When Shen Zhiwei died on a snowy night in a ruined temple, she finally understood that kindness was the most useless thing in the world.
Reborn in the third year after being poisoned, she has a grotesque scar on her left cheek, her dowry has been stolen, and her scoundrel of a husband is enjoying a tryst with her half-sister in the study. This time, she doesn’t bang her head against a pillar to prove her resolve. She quietly cooks a pot of porridge instead. She adds a fragrant powder called “Truth-Telling”: it makes the wicked couple expose each other’s shameful secrets in a haze, drives her greedy mother-in-law to ruin, and leaves her hypocritical stepmother friendless through her own schemes.
She is the legitimate daughter of a marquis, an heir to the art of incense, and the most successful female merchant in the capital. She is also the snowy-night benefactor whom Xiao Heng, the “crippled” hostage prince, has searched for over ten years.
When her scoundrel of an ex-husband kneels and begs to reconcile, she appears in red and burns their marriage contract before everyone: “I’ll collect the interest slowly.” When the new emperor wants to make her empress, she turns away to expand her business: “Let him marry into my family, and I’ll think about it.”
[A sweet-faced schemer and master of social games × an obsessive, devoted hero who plays the pig to eat the tiger] Everyone faces their reckoning, and there’s no getting back together after a broken relationship. This time, the knife is in her hand, the tea is in her cup, and the world lies beneath her feet.
