[Transmigrated into a book + devoted couple + powerful hero, even more powerful heroine]
Shen Lingshu transmigrated at birth into a historical power-struggle novel and became a doomed, short-lived cannon-fodder character.
After her birth father placed third in the palace exams, he curries favor with the powerful and takes another wife, the daughter of a high-ranking official. Her birth mother dies of depression, and her maternal family is destined to be destroyed because of her scumbag father.
She knows the entire plot by heart, and also knows she isn’t the only one in this world who transmigrated.
She lays low in the countryside for twelve years, protecting her entire maternal family and steadily establishing and growing the Shen family’s trading house.
She tracks down and recruits every extraordinary talent from another world scattered across the land before anyone else can find them.
At fourteen, she enters the capital, where the decaying city seethes with hidden currents.
She doesn’t vie for favor in the inner household or curry favor with the powerful. She only wants to stockpile wealth and grain and make it through the chaos in peace.
But the old dynasty’s treasury is empty, the sale of official posts is rampant, and the powerful prey on the common people. Refugees are everywhere, and word of a goddess spreads quietly among the people.
She asks for the barren fief everyone else avoids, opens up the land and grows crops, and introduces new policies, turning a poor region into a haven amid the chaos.
A sickly, self-controlled prince from the imperial clan carefully advances through the ranks at court, using his frail body to clear obstacles from her path.
Civil unrest erupts, foreign forces invade, and the old dynasty collapses with a crash.
The cannon-fodder who only wanted to survive is ultimately embraced by the people and crowned emperor, transforming from a countryside merchant into an empress who rules the realm.
It's okay 🤭