Old Bones, New Face: In One Night, the Old Order Crumbles

She was held beneath the water for seven days. By the time she clawed her way out of a pile of corpses, the silt at the bottom of the River of Forgetfulness had seeped into her very bones.

On the night her fiancé and half-sister joined forces to silence her, she learned that the deadliest thing in the world was not arsenic, but the tenderness of the person beside you in bed.

Fortunately, the River of Forgetfulness does not claim the nameless.

At the riverbed, she found The Art of Sinister Glamour and mastered the art of skin-deep disguise: changing her face, reshaping her bones, altering her voice. One face, one life. From that moment on, Shen Qingci no longer existed.

When she returned, she was a nameless mute crone, a wandering miracle healer, the “salvation” her enemies would beg for on their knees.

She personally shaped her half-sister’s brows, stroke by stroke, until the woman watched her own face rot down to the bone in the mirror. She concocted a fragrance for her fiancé, making him fall in love with the face of his “enemy” in his waking hallucinations, night after night.

As everyone knelt at her feet to repent, they had no idea that the person they were kneeling before had long since become a painted skin.

Only she remembered her master’s words:

“Every face you change costs you a piece of your soul. When you have shed a thousand masks, will you still remember who Shen Qingci is?”

Historical romance, revenge, disguise and political schemes, no romance, female-led power fantasy