Gu Liuli, the illegitimate daughter of her family, is sent into the palace as a pawn. She appears docile, but thinks in terms of chess as she plots her moves through the inner court. In a palace with nine gates, she uses pawns as bait and the game as her sword, advancing carefully across the board of power. When she uses the court’s political forces to keep the inner court in check, forcing the emperor to say, “Half this realm is yours,” only then does she realize that after ten years of plotting, the true player was never the emperor.
