Word is that the Xie family in the capital has been in turmoil lately. The old master is gravely ill, and the various branches are locked in open and covert battles, so fierce that even the family dog has learned to pick a side. In this struggle for power among the wealthy, there is one person who moves among them like a ghost, yet also like an anchor in a storm. No one knows what her surname is.
Her name is Shen Qing. Yes, just “Shen Qing,” with no prefix or suffix, and no prestigious family name to back her up. The eldest young master of the Xie family calls her “a wild weed with no roots.” The second young miss curses her as “some fox spirit who came out of nowhere.” The third young master scoffs behind her back: “She’s just a tool with a little cleverness.”
The good news is that Shen Qing really does have no family ties, so all the Xie family’s tangled blood relations and ancestral rules have nothing to do with her. She doesn’t have to wave a flag for any branch’s interests or swallow her anger for the sake of the family’s reputation. She can watch from the sidelines with cool detachment, or even… stir things up.
The bad news is that, despite having no surname, she is the only “non-Xie” the old master specifically chose to deal with the family’s mess as he lay dying. With eyes that had seen through the ways of the world, he saw the greed and incompetence of all his descendants, yet entrusted the fate of the Xie family for decades to come to this nameless woman. The whole family was thrown into an uproar! Shen Qing merely smiled faintly. She was just helping people solve their problems and earning a little for her hard work along the way. As for the feuds and power struggles of the wealthy, in her eyes they were nothing but carefully staged performances, and she was the only audience member not bound by the script,
