[Growth of the heroine] + [Substitute] + [Sense of Fate] + [Cool Buddha] + [Young King]
Song Shangge, a girl from the south of the Yangtze River, was secretly taken into the palace because she resembled a princess, and became the "Princess Yu'an" who was married to the Western Regions. During the two years of cage-like palace life, the monk Mingkong was her only comfort. On the way westward, she rescued the sunny and cheerful mixed-race young man Ashnariel, and conveyed her trust and vague love. When they arrived in the Western Region, they found out that Ashnariel was the ruler he wanted to marry and would do anything to achieve his goals. A marriage intertwined with love and deception, her unintentional leakage of intelligence about her motherland led to the destruction of all life on the border. The sense of guilt drove her to madness, and neither Mingkong's silence nor Ashnariel's paranoid compensation could fill the abyss in her heart.
When love turns into a cage and used, Song Shangge tries to escape in despair. In order to save her, Mingkong got involved in a power struggle and was eventually killed by an arrow; Ashnariel was killed by a cold arrow from the rebels due to misunderstanding and regret. Her motherland regarded her as an abandoned child, and war spread in the Western Regions. After losing everything, Song Shangge was no longer anyone's substitute, pawn or vassal. She picked up the art of war she learned from her enemies, used the wisdom of Buddhism to calm people's hearts, and rebuilt her homeland with the skills of her native land. In the end, she grew from a sacrifice to fate to a guardian respected by all people in the Western Region, writing her own legend on the yellow sand and blood and tears.
