Rong Jing was known as the most brilliant madwoman in the modern world: cold-blooded, elegant, and impossible to read.
After falling into a trap, she withered away and was forced to bind herself to a System, transmigrating into an unfinished novel as the legitimate daughter of the prime minister’s household in the Sheng Kingdom, who would not live past sixteen.
After the System explained that her condition was “skin hunger syndrome,” she encountered him at Koi Pavilion. He sat in a wheelchair, cool and ethereal as an immortal banished from heaven.
As they brushed past each other, the bone-deep, heart-searing hunger within her turned into absolute calm.
Xie Qingci smiled. Excellent. Her “medicine” had come right to her door.
Near him, the bone-deep torment turned into absolute calm. Away from him, she plunged into an abyss a hundred times more painful than before.
She regarded him as prey she needed to keep alive, carefully plotting her approach as she drew closer. Meanwhile, on the author’s page, Regent Sikong Yao was frail and sickly, with a heart as ruthless as they came.
She treated him as prey and plotted at every turn, willing to enter the game herself, never realizing that she, too, was already part of his plan.
She pretended to be docile and treated him as the remedy that would keep her alive. He played along, seeing her as the poison that dulled his pain.
Each with their own ulterior motives, they tested one another with false affection and relied on each other at the brink of death.
Until, at the palace banquet, with a thousand troops surrounding the estate, she dropped her disguise and walked through the ranks to his wheelchair, a bloodied sword in hand.
He looked up at her, repressed madness and passion in his eyes. “Miss... so it turns out... we’re the same kind.”
Later, clad in the imperial robes, she had him place the crown on her head with his own hands, and he bowed in submission.
When the inner demons emerged at the heart of the ascension tribulation, they suddenly understood that the entanglement born of sickness and exploitation had long since become a bond of symbiosis that transcended life and death.
Being near you will kill me. Being away from you will drive me mad.
