“Young Marshal, you’ve spent years in Buddhist retreat. How could you not even keep hold of a single prayer bead?”
In the meditation room at Yunqi Temple, Jiang Ruoli clutched a broken strand of agarwood beads and smiled as she closed in on the eldest young marshal of the Huo family, a man who commanded a powerful army and had long devoted himself to a life of religious discipline.
But before she could see this “living bodhisattva” break his vows completely, time rewound by three months.
At her eighteenth-birthday ball, her concubine aunt forced her to bind her chest and starve herself. Her fiancé, Huo Jingming, took her half-sister Jiang Yuetang by the hand and humiliated her in front of the entire room.
When she opened her eyes again, Jiang Ruoli, a modern-day master of romance, had taken over the body of a girl on the brink of death.
She cut off her chest binding, exposed her half-sister’s schemes, and burned the marriage contracts between the two families, trapping the couple in a scandal of her own making.
But her mother’s death and her older brother’s old military-supply case were tied to a web of interests deadly enough to cost people their lives.
Jiang Ruoli set her sights on Huo Chenzhou.
Everyone said the young marshal had no interest in women. Only she knew that he would pick up her hairpin for her, wind his personal prayer beads around her wrist, and lose his composure when she got close to another man.
“Why are you really getting close to me? What do you want?”
She toyed with his prayer beads, smiling serenely.
“Your military power, the Huo family’s protection. I want it all.”
The man clasped her wrist, his voice low.
“And what else?”
“Your heart.”
Later, when Huo Jingming begged her to come back, his eyes red, Jiang Ruoli was already standing beside Huo Chenzhou.
She raised the prayer beads on her wrist and said softly,
“Too late. From now on, you should call me sister-in-law.”
Huo Chenzhou lowered his eyes and held her between the incense and his military uniform.
“Jiang Ruoli, now that you’ve provoked me, don’t think you can get away unscathed in this lifetime.”
