The Phoenix Returns to Its Golden Nest

Phoenix Returns to Its Nest: Synopsis

There's a phoenix on the sole of my foot, but they say it's a demonic birthmark.

My name is A Qi, a girl who was abandoned, sold, and trampled into the mud. My foster mother says I'm a jinx, my foster brother eyes me greedily, and my foster sister stole the copper coins I'd saved for an entire year just to buy a skewer of candied hawthorn.

When I was thirteen, I was sold to the Shen family for thirty-five taels of silver and became a young master's companion maid.

The young master said, "A phoenix perches in a parasol tree. From now on, your name will be Qiwu."

He taught me to read and write, guiding my hand over the brush as we wrote stroke by stroke, his palm burning hot beneath mine. By his side, I grew from an illiterate maid into a young woman who could trim the candle and discuss poetry with him.

But I didn't know that I wasn't an abandoned child.

I was a princess of the Great Liang dynasty, the daughter Consort Chen had risked everything to send out of the palace. Someone poisoned me in my swaddling clothes, then secretly gave my mother a slow-acting poison for three years...

My blood feud remains unavenged, and the young man who taught me to write the characters for "Qiwu" has already placed second in the imperial examinations.

On the day the results of the palace examination were posted, he said, "I don't want to become an official. I want to marry you first."

But I answered, "Give me three years."

Will three years be enough for me to grow from the mud into a parasol tree? Enough for me to draw the fire-phoenix sword from the sole of my foot and fight my way back to that man-eating imperial city?

A phoenix never settles where there is no treasure, and I will settle once more in his heart.