Content warning: The female lead is seven years older than the male lead. The male lead is a real eunuch, and he won't be pushed around. No rebirth or transmigration. The court politics are all just a plot device, so feel free to ship them.
The whole world fears him. She's the only one who dares to smack him with a ruler.
The boldest thing Wen Wanhe ever did was help her father hide the son of a condemned official: five-year-old Xie Zhi, a little eunuch who had escaped from the castration chamber.
She raised him for five years. She taught him to write with a ruler and saved up every coin of his "redemption money," dreaming of buying her A-Zhi out of the palace someday so he could marry and live in peace.
Then the palace took him away. She waited ten years.
Ten years later, the powerful Eastern Depot governor returned to the capital. The officials knelt to welcome him along the main street, but his sedan chair did not stop. It turned into a shabby alley in the south of the city.
Wen Wanhe stepped outside with a fire poker in hand, ready to yell at someone. She saw a man in a python robe crouched at the foot of her wall, sleeves rolled up, trowel in hand.
"A-Zhi?"
"Big Sister." He brushed the dust off his hands. "The woodshed roof was leaking. I've fixed it."
The officials of the entire court don't know that the merciless Lord Eunuch, the Nine-Thousand-Year-Old himself, shuts himself away to copy texts on the first of every month. If he gets one character wrong, he smacks his own palm.
The Eastern Depot's agents also don't know that their governor fears one thing more than anything else in the entire organization: Miss Wen furrowing her brow.
