In the winter of the seventeenth year of Yonglong, seven-year-old Shen Shengsheng lost everything in the snow: her father, Shen Weiqing, was killed by Li Huan in court for admonishing Danqi, and eighty-one members of the Shen family were executed. Her mother, Lin Yuan, took her to flee north in the snow and went to Yun Qike, the great national advisor of Beiyan.
After ten years of dormancy, Sheng Sheng trained day and night - military arts, medical skills, poison skills, disguise, and plot planning - and boiled hatred into a double-edged blade.
In the twenty-seventh year of Yonglong's reign, Beiyan of the later Tang Dynasty got married again, and Shengsheng returned to Chang'an as a married female official. She is no longer an orphan begging for mercy, but a chess player:
——He and Xiao Jue, the prince of Northern Yan, are each other's pawns, but they are secretly in love but neither gives in to the other;
——Joined forces with the seventh prince Li Changji to punish powerful officials, overturn old cases, and turn the court upside down;
——He teamed up with his childhood sweetheart, Su Yanli, the minister of the Ministry of Civil Affairs, and vowed to repay the blood debt of Li Huan, mother and son.
But when the evidence of regicide was conclusive and the enemy drank poison and died, Sheng Sheng had an epiphany in her father's last words: "Revenge can be avenged, but the heart must not be imprisoned":
The end of revenge is not destruction, but rebirth.
She put down the butcher's knife and started an uprising in the misty rain of the south of the Yangtze River. Xiao Jue, the man who had played chess with her and entered the prison together, would wait for her to look back for ten years every year during the light rain of apricot blossoms.
This is a story about hatred and forgiveness, destruction and rebirth.
When Shen Shengsheng finally understood that letting go of hatred is not weakness, but requires more courage than revenge, she became the person her father wanted her to be:
Not imprisoned by hatred, only born of morality in the heart. Life should be controlled by yourself
