Pearls as Blades: I Slaughtered My Way from the Riverbed to the Imperial Court

The night my entire family was wiped out, I jumped into the Huai River and pretended to drown, becoming the lowest of the low: a pearl-diving slave.

My enemies don’t know that the Ling family’s ancestral art of judging mussels can reveal more than the quality of a pearl...

It can also expose the good and evil in people’s hearts and the undercurrents in the imperial court.

From then on, pearls became my blades, and the Huai River my chessboard.

I fought my way from the silt at the bottom of the river to the imperial court...