only to be despised by her husband, bullied by her sister-in-law, and sold into a brothel...

For revenge, she worked the abacus and dug through old accounts at the brothel. The owner behind it all turned out to be the powerful eunuch Zhao Gou!

Fine. She would use his influence to save her people and avenge herself.

“Lin Jingxuan, your Lin family owes my Su family a blood debt. I'll make you pay in blood. Killing just a few of you isn't nearly enough!”

She became Zhao Gou's weapon of money.

Military pay and false accounts were all evidence of his crimes.

From the very beginning, she got close to him for one person alone:

Xiao Yu, heir to Prince Jing, who had fallen into captivity.

“Yaoyao, don't let me ruin your path,” he urged her.

She smiled. “You should call me Yaoyao. This path was tainted long ago. I don't mind dirtying it once more.”

Meanwhile, Xiao Yu endured humiliation and became Zhao Gou's adopted son, joining forces with the emperor to weave a net that would bring Zhao Gou down.

And Zhao Gou himself?

His first wife, Xie Lanyin, had been trampled to death by Shen Chenzhou's horse. Unable to clear her name, he had castrated himself and entered the palace, climbing to the pinnacle of power only to be consumed by its backlash.

Then he developed a twisted obsession with one woman:

Lin Chunhua, the eldest daughter of the Lin family, whose face was exactly like that of his dead wife, Xie Lanyin.

On the day of the palace coup,

weapons had been switched for sand, and his allies turned against him at the last moment.

The evidence was laid bare in the sunlight.

And the seemingly weak Emperor Xia Yinghuan had long since shed his disguise. It turned out that everything had been part of a scheme devised by Prince Jing Xiao Heng before his death.

Before the imperial throne, Zhao Gou cried, “Xiao Yu! How could you deceive me?!”

Xiao Yu turned back with a smile. “Your Excellency, this realm was always meant to belong to the Xia family!”