Ye Tang first met Xuan He when she was young. Her father told her he was the orphan of a dear friend.
"From now on, Xuan He will live with us. Call him older brother. You must get along."
"People say you're the bastard son my dad fathered," Ye Tang asked Xuan He curiously.
Her father heard her and gave her a beating.
That night, Xuan He brought Ye Tang medicine and recited eighteen generations of their ancestors from the family genealogy, proving that he really was his parents' biological child.
After listening, Ye Tang understood and laughed. "So you're not a bastard. You're a dummy."
They were close in age and attended school together.
Xuan He was clever and well-read, winning the teacher's admiration. The teacher declared that the boy was sure to become a marquis or a chancellor one day.
Ye Tang secretly resented him and mocked him: "So you're not a dummy. You're a chancellor."
In the thirty-first year of Jingping, the Crown Prince staged a coup, and the emperor died. Empress Zhao, who had controlled the court for nearly twenty years, led troops to kill the Crown Prince and made herself emperor. The dynasty changed, and a general amnesty was declared. Ye Tang didn't learn that her great-aunt, a woman famous throughout the land, had become emperor until the imperial edict arrived at home. She was granted the title of commandery princess and summoned to the capital.
Power and status bred ambition, and ambition drove her ever closer to the supreme throne.
"In life or in death, I will stay by Your Highness's side and help you," Xuan He said.
"I'll make you a chancellor," Ye Tang said, nearly in tears. Through countless bloody storms, she would have died without Xuan He.
"Your Highness, how do you know I want to be a chancellor, and not an empress?"
One-on-one romance, girlboss x boy
Childhood sweethearts
An ambitious young woman x a beautiful, home-raised strategist
Theme: I decide my own fate, not heaven.
