After Reincarnating as the Marchioness, I Took Over the Entire Household

After transmigrating, Shen Zhiyi became the nominal mistress of the Yong'an Marquis's residence. Her husband was cold, her mother-in-law domineering, and undercurrents churned through the inner residence. Just as she stepped into the fray, the Marquis brought home a beautiful, delicate concubine named Liu Ruyue. Shen Zhiyi thought it was merely a battle for favor and power between wives and concubines. But then someone vomited blood after drinking ginseng soup, a corpse was made to look like a suicide by hanging, and a birth register had been altered. The Marquis's residence's long-buried crimes were dragged into the open.

Her inability to bear children wasn't bad luck. Someone wanted her to remain a mistress who would never give birth to a legitimate heir. Liu Ruyue hadn't entered the residence to compete for favor. She was a live bait, sent back after being fed a hatred of her own. The former Marquis's death in battle had been nothing like it appeared, either. The inner residence, succession, switched children, old cases, military provisions on the border, powerful figures in the capital: a vast web had been woven many years ago. Everyone thought she was an easy-to-handle mistress, a pawn placed in the main courtyard to be slowly worn down. But Shen Zhiyi refused to accept her fate. If the Marquis's residence used women's lives to set traps, children's lives to fill holes, and the mistress's position to maintain its web, then she would personally turn over the accounts, expose the people, and reopen the old cases, tearing this seemingly respectable residence apart inch by inch. A mistress was not meant to be sacrificed to a scheme. She wanted to live. And everyone who owed her, or the dead, would have nowhere to run.