In his previous life, Shen Yuning was an ordinary man who wrote code, ate skewers, and slept on a latex pillow that cost 39.9 yuan with free shipping. One moment he was asleep; the next, he had become a baby girl in a time of chaos.
Her mother smudged the baby’s face with soot from the bottom of a cooking pot and used her frail back to shield her from the arrows and spears of war. Before she died, she gripped half a jade pendant and left these words: “Go find your father. He’s a great general now.”
After traveling a thousand li to the capital, she met the man who was supposed to have “fallen in battle.” Her father rubbed the half-pendant, his knuckles turning white as he gripped it. He didn’t say a single word from beginning to end.
Her stepmother, born into a marquis’s household, treated her with polished courtesy. The moment they met, she ordered someone to brew a cup of ginger tea, then said with a smile, “You’ve just arrived, and you must be feeling the chill. You should warm yourself up properly.”
She became the “cousin miss,” made to sit before a bronze mirror and relearn how to be a woman: no long strides when walking, no showing teeth when smiling, and always sleep on her side with her legs together. Deep inside, the soul accustomed to sleeping sprawled out lay awake until dawn each night beneath embroidered bed curtains.
One day, she finally sneaks out of the manor disguised as a man. At Wangjiang Pavilion, she trounces the capital’s talented scholars with two poems, then happens to corner a handsome “young man,” also disguised as a man, aboard a pleasure boat and kisses them both senseless.
Then her hand touches the unmistakably female feature on the other person’s body.
They stare at each other, both blushing scarlet.
Before she can make sense of this forbidden love, an imperial decree of marriage arrives. She is betrothed to the Duke of Qin, the emperor’s nephew, but the person in his heart is none other than the princess who disguises herself as a man.
She marries a husband who loves someone else and falls in love with someone she should not...
