The Things That Don’t Kill Me Keep Trying to Kill Me

[Absurdist comedy and trope-subversion + powerful heroine and satisfying revenge + court intrigue and detective work + mechanical arts golden finger + love-hate relationship + multiple male suitors + an ensemble cast from the Mohist School + clearing wrongful convictions + powerful emperor and empress]

Her mother’s body is barely cold when Zhu Changning’s own father locks her in a woodshed and plans to move her mother’s grave to change the family’s feng shui. She fights back by barging into a palace banquet and thrusting her sword at the new emperor. “It’s definitely not because I’m afraid they’ll investigate my dad for embezzlement!”

She is an assassin from the Mohist School, and she holds the Mountains and Rivers Box her mother left behind. Her relatives mistreat her, her husband’s family betrays her, and her school wrongs her. Every time she suffers an injustice, she goes to the palace and tries to assassinate the emperor. Yet Yan Chenxiao evades her every time, then follows the clues she leaves behind to uproot the villains.

When a fake assassin appears, she is forced to become the emperor’s personal guard: hiding in the rafters by day and watching over the imperial bedchamber at night. The cold-faced Assistant Minister of Justice grips her wrist to test her swordsmanship, her childhood friend, a mechanical engineer, catches her fall with wooden wings, and the tyrant asks as she bandages his wound, “Who do you want to kill this time?”

Then a blood-letter arrives at the palace: next time, the entire Mohist School will die. And the secret mark on the letter belongs to her mother, who has been buried for years...