As the poisoned wine at the palace banquet seared through her lungs, Shen Jinglan thought, If there is another life, I will never set foot in the Eastern Palace again.
When she opened her eyes, she was back at fourteen, on the eve of the selection. Her phoenix crown and wedding robes lay dazzling beside her pillow, while the sound of her elder brother's sword cutting through the air drifted in from outside. Her mother was still gently urging her to think of the family.
She carefully folded the formal robes and pushed them aside. “Mother, I won't wear these.”
In her previous life, she had followed every rule, only to see her family ruined and end up in the Cold Palace with a strip of white silk. This time, she would choose her own path.
Her father flew into a rage and scolded her for being ungrateful. Shen Jinglan calmly looked up and told him three things: where the eight hundred thousand taels of silver from the Jiangnan grain transport had gone, which Ministry of Personnel vice minister was about to fall from power, and how the Shen family might face impeachment in three months.
The candles in the study burned all night.
Three days later, she moved into an abandoned courtyard on Yulin Alley. A new sign hung above the door: Qinghui Hall. It charged nothing and taught children from poor families to read and do sums.
The capital's noblewomen mocked her for throwing her life away, while the scions of great families waited for a laugh. Then the young bully from the Yongchang Marquis's household arrived with a gang to wreck the place, only to be left red-faced by a few entries from old account books, cited by a frail scholar at her school who had once copied the grain transport ledgers.
The news spread like wildfire.
The laid-back Prince Xie Yun sent her a box of old books, with a note bearing a private seal tucked between the pages. In the imperial prison, Embroidered Uniform Guard commander Chu Suifeng leisurely brewed tea and asked with a smile, “You've gone to all this trouble, Commandery Princess. Why not ask me for help?”
Shen Jinglan tightened her grip on the old jade pendant her birth mother had left her, hidden in her sleeve.
She would ask no one for anything.
She was determined to carve a gap through this seemingly unyielding world, a crack wide enough for the poor to breathe. She would make the people who had once trampled on and used her watch closely...
By refusing to marry into the Eastern Palace, Shen Jinglan found that her path only grew wider.
The plot is quite compact, I just wish it would come out faster.