Reborn on the eve of being sent to the Xie family for a political marriage, Shen Liuyun unhesitatingly calls off the engagement.
In her previous life, she married into Jiangnan’s wealthiest family, only to suffer endless humiliation and end up with a cup of poison. This time, she takes only a maid and a young guard, traveling light as she heads south, determined to cut off this ill-fated bond with her own hands.
Caught in the rain, she takes shelter in an abandoned temple, only to be seized by bandits. With nowhere left to turn, she stakes everything on one offer: “Whoever’s willing to protect me can name their price!”
A pale, handsome young man in black drops gracefully from the rafters. “Do you mean it?”
He becomes the bodyguard she hires. Silent and reserved, he possesses astonishing martial prowess. As they travel together, their relationship grows from a distant employer-and-hired-guard arrangement into a bond of trust forged in life-or-death situations, and unspoken feelings quietly begin to grow.
Then he collapses when his poison flares up, and she realizes he’s no ordinary wanderer.
To save him, she resolutely abandons her plans and walks straight into an even more dangerous trap, seeking doctors and medicine and risking her life.
After all her twists and turns, she eventually finds herself standing before the grand, imposing gates of the Xie family of Jiangnan.
Inside, the “fiancé” she’d never met, whom she’d believed gravely ill and on the verge of death, sits comfortably in the head of the family’s seat. His pale fingers toy with the broken engagement letter she left behind as he smiles faintly at her.
“My lady, you hired me to protect you all this way. How do you think we should settle the bill?”
Only then does she understand that the sickly guard she picked up was no mere bodyguard. He’s none other than the Xie family’s legendary, supposedly dying, madcap tycoon himself.
