Su Jinnian spent three years working overtime and finally saved enough money to travel around the world, only to be struck down by lightning.
When she woke up, she was bound to the "Queen's Comeback System," which sent her to transmigrate through different worlds and fulfill the original host's unfulfilled wishes. Her first response was to refuse. Why should she have to work after she was already dead?
But then she saw the original host's brief and tragic life: her birth mother was a maid who died in childbirth; as a concubine-born daughter of the Prime Minister's household, she slept on straw and drank watery porridge. Her legitimate elder sister framed her for theft, and in the end she froze to death in a ruined temple, still clutching the silver hairpin her birth mother had left her.
As she lay dying, the original host had only one thought: "If I could live again, I wouldn't let anyone bully me ever again."
Su Jinnian put down the fire poker and wiped the soot from her face.
"Fine. I'll help you this once."
But she was no pushover for people to trample on. When her elder sister came to throw her out, Su Jinnian splashed a bowl of watery porridge right in her face and promptly turned the false accusation back on her. When the mistress of the household secretly tried to trip her up, Su Jinnian jumped into a pond in front of everyone to "pick lotus flowers," then wept so pitifully that the Prime Minister felt guilty enough to move her into the eastern wing and raise her monthly allowance to match his legitimate daughter's.
She seemed gentle and harmless, with tears ready to fall at a moment's notice. In secret, she plotted at every turn and left nothing to chance. Everyone thought she was a helpless little rabbit, ripe for the picking, never realizing that when this rabbit bit, it didn't leave a bone intact.
Her hidden identity as the orphaned legitimate daughter of the Shen family of Jiangnan, her leverage in overturning an old case from the previous dynasty, and the power struggle within the Prime Minister's household: she wasn't after temporary safety, but a true comeback.
There is no male lead and no romance, only a queen's carefully plotted rise to power.
From a pile of straw to the heights of power, she has knelt, cried, and played the weakling, but she has never lost.
