The Stand-In Alliance

She won’t marry him? Then I will.

Three thousand taels for your freedom for the rest of your life.

On the day her elder half-sister’s bridal sedan arrived, the top scholar revealed that he preferred men. As the whole household descended into chaos, the concubine-born daughter Ouyang Jin pulled out her abacus and named her price on the spot.

She was never a pushover for others to manipulate.

With a single abacus, she brought the whole room to heel and opened a “marriage agency” on Zhuque Street, the busiest street in the capital. She married in place of noblewomen who didn’t want to wed and helped young ladies escape when they wanted to elope. A former courtesan, a retired female bodyguard, and a refugee disguised as a man all joined her, and the stand-in marriage business grew from serving commoners to catering to the powerful.

The bigger the business got, the more trouble she stirred up.

Some warned her to stop investigating her mother’s death. Someone sent her the blood contract for her mother’s own marriage substitution years ago, with “the proprietor” listed as the client. And then there was Meng Zhaojun, heir to the Marquis of Zhenbei, who climbed onto her roof beam in the middle of the night to propose a partnership: “I’ll marry in someone else’s place, you’ll do the same. We split the profits forty-sixty.”

Two people who treated marriage as business found themselves getting entangled as they negotiated.

Then the Empress Dowager summoned her and revealed the truth from forty years ago: her mother was the real Qin Zhao. The woman who was now Empress Dowager had only been a stand-in.

And the half of the jade pendant her mother left her was now hanging from the Empress Dowager’s phoenix hairpin.

Three days later, palace attendants came to take her to “marry in someone else’s place” for the emperor.

That same night, her long-missing true elder sister suddenly appeared and whispered in her ear:

“Mother isn’t dead. She’s waiting for you.”

This isn’t a stand-in bride story. It’s a historical workplace drama about marriage.

An abacus can balance the books, but it can’t calculate what’s in people’s hearts.