Beneath the Kasaya, the Ailing Heir Grins and Praises the Abbess's Acting

[The Perfect Impostor x The Most Obsessive Truth-Seeker]

Reborn as a concubine-born daughter of a marquis's household, she survived by pretending to be foolish for ten years.

Until the sickly heir moved into the temple.

Coughing up blood, he asked her, "Abbess, what are you so afraid of?"

She was afraid he'd see through her, and discover her soul came from a thousand years in the future.

Morning bells and evening drums, a solitary lamp before the Buddha.

She was the quietest nun at the Huguo Temple, even the pressure of her fingers on her prayer beads as precise as a ruler's measure.

Until he came.

Chong Li, heir to the Duke of Jingguo, was famous in the capital as a sickly invalid, yet his eyes could see straight into people's hearts.

[He said her perfection was her flaw]

"Senior Sister's bows are always exactly the same angle."

"When you explain the scriptures, you only ever explain what others have explained before."

"Even when you're startled... you look like you're acting for someone."

He smiled as he coughed up blood, his fingertips holding a record of the words she'd murmured in her sleep.

It wasn't that she wouldn't. She didn't dare. In the depths of this household, with them together day and night, how could she keep up the act?

On their wedding night, he lifted her veil.

"Be yourself. I'll take care of the rest."

But when she nearly gave herself away, he pinned her against the wall, his eyes churning with a darkness she couldn't understand.

"Wu Hua, who are you really?"

[Later, the whole capital knew]

The wife of the Duke of Jingguo's heir was an extraordinary woman.

She could make ice and build carriages. When an epidemic struck, she could save the lives of an entire city.

Yet she always said, "I just read it in an old book."

Until one day, when enemy troops besieged the city, she stood atop the walls and said something.

The heir's head snapped up.

That night, he tore away her layers of disguise, while she gripped the dagger hidden in her sleeve and asked in a low voice:

"People who learn the truth never live long."