A modern female executive wakes up as Miao Xiaoman, a six-year-old girl in the Hundred Thousand Mountains of the southern frontier of the Great Yu Dynasty.
This place is strange: men and women can both hold power, and there are all kinds of Gu arts. Her mother has three husbands. Her eldest and second eldest brothers were born to her first father, while her third brother and sister were born to her second father. Only she was born to her mother.
At six, she awakens her spiritual talent and is found to have a once-in-a-century affinity with the Nine Gu. She is appointed Holy Maiden, and the whole village bows before her.
But all she wants is to lie flat. Bugs? She wouldn't study them if they were the last thing on earth!
Then she hears of a Gu-breeding method in the southern frontier that can make men conceive. Unfortunately, when men bear children, the chance of producing a girl with Gu blood is only thirty percent, while women who bear children have an eighty percent chance. The outer regions are eyeing the method covetously.
She sits up with a start. The Gu-breeding method hasn't been lost? Then she'll create a Gu King for the ages and invent an improved version that guarantees a child with Gu blood every time!
A bug-phobic coward meets an ambitious Gu King. She makes her way from the Hundred Thousand Mountains to the imperial capital of Zhongzhou, with a bookish childhood friend, a monk from the Western Desert, and an imperial tutor all clinging to her side...
Theme: Overcoming fear and creating for love
