Shen Wantang has only ever envied one thing in her life: Liu Rumei’s healthy body, strong enough to run, jump, and bask in the sun.
She is the Duke of Zhenguo’s legitimate daughter, the most pampered sickly beauty in the capital. A gust of wind could knock her down, and sitting too long makes her dizzy. In her fifteen years, she has never even made it to the end of the long embankment by Mirror Lake. Liu Rumei is a concubine-born daughter of the Marquis of Anyuan’s household, the most despised “villainess” in the Luan Court. Everyone calls her crude, reckless, and insolent, but she is as sturdy as a young ox and can lift a bronze cauldron half her own height.
On Qixi night, Liu Rumei uses a body-swapping talisman to shove Shen Wantang into the body everyone despises. People assume the delicate beauty has fallen into the mud and wait to watch her wail and lament. But Shen Wantang crouches by the woodshed door in that freckled face, chewing on a cold steamed bun and savoring how she can breathe without wheezing or coughing. Suddenly, she smiles.
“From now on, this body is mine.”
She boils and dries medicinal herbs at the Imperial Pharmacy, and amid the chaos, grows into the “villainess” she is meant to be: living boldly and fearlessly. Beneath the furnace, she unearths a secret her grandmother hid for ten years. By Mirror Lake, she runs the entire embankment beneath the moonlight, reveling in every step.
But she never imagined that the healthy body she had envied for fifteen years concealed a mystery far greater than her own: the Marquis of Anyuan’s rebellion, private troops outside the city, a medical record that could turn the court upside down, and a “false prince” who has returned reborn, yet remains a puzzle even to himself.
He tells her, “I don’t care who you used to be. Whoever you become, I’ll be there.”
