My Stepbrother Helps Me Rise to the Clouds

[A Brilliant Strategist, She Endures for Years to Clear Her Father's Name: The Cold, Aloof Court Minister Becomes a Devoted Wife-Protecting Husband]

Song Lanxin has been clever and resourceful since childhood, and is determined to become a female official.

Then a palace coup turns everything upside down. Her father takes his own life, and she hides her grief as she follows her mother into a remarriage with a rising noble family, where she meets her cold and dignified stepbrother, Lu Chen.

To uncover the truth behind her father's death, she gradually gets close to Lu Chen, now a minister at the Court of Judicial Review, hoping to use him as her way in. But her stepbrother proves far too coldhearted.

She helps solve cases to draw near to him, yet he only looks at her from a short distance, her beautiful face right before his eyes, and coldly tells her to leave.

Song Lanxin assumes there is no way forward and leaves without looking back. But when she risks everything to sit the examination for female officials, Lu Chen unexpectedly becomes patient and guides her.

The first time Lu Chen saw Song Lanxin, he knew his nominal stepsister was no ordinary person.

She smiled as she pointed out a tiny clue on the corpse. Her light sleeve brushed his wrist, almost imperceptibly, as a faint fragrance drifted over. He looked up and saw her face.

He clenched his hand before he could stop himself, but kept his expression composed and told her to leave at once.

They were siblings in name, and besides, he knew perfectly well why she had approached him.

Later, he watched her rise through the ranks and take revenge on her enemy. All the while, he quietly paved the way for her, but even after she achieved her goal, she treated him as she always had, as if he were merely, and could only ever be, her brother.

One night, Lu Chen went to Song Lanxin's room and knocked late into the night. Eyes red, he cornered her against the door and asked, "Now that you've made it onto the road to greatness, have you forgotten the strategist who silently gave everything for you?"

At first, Song Lanxin approached Lu Chen because she wanted something from him. Later, the two tacitly agreed to call each other brother and sister, to hide what had happened between them that night.

So after she became a respected female official, Lu Chen would plead softly with her late every night to ride once more in the Lu family's wedding sedan.

[Set in a fictionalized version of the mid-Tang era. No characters are based on real people, so please don't overthink it.]

The author's other serial, Running a Food Empire with My Parents in Ancient Times, is also ongoing. Her whole family transmigrates and supports the heroine's career unconditionally. Come join the author in craving delicious food, eating delicious food, and getting chubby!

Theme: Keep moving forward even in adversity.