Lin Wanqiu, the daughter of a noble family in the North, was drafted into the palace at the age of sixteen. She was implicated in the defeat of her father and brother in the war, and was thrown into the cold palace of Beisan, where she left to fend for herself.
A bowl of rotten porridge, half a bun, a leaky roof, and a greedy guard - this is all she has for the rest of her life.
Until that day, a man came to live in the West House.
The new prisoner is a young woman. Her prison uniform is ragged and scarred, but her back is straight. Jin Yiwei personally escorted him, ransacked his house and took away the locks. The Shen family in Suzhou was overturned.
Her name is Shen Yuan.
Every night after that, an abandoned mouse hole in the most inconspicuous corner of the Cold Palace became the only passage between the two cells. The strips of cloth were paper, and the burnt branches were pens. In the dark night where no one knew, they passed a few words through the adobe wall, and something more dangerous than words.
Shen Yuan has a secret. The secret is hidden in the faint sounds outside the southeast wall every few nights, in the exquisite medicinal meals sent by a certain mysterious "master", and in her eyes that are always burning with ghostly fire.
Lin Wanqiu didn't want to know those secrets. She just wanted to live, she just wanted to lie down in this rotten corner, retire, and wait for death.
But when Shen Yuan stuffed a pill that "can stop evil and slow down poison in times of crisis" into the hole, and wrote on the cloth "Tomorrow evening, look and hear the southeast", Lin Wanqiu knew -
She can never go back.
That night, fire shot into the sky from the southeast.
That night, the door to the west room was opened a crack.
