The Empress of the Inner Palace

On a snowy night in the Yeting Palace, everyone knelt in the snow. She was the only one who kept watching his hands as she knelt. As he left, he said, “That girl in the Yeting Palace, don’t let her die.”

At the gates of Xiaguan, wearing her dead father’s white robe, she stood alone before tens of thousands of enemy soldiers. Behind her, the patched and re-patched Shen banner snapped in the wind.

At the rear mountain, she led twenty death-sworn warriors up a sheer cliff and onto a rise, then struck down the King of the Grasslands with a single blow.

Her mother reached to straighten her collar, then stopped with her hand halfway there. She could not acknowledge her, could not call out to her, and could only say, “It’s cold. Dress warmly.”

Wen Yan came with poisoned wine to kill her, but in the end raised the cup and drank it herself. “This cup is from Wen Yan, to Wen Yan.”

The eight-year-old emperor asked Grand Tutor Xie in court, “You asked me to spare the Xie family. Then let me ask you: should the Shen family be spared?”

In his final moments, he crookedly wrote a line: “Elder Sister Empress, I’m entrusting you with the lamp.”

At the enthronement ceremony, he knelt at the foot of the stairs and presented the imperial seal with both hands, calling her “Your Majesty.” But she called him only “Minister Li.”

She crawled out of the snow and walked toward the light of ten thousand lamps.

Not to become empress, and not to sit on the throne. She only wanted justice to endure in this land.

Should the Shen family be spared?

And the man who had guarded her light for half a lifetime said only this in the end:

“The lights are beautiful. From now on, I will watch them with you every day.”

Theme: A wronged daughter is reborn and seeks revenge by reading people, rising from the Yeting Palace to the throne. With her intelligence and courage, she clears her family’s name. After seeing through the hearts of everyone in the world, she finally learns to trust a sincere heart. True strength means daring to trust and daring to love.