Gu Qingyi has died once.
Her younger stepsister pushed her into an icy lake. When she woke, the body no longer held the timid legitimate daughter of the Marquis's household, but Su Jin, a toxicology PhD from the modern world. Her fever had yet to break when her stepmother sent someone with a bowl of “tonic.” It wasn't meant to kill her outright, but to leave her bedridden and dependent on medicine, an easy target for anyone to manipulate.
She knocked the bowl aside, touched a fingertip to the spilled liquid, and brought it to her nose. Then she said to the maid who had brought it, “Go ask Madam whether the ginseng in the storeroom is kept with the monkshood and aconite.”
Everyone thought she was still the Gu family's helpless eldest daughter. No one knew that behind her frail frame lay a pair of eyes able to see through every poison in the world.
When her stepmother later arrived with poisoned wine, Gu pointed to the white foam forming in the spilled drink and said to the guests gathered in the hall, “Osmanthus wine is warming in nature, but when it meets arsenic, it foams. Mother, is this cup meant for me, or for the King of the Underworld?”
When she catches a glimpse of Crown Prince Xiao Yan beneath the lanterns on the Lantern Festival night, and Zhou Wanning brings her a secret message saying, “The Crown Prince is gravely ill. The palace is on the verge of upheaval,” she still doesn't know that this frail prince, whose sharp gaze mirrors her own in the face of hopeless odds, will pull her from the intrigues of the household and into a far greater maelstrom.
