After three years in Yeting, Shen Qingyi thought she had already accepted her fate.
Until the regent Pei Xuandu came over the moon, pinched her chin and said, "It looks like it, but it doesn't look like it either."
He needed a substitute, a puppet queen who was three-thirds similar to the dead Bai Yueguang, to contain the queen mother, control the emperor, and stabilize his chess game of overwhelming power.
And she happened to have that face.
On the wedding night, the emperor fled. Pei Xuando stepped into the bridal chamber and declared condescendingly: "Remember, you are just her shadow."
Shen Qingyi lowered his head and said yes, digging his nails into his palms.
The queen mother punished her by kneeling in the ancestral hall, and the emperor regarded her as a life-saving straw to escape control. The civil and military officials in the court laughed at her as "the queen of the court."
No one knew that the puppet queen who was kneeling in the ancestral hall and copying the palace rules was writing down the flow of money one by one, silently weaving a dragnet.
No one knew that her face, which resembled that of Bai Yueguang, never contained resignation, but the fire of revenge that had been dormant for three years.
On the night of the palace coup, Pei Xuandu led his troops to clear the emperor's side, but handed the sword that determined life and death into her hand: "Kill him, and you will be the empress."
Shen Qingyi took the sword and smiled.
"My lord, do you think you have always been playing this game of chess?"
The deepest calculation in the world is not to treat a person as a chess piece, but to make her think that she is a chess piece.
The real victory is never on his chessboard, but in the palm of her hand.
