The moment Ruan Liyue opened her eyes, she realized she'd become a minor character in a novel, one too poor to afford even steamed buns.
No matter. She had a pocket dimension, cooking skills, and a clever mind.
She sold candied hawthorn skewers and opened a braised-food stall to earn her first pot of gold.
Chestnuts with roasted pork, chicken wings braised in oyster sauce, spicy lotus root, tomato beef brisket.
Every dish was a weapon in her arsenal.
When her awful relatives tried to steal her recipes, Ruan Liyue turned the tables and tricked them into walking straight into their own trap.
Her jealous cousin poisoned the samples she was preparing for a client.
Ruan Liyue quietly switched them back, earning her cousin three hundred copies of the clan rules and three days and nights kneeling in the ancestral hall.
A rival with bad intentions was left speechless after tasting one of her dishes.
But the person who worried her most was the young man named Pei Yan.
He looked thin and frail, but in the original novel, he was a major villain who killed without batting an eye.
Nobody else dared go near him.
She insisted on cooking for him, mending his clothes, and taking him into business with her.
Later, his identity was revealed, and he returned to the capital, where he was forced into the struggle for imperial power and became the imperial heir's eldest grandson.
The court officials pressured him to marry a daughter of a great clan.
He rejected the match on the spot in the great hall.
"Your grandson will marry no one but Ruan Liyue in this life."
He looked at her and asked, "Can we discuss something?"
"What?"
"Will you accept my betrothal gifts?"
"I won't..."
Later, after he became emperor, his very first imperial edict was to marry Ruan Liyue.
The civil and military officials all knelt down and urged him to think twice.
"A merchant's daughter is unfit to be empress."
He slammed the jade seal onto the table.
"She is the only woman who can be my empress."
