Su Wei, the legitimate daughter of the Marquis of Yong’an, lost her mother as a child and was tormented by her stepmother until she became a “lowly maid” in the woodshed. When her younger sister didn’t want to marry the Seventh Prince, Xiao Che, whose bones were being eaten away by poison and whose legs were completely crippled, she dumped this “marriage to a dead man” on Su Wei.
The red bridal sedan carries her into the desolate Seventh Prince’s residence, where she meets a pair of blood-red eyes beneath a golden-thread mask. The crippled prince, regarded in the capital as a “living corpse,” is as cold as ice.
Clutching the silver acupuncture kit her birth mother left her, she kneels beside his poison-ridden bed all night. “Your Highness, trust me. I can save you.”
He scoffs at her overconfidence, but when she braves the snow to steal a red-scaled snake’s gallbladder, he grips her frost-reddened wrist.
The poisonous sores scab over, the mask comes off, and the face of a young general appears before her. His legs heal, and the crippled prince returns to power. In the throne hall, he takes her hand. “You alone can be my empress.”
The girl who once languished alone in a woodshed becomes the only woman cherished in an emperor’s heart.
