Female-oriented / Historical palace intrigue / Marriage before love / Older man and younger woman / Forbidden uncle and sister-in-law romance / Scheming heroine
Pei Qinghou transmigrates as a princess sent to marry into a foreign kingdom. In the original story, she's supposed to marry a useless young heir, serve as his broodmare, and be granted a white silk sash three years later. She lifts the bridal sedan curtain and sees the heir drooling and acting like a fool, while the Regent who escorted her has a face made for cold restraint. That very night, she climbs into the bed she shouldn't be in.
She has a copy of The Secret History of Dayan, which records who will become a border lord and who will have their family wiped out ten years from now. She knows the Regent commands the army but has no heir, that the medicinal food in the heir's residence is laced with contraceptives, and that the Empress Dowager's Buddhist prayer beads are the key to opening the secret passage to the imperial treasury. So by day, she boils medicine for the heir and dutifully tends to him; by night, she slips into the Regent's study to "ask about state affairs." Their conversations go from memorials to the imperial bed, and from the duties of ruler and subject to the proper conduct between an uncle and his nephew's wife. Then the heir discovers the child in her belly and bursts in shouting, "Uncle, how could you..." The Regent pins her against the imperial desk, his fingers digging into the hollow of her waist. "That title, nephew's wife, makes me very uncomfortable." Three months later, the heir dies suddenly. The entire court demands that he marry his widowed sister-in-law to legitimize their relationship. He sneers, "She was never my nephew's wife. She's the princess consort I've been plotting to claim all along." Everyone thinks the Regent has been bewitched by a wicked beauty. Only Pei Qinghou knows the truth: on the night the wedding procession entered the capital, he had already sent people to uncover her entire past. So who was really plotting against whom?
