The Entire Harem Is Competing, So the Empress and I Join Forces

Beneath the red walls of the Forbidden City, two souls who should never have met are trapped together.

Ulanara Yunshu has come back to life, returning to the imperial selection in the first year of the Yongzheng reign. In her previous life, history praised her as a virtuous empress, yet she ended up losing her child and family, with no one left to mourn her. This time, she will claim the phoenix crown and take lives. Not one person who wronged her will escape. She knows every corner of the human heart and is a flawless player in the palace’s grand drama.

Su Qinghe opens her eyes to find herself a Han bannerman maiden entering the palace alongside Yunshu. A graduate student in history, she knows how everyone’s story ends, including the fate of the original owner of this body, who is destined to “die of illness” in less than a year. She had planned to keep her head down until she could leave the palace, but she is forced into the turmoil time and again. Her weapons are knowledge from beyond this era and a heart that refuses to be tamed.

At first, they see each other as the most dangerous variables: one is a scheming avenger, the other an unpredictable outsider.

Until the night Yunshu catches Qinghe recording palace secrets in strange symbols in the imperial garden;

Until the day Qinghe sees with her own eyes how Yunshu brings the arrogant Noble Consort Nian crashing down with a single sentence.

“Let’s work together.” Yunshu holds out her hand, fire tempered with ice burning in her eyes. “You want to live. I want to win.”

“Deal.” Qinghe takes her hand, feeling the warmth of a bond spanning three hundred years in her palm.

And so the deadlock begins to turn:

- The Empress’s carefully laid traps are rendered harmless by a “modern epidemic prevention manual”;

- The Nian clan’s political attacks from the previous reign are turned back and crushed by an “anonymous ledger.”