Song Xuezhi, the second legitimate daughter of the Prefect of Tingzhou, was born the unwanted child of her family.
Her stepmother showed her no kindness, her elder sister bullied her, and even her own father saw her only as a bargaining chip for marriage alliances. When the decree selecting her as a palace candidate arrived, she knew that accepting her fate meant handing her life over to a merciless palace.
So she staked everything, setting her sights on Gu Yanzhi, the great general who commanded a hundred thousand border troops and whom even the emperor treated with deference.
At the Plum Garden, she carefully engineered a “chance encounter.” She made her moves step by step, and he promised her with a smile. She thought she had secured the strongest backing in the world. She believed that on the day of the selection, he would come as promised and pull her from the abyss of fate.
But if that were really true, she would have been far too naive… Who would defy imperial authority for a woman they had known for less than a month?
He would climb upward, one step at a time. As for those who had once deceived, betrayed, and hurt him… she would bring them down with her own hands, one by one.
