I Only Want to Be Sent to the Cold Palace

Shen Yunning stayed up all night reading the palace-intrigue novel "A Thousand Autumns for the Emperor and Empress". After cursing the villainous Consort Shu for being both stupid and wicked, she fell asleep.

She woke up as Consort Shu herself.

The original plot: the heroine would enter the palace in three months, and six months later Shen Yunning would be given a white silk cord, while the entire Shen family would be wiped out.

She wanted to live.

But she couldn’t suddenly turn into a good person. The paranoid, unstable emperor would think she was plotting something even worse.

So she came up with a “Troublemaking Plan to Get Him to Dump Me”:

Take up his morning court time to do her eyebrows, wake up the imperial kitchens in the middle of the night, and offer him beautiful women. She would act so outrageously that he’d grow sick of her.

Her goal: get sent to the cold palace and disappear from the plot for good.

But then

She did her eyebrows? He put down his brush and came straight over.

She offered him beautiful women? He turned around and made her a Noble Consort.

Every knife she turned on him, he caught and forged into another chain to bind her to him.

Worse still, her "Handbook for Surviving the Harem", where she secretly recorded her progress at getting him to reject her, somehow appeared on his dragon desk one day.

He flipped through the little book full of escape plans, reading it page by page. When he finished, he looked at her and said softly,

“From beginning to end, all you’ve been doing is planning to leave me.”

She thought he would order her death.

Instead, he returned the book to her and said, “Keep writing. I want to know what you’ll put down from now on.”

At first, she wanted to escape. Later, she made that cage her home. After all, he had the key, and he slept right beside her.