The moment Shen Fuyao opens her eyes, she has become the most notorious spendthrift princess in the capital: only three hundred taels remain in the household treasury, more than twenty creditors are blocking the gate, and her fiance has sent a letter breaking off their engagement.
Everyone expects her to sell the estate to pay her debts. Instead, a pearl-debt IOU for a shipment of southern pearls that was never entered into the books reveals that she does not owe the full hundred thousand taels. She will acknowledge what she truly owes and investigate what she does not.
She turns her engagement-breaking banquet into an investor meeting, invites the creditors blocking her gate to sit on the oversight committee, then opens a commercial street and workshops, giving the young women once confined to the inner quarters their own wages and names. But the deeper she digs into the accounts, the more the trail points to the same hand: the merchants' guild, the money houses, the Ministry of Revenue, even her mother's old case.
Xiao Jingheng protects her witnesses and catches the real culprit. She follows the trail of silver, dragging the hand hidden behind the court into the light, inch by inch.
This time, the debt she means to settle is far more than what one household owes.
