The Heir Apparent Keeps Trying to Set His Affairs in Order

She said she wanted his life, then went after everyone else’s too, but when it came to him, she couldn’t bring herself to take it.

I, Shen Mingzhu, never make a bad deal. Except with you: I lost everything.

Shen Mingzhu, daughter of Yangzhou’s richest man, is nicknamed “Shen the Skinflint.” She took over her family’s textile shop at fourteen and drove three competitors out of business in four years. No one has ever gotten the better of her.

Until she meets Gu Yanzhi.

The heir to the Anyang Marquis’s estate is sharp-tongued, aloof, and nonchalant. At their first meeting, he throws silver at her face. At their second, he kicks open her door and sees right through her little act of playing dead.

She swears she’ll make him pay.

But the truth she uncovers leaves her speechless: the Eastern Depot is hunting him, his father has been framed, and he is surrounded on all sides. This man, who seems so proud as to be untouchable, bears strangulation marks on his fingers from a failed suicide attempt, and is quietly arranging his own funeral.

Shen Mingzhu returns the cypress coffin she had ordered.

“From now on, your life belongs to me.”

“I haven’t given you permission to die, so even the King of Hell can’t have you.”

From Yangzhou to the capital, from the textile shop to the imperial court, the meeting of a merchant’s daughter and a marquis’s heir begins with revenge and ends with each becoming the other’s only way out.

But when the snow and wind finally descend on the capital, and the Eastern Depot’s blade reaches their throats, Shen Mingzhu realizes the truth:

The man she has fought so hard to save had been ready to die for her from the very beginning.