[Xie Xiaohe, the woman disguised as a man who became the top scholar, VS Chu Jinheng, the cool and rebellious runner-up]
[Historical Romance + Court Intrigue + Protective Hero + Devoted Love + Woman Disguised as a Man + Sweet Romance]
The newly crowned top scholar Xie Xiaohe rode through the streets in a dazzling red robe, captivating the capital.
No one knew that this promising young man was actually a woman: the young valley lord of the Mystic Medicine Valley, famed from north to south for her mastery of the needle technique that could save the dying and restore the dead to life.
She left her mountain medicine hut behind and concealed her feminine identity to enter officialdom, but she had never sought to become a marquis or minister.
She did it only to clear the bloody injustice surrounding the thirty-seven members of the Duke of Zhenguo's household, murdered three years ago, and to uncover the massacre buried through the collusion of a prince and powerful ministers.
She entered the Ministry of Justice and took charge of criminal cases, determined to tread every red line in the rules of the court.
When a nobleman's legitimate daughter drowned in a lotus pond, the entire court declared it a case of “suicide to preserve her honor after losing her chastity.” Xie Xiaohe broke into the Minister's residence at night and knelt before its vermilion gates, offering to marry the dead woman as her legal wife. Defying the crowd, she ordered the coffin opened and the body examined, wrenching the truth from the cage of ritual and bringing the vicious woman to justice.
A powerless young woman was humiliated and then convicted of adultery; a commoner's wife was forced to kill her husband and take the blame... These “women's cases,” which everyone else shunned, she took on and investigated, one after another. Even if it meant offending the powerful or earning the scorn of the upright, she would make the world understand:
A woman's life is not a stepping-stone for her family's reputation, nor a sacrifice to the rules of propriety.
