The Book of Defying Fate: I Pledge These Fair Lands to You

People say that Shuying, the Shen family’s concubine-born daughter, has three things she never fights for:

She doesn’t vie for favor, profit, or an overwhelming fortune.

All she wants is to tend her loom, weaving her thoughts and the passage of time, inch by inch, into the warp and weft of brocade.

That is, until she meets the cold-faced prince with a scar between his brows.

He is struck by a deadly poison, his life hanging by a thread;

She holds a golden shuttle and can weave fate itself.

By imperial decree, she is confined behind the high walls of Prince Jing’s manor.

The world laughs, thinking she is currying favor with the powerful, never knowing that

The patterns on his battle robe are defensive formations she designed,

Only her “emotion-woven brocade” can ease his agony when the poison flares,

And the hope of survival in his darkest moments lies in her restoration of a lost craft.

But when the northern cavalry breaks through the border defenses,

When court intrigues try to use her as a pawn in a political marriage,

When the nine great clans join forces to suppress her revolutionary weaving techniques…

She calmly takes her seat at the loom and says to the man who now commands all the power in the realm:

“Hold up the sky for me,

and I’ll give you in return

a frontier that can withstand the cold, crafts that can enrich the people,

and a ‘way of warp and weft’ that can pass civilization down through the generations.”

This is not a story about a weak woman relying on a powerful man,

but a story about how an era

is quietly transformed by a pair of hands weaving brocade.

He offers her his kingdom as a betrothal gift, promising her a lifetime of peace;

She takes the land and rivers as her canvas, weaving a splendid world that stretches for thousands of miles.