[Historical Fiction, Literary Plagiarism] When she opened her eyes, she was kneeling beneath the white mourning banners in a funeral hall. Her husband’s family accused her of bringing bad luck and wanted to throw her out. Her own family thought she had disgraced them and planned to send her to the family temple, shave her head, and make her a nun. At sixteen, in this world, she seemed to have no way out.
But her mind held five thousand years of poetry, essays, and statecraft, and in her hand was a kind of pen no one had ever seen before.
She wrote a seven-line quatrain by the city wall, and by the next day it had spread throughout the capital. When the granddaughter of a Grand Secretary read the words “rivers and mountains,” she set down her teacup and came downstairs to invite her in person. Those who called her a bearer of ill fortune never imagined that the woman they drove out could turn an entire household from accuser to accused in half an hour.
Later, she entered the Qingyin Pavilion, presented her Rhapsody on the Tributes of Ten Thousand Nations, debated the Hanlin scholars, and devised a plan to repel the enemy. By the time the people at court who mocked her for being a woman without talent came to their senses, she already had their fate in her hands, and the game was well underway.
This is the story of a woman who refused to accept her fate and used a thousand years of literary heritage to forge her own path. Every step she took was on a stair no one else could see. And those who once tried to grind her into the mud would one day have to look up at the path she had walked.
