Shen Tang, a modern crisis communications consultant, wakes up inside a historical household intrigue novel as the wicked matriarch who poisons her mother-in-law, mistreats her stepson, drives a concubine to her death, and is ultimately divorced and drowned in a pond.
On her first day in the story, she wakes in a side room where she was supposed to meet her "lover," with the entire Hou household gathered outside to catch them in the act.
To save her life, Shen Tang exposes the trap on the spot, voluntarily gives up control of the household, and proposes divorcing the Marquis, who has been missing for three years. But the more she tries to leave, the less the Hou household can do without her. Then the man who was supposed to have died on the frontier suddenly returns, and she realizes that the book she read never told the truth about this world.
