The Fake County Magistrate's Daily Mediation

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As a modern-day mediator, Meng Anyun worked herself to the bone and thought she just had to hold on until retirement. Who could have guessed she would wake up as the family member of an official newly taking up his post?

She opened her eyes in the middle of a desperate escape, with a brother and sister fleeing bandits. By the time Meng Anyun came to her senses, her brother was already on the brink of death, and in the end he never made it to Yushan.

To repay him for his kindness, Meng Anyun ignored his arrangements for her to seek refuge with relatives and instead decided to assume his identity and fulfill his dying wishes.

How hard could being an official be? In modern times, she was at least a team leader in mediation.

And solving cases? She could handle family squabbles with her eyes closed.

Her new post brought one strange case after another.

The first adviser she hired looked remarkably like one of the bandits who had killed her brother.

The second dispute she was called to settle involved the county's two great clans fighting in the street over a cook weighing two hundred jin.

Even more absurdly, the women of the county were having illicit affairs because they believed they were too thin to make a good match.

In the Night Kingdom, plumpness was considered beautiful, and the people followed suit.

This extreme aesthetic had seeped into every aspect of life, from food and daily routines to marriage and choosing a spouse.

Meng Anyun thought, This is easy! I'll open a shop serving light meals and set up a weight-loss camp. With enough encouragement, a healthy view of beauty will gradually transform the people's lives.

But then, by an unexpected twist of fate, Meng Anyun discovered a strange herb in a patient's medicinal dregs. Even the heir to the world's foremost medical valley had no idea what it was.

New to the county, Meng Anyun had been wary of the powerful local clans.

But while mediating a divorce case at their doorstep, she uncovered the secret that the clan had been wiped out ten years earlier. White bones covered the underground of their manor, and that unknown herb grew in the secret chamber.

After that, she found one plant here, another there, and even searched the wells in ordinary people's homes.

This was the culprit behind the people's weight gain!

To quietly resolve the side effects the weight-gain herb was causing, Meng Anyun invited the plump cook she had met before to invest in a shop. But on opening day, someone showed up making trouble in the name of the great clan.

It would have been better not to investigate. Once she did, she found that the clan had problems of its own.

She had thought this was merely a clumsy scheme by local gentry, but it turned out to be just the tip of the iceberg of a conspiracy orchestrated by someone behind the scenes.

Xie Buzhou and his companions had once been young and reckless, standing up to the powerful for the sake of the Night Kingdom. But they had failed.

After that, Xie Buzhou exiled himself to Yushan, choosing it as the place where he would be buried.

But no one expected Yushan to become beautiful after Meng Anyun arrived. He could no longer turn a blind eye.

Meng Anyun had only wanted to develop Yushan and be a minor official. Somehow, along the way, she became the savior of the world.

[Reading Guide]

1. One-on-one romance, alternate history, happy ending

2. A workaholic heroine and a hero who is mostly window dressing early on

3. The heroine sees her precious county as flawed, though through a slight rosy filter. A little infighting is fine, but they'll unite against outside threats.

Theme: Beauty blooms in a thousand forms