Who Will Sit with Me and Rule the World?

Twelve years ago, three hundred members of the Zhongli clan were executed to the last after being accused of treason.

The whole capital believed not one of them had survived.

No one remembered that a little girl had crawled out of the burning ruins. And no one knew that twelve years later, she would bind her chest, tie up her hair, assume the name Zhongli Zhishi, and return to court as a seventh-rank civil official.

She was almost too good a person. Gentle and timid, she would only lower her head and wipe herself off when a colleague poured wine over her in public. She wouldn't even raise her voice. But no one had seen how, when alone, she tightened her chest bindings until her ribs creaked, how she stared at her old scars deep into the night, or how she wrote the words "Crane in the Well" on the wall in blood.

She returned to the capital for one purpose: to overturn the verdict. To drag every old grievance of those "loyal and virtuous souls, easy to bully" back into the light, one by one.

Dugu Yanci was the crown prince. He knew better than anyone that the bones of the Zhongli clan lay buried beneath the Dugu family's dragon throne. He should have been the first to get rid of her. But at some point, he began to notice the nape of her neck tensing when she lowered her head, and the thin layer of ice in her eyes when she smiled. He even entertained the thought: if she weren't one of the Zhongli clan, perhaps the capital wouldn't feel quite so cold.

She could not love him. If she did, the three hundred dead would never forgive her.

He could not protect her. If he did, he would become the enemy of the entire Dugu imperial clan.

The court was a game, and human hearts were its pieces. The public case was the old charge of treason; beneath the surface, two people were tearing at the private feelings they dared not admit. Everyone thought they were the ones moving the pieces, until they discovered that beneath the Imperial Ancestral Temple lay a well sealed for thirty years. Something inside was chiseling its way up from underground, night after night.

It was no ghost, no god. It was the debt this realm owed. It was what the Dugu family owed the three hundred