Crossing a Thousand Mountains: She Made the Land and Rivers Pale

[Female lead + strong heroine + ancient setting + personal growth + fictional dynasty + young general]

Huo Yunshu was born with sharp, heroic features. She looked nothing like a sheltered young lady, but rather like a young general stepped out of a painting.

Her mother hated her for supposedly causing her father's death in battle, and left her at the border to fend for herself. When she was summoned back to the capital at fifteen, she was a wild girl covered in dust and sand. Even the maids in her stepmother's courtyard dared to treat her with contempt.

No one expected that this legitimate daughter of the marquis's household, who could not even stand in the right place to pay her respects, would uncover an astonishing thirty-year record of embezzlement by the second branch of the family while auditing the accounts. Fewer still expected that, when war fires rose in the north, she would calculate the army's supply losses, race a thousand li to rescue the veteran commander trapped behind enemy lines, then mount her horse with spear in hand and carve her way through the enemy ranks.

The court was shaken, and the Son of Heaven personally bestowed upon her the title “Marquis Who Guards the Nation.”

At the victory banquet, someone asked, “Marquis Huo, have you ever fallen for anyone?”

She smiled and shook her head. Her gaze passed over the gathered guests and settled on the women quietly watching her from a corner: former comrades from the borderlands who had faced life and death by her side, noblewomen who had abandoned rouge and powder to study medicine because of a single word from her, and an enemy princess who had once been captured by her army but, after Huo said “Let her go,” never married for the rest of her life.

Each of them had hidden the best years of her life in the way she looked at Huo.

But Huo's eyes held only the vast lands, a peaceful and prosperous realm, and the girl she had never once looked back at: the girl secretly loved by countless people, yet destined to belong to no one.