The Dowager Consort Hid Behind the Curtain, Only to Become the Powerful Minister's Beloved

The underground palace beneath the Imperial Ancestral Temple collapses, and Sheng Fuwei and Xie Zhiheng, the iron-fisted judicial commissioner ordered to investigate, plunge into a deadly trap together. When the cold poison flares up, they are forced into intimate contact to save each other’s lives. At dawn, she wipes away all traces and returns behind the beaded curtain to her role as the regent dowager overseeing the young emperor. The secret cipher scrolls left behind by the late emperor contain the officials’ fatal weaknesses, as well as the truth about why she was forced to join him in death. With just sixty days left in the mourning period, the maternal clan’s chief minister wields a secret edict and presses her at every turn to surrender her power. She uses an inside traitor to send a fake letter and turns the law into a blade, bringing down one faction today and executing an official tomorrow. But Xie Zhiheng is ordered to search the palace, determined to find the woman from that night. When they meet behind the curtain, he demands coldly, “Has Your Highness the Dowager Consort seen the assassin?” She raises a hand with a smile. “Lord Judicial Commissioner, why not examine my palm first?” He doesn’t know that the person he’s hunting is none other than the most powerful woman in the palace, right before him.