Female first-person perspective + Substitute romance + Palace intrigue and power struggles + Daoist philosophy + Mystery and investigation + Two strong leads finding salvation in each other
An original story with a fast pace, six chapters updated daily, and no cliffhangers. Keep me accountable!
Liu Baiyu, a bride given in marriage as a substitute, discovers on her wedding night that her husband is a “fake” too. The two substitutes recognize each other by touch in the darkness. They are drawn into the bloody struggle of the “Twelve Palaces of Substitutes”: substitutes live and die in place of the true consorts, but where can they find the chance to live as themselves?
Who wiped out the entire Gu family in the massacre twenty years ago? What secrets lie in her father's secret ledger? Can the Daoist art of the “body outside the body” really shield someone from a fatal calamity? Where did the missing women from Qingwei Temple go? Which of the Twelve Palaces' substitutes will finally become themselves? How will these two substitutes find themselves amid a life of taking each other's places, rise from the piles of corpses, and become the light of their own lives?
