She was the doomed empress whom the late emperor's final edict ordered to be buried with him. He was the regent who had seized the realm.
In the third year of Yong'an under the Great Ye, seventeen-year-old Shen Yuan knelt before the late emperor's coffin, waiting to die. Pei Yan alone spared her, not out of pity, but to lock her in a side hall of the Golden Throne Hall and make her a blade to hold the court in check.
She hated him to the bone. She believed he had caused her father's execution and the exile of the entire Shen clan. Again and again, she laid traps to take his life. Again and again, he pulled her back from the brink of death, then placed the dagger back in her hand.
But when she finally uncovered the truth, she found a fact hidden behind that bloody case that she could not bear to face. The man she had hated for ten years was merely a loyal subject who had taken the blame for the emperor.
He shielded her from every attack, open or covert, yet never once explained himself.
Breaking down, she asked why he had never told her. He replied, “You’ve hated me for so many years. If I suddenly told you that you’d hated the wrong person, what would you do with yourself? I’d rather you keep hating me.”
In the Golden Throne Hall, she had once sworn to make him pay for his crimes in blood. But when he truly gave the entire realm for her, was struck by a strange poison, and had little time left to live, she smiled and said
“Pei Yan, I can never repay you in this life. In the next, will you become a son-in-law of the Shen family?”
