[Everyone can hear her inner thoughts + everyday gossip + woman disguised as a man + officials imagining all sorts of things + tyrannical, unhinged emperor’s possessive love + lighthearted comedy]
Disguised as a man, Yu Wanwan infiltrates the imperial court and gets a bottom-rung job as a court diarist.
Her ambitions are simple: free meals, slacking off, and leaving work on time.
But one day, as court is in session, all the officials and the unhinged tyrant sitting on the throne suddenly find they can hear her private thoughts!
At court, the officials are arguing endlessly over disaster-relief funds.
Yu Wanwan, dozing in a corner, grumbles to herself:
[Why are you all arguing? The Minister of Revenue just hid twenty thousand taels of gold in a secret chamber beneath his concubine’s bed last night. Why not raid his house? Oh, and that concubine is the Left Chancellor’s lover. Tsk, what a sturdy pair of horns he’s wearing.]
The Minister of Revenue, about to plead poverty: ?!
The Left Chancellor: I’ll kill you!!
Before long, the whole court has gone completely off the rails.
The officials stop scheming against each other and start lining up every day to give her money and snacks, all in the hope that she’ll share “a few more details” in her thoughts. As for how she knows so many secrets, everyone tacitly agrees not to ask, as if she were born the “all-knowing oracle” of the Daming Palace.
Just as she becomes a top-tier star in the capital, Yu Wanwan packs her bags in the middle of the night and prepares to run away.
But before she can make it out of the palace, Xiao Yanting, the tyrant rumored to kill without batting an eye, corners her against a wall.
Trembling, Yu Wanwan wails inwardly:
[It’s over, it’s over! The living King of Hell is going to kill me to keep me quiet! I heard he likes to pull out people’s tendons first... Help, I don’t want to die!]
But the tyrant doesn’t draw his sword. Instead, he pins her tightly in his arms, eyes reddening. “Wanwan, didn’t you say you liked this face of mine? Since you’ve gone and tempted me, how dare you look at anyone else?”
Nothing written
The author likes to torture the heroine. Among all the mind-readers, she is the only one who doesn't think that others can hear his inner thoughts.
A tyrant can kill people at will, but he can't stop the Queen Mother from inserting women into his palace.