[Scheming, unhinged male lead x dangerous seduction] [Both leads are devoted only to each other] [Angst-filled love triangle]
World One: Where Dragons Rise from the Abyss
A Yuan first meets Yan Zhi beneath the training corridor of the Shadowless Pavilion. She is a spy planted by Xiao An; he is a Loulan poison master and deputy leader of an assassination organization, with a red snake coiled around his wrist beneath his sleeve and poisonous butterflies circling his shoulder. He looks at her as if she were an object waiting to be appraised.
“You can stand your ground,” he says.
But in the blink of an eye, A Yuan gives him a huge surprise...
Grinning, she steps in front of his poison chamber and fends off the taunts of three female assassins. Then she turns to him and repeats, “The sisters told me to stay away from the deputy leader.”
Afterward, Yan Zhi makes an exception and writes a single word beside her name on the roster.
No one knows what that word is.
Three months later, beneath the moonlight in Loulan, A Yuan watches the poison insects while Yan Zhi smiles at her for the first time without any schemes behind it.
“If you died, it wouldn't be any fun,” he says.
But the Empress Dowager's faction uncovers her true identity. Yan Zhi presses a butterfly knife to her neck, yet his hand trembles.
She offers no explanation. She only says, “Kill me, and you'll never get your answer.”
That knife is still embedded in the wall behind her, its handle facing outward, like a thorn never pulled free.
When a chess piece begins to stir the player's heart, who is whose poison insect?
