Marrying Up 1

She was once an inconspicuous young incense maker in the capital. At a flower-viewing banquet, the regent noticed her at a glance, not for who she was, but because she looked so much like the shadow in his heart.

Within three days, she went from a young woman awaiting marriage to a prince's concubine, falling from freedom into a cage.

He was sometimes gentle, sometimes cold. He called her "Older Sister," but never by her name.

She thought she was merely a substitute, never imagining that the real shadow was the forbidden secret he could not speak of.

When her heart finally died, she faked her death and escaped to Jiangnan, believing she could start a new life. But fate pushed her back in front of him once more.

Three years later, he saw a landscape painting in an art studio in Jiangnan and was instantly stunned.

The brushwork and mood clearly belonged to his dead wife.

Following the clues, he found her, but she no longer wished to be anyone's shadow.

He pressed closer at every turn, while she dodged him at every opportunity.

Only when the past came to light, revealing the mystery of the substitute, the truth of her birth, and scandal after scandal within the imperial family, did he understand that the person he'd spent three years searching for was not a shadow. It was her.

When conspiracy stirred once more, he was poisoned while protecting her, and she revealed her identity to save him.

The crime of deceiving the emperor by faking her death, and the love and hatred entangling them, would all be settled in that moment.

Theme: The one I love lies beyond mountains and seas, and those mountains and seas cannot be crossed