The day I caught my boyfriend cheating, I sent the bastard trending online, only to fall from the twenty-eighth floor myself.
When I opened my eyes again, I was the unluckiest maid serving a princess sent away for a political marriage. The princess ran off for love, leaving only a “Marry him in my place,” before eloping with a eunuch. Worse still, the two countries had agreed that if the princess didn’t marry, her entire wedding entourage would be buried with her.
To stay alive, I had no choice but to put on the wedding dress and offer myself to the tyrant rumored to kill without blinking.
The tyrant lifted my veil and asked coldly, “How many cities is a fake princess worth?”
I thought it over carefully. “Could we skip the romance and settle this in cash?”
The good news: I was bound to an intertemporal marketplace.
The bad news: the marketplace might have a mind of its own.
When I was poisoned at a palace banquet, it sent me spicy snack strips. When I was ambushed on Black Crow Ridge, it sent me a bronze mirror. When the empress dowager tried to seize power, it delivered a cartload of yoga mats. When my life was hanging by a thread, it even popped up a message: Dear customer, you don’t have enough points. We recommend earning a little on the price difference first.
So while other women fought for favor, I fought with accounting books. While they grew flowers, I planted chili peppers in the Cold Palace, opened a grain depot, and organized a merchant caravan. Along the way, I even found out that a chicken in the harem had eaten three years’ worth of military pay.
The imperial consort called me a bewitching woman. The empress dowager said I would bring down the country. The entire court knelt and begged the emperor to banish me to the Cold Palace.
The tyrant was silent for a moment. “The Cold Palace belongs to her too, and she has the keys to the treasury.”
All I wanted was to earn enough points to return to the modern world. Who knew I’d keep opening more grain depots and sending merchant caravans farther and farther afield, while even the tyrant’s gaze grew increasingly strange?
At last, the door home opened, but he stood before it holding the empress’s phoenix seal.
“Shen Zhiwei, stay. You can manage the empire, and you can manage me too.”
