The Mountains and Rivers Won't Let Me Bow My Head

On the day of her wedding, the red silk decorations still hang at the Marquis of Zhenbei’s residence, but the imperial guards have already surrounded the gates.

What awaits Shen Zhaowei is not the Crown Prince coming to marry her, but an edict accusing her family of colluding with the enemy. Her father and brothers died on the frontier, and the Shen family was loyal to a fault. Yet before their bones have even grown cold, their own country brands them traitors. The Crown Prince sends her a confession through the door, urging her to “keep the bigger picture in mind.” The emperor issues an edict sending her to marry into an enemy nation, forcing her to seal off the Southern Dynasty’s defeat at the border.

Wearing her wedding gown, she leaves the capital under a cloud of accusations and enters Beiyin. Everyone thinks she is a pawn that has been cast aside. The enemy court waits for her to bow her head, while the powerful in her homeland expect her to die in a foreign land.

But Shen Zhaowei refuses to accept her fate.

She turns her enemies against each other, lays traps in the court, and searches for proof at the border. Step by step, she rises from an abandoned bride sent off to marry for political purposes to a player neither country dares underestimate. Three years later, she returns with her old allies and irrefutable evidence, not to beg the Crown Prince to take her back, but to make the entire court hear the case: Who sold out the border all those years ago, and who used the bones of loyal ministers to shore up their own power?

The land should not demand that only loyal subjects die for it, and women should not have to bow their heads for the so-called greater good.