The Beauty's Slender Waist and Blade

[Fallen Kingdom Noblewoman Assassin x Cold-Faced Enemy General]

Also known as "He Mistook the Woman He'd Longed for for Years for Someone Else and Sent Her to the Dragon Bed" and "The Chu Woman Assassinates Qin"

[Blurb]

In the twenty-fourth year of King Qin's reign, the Qin army breached Ying, the capital of Chu.

With her country fallen and her family destroyed, Zhao Huayu, daughter of a Chu aristocrat, assumed the name Yao Ji and risked everything to secretly plot the restoration of her kingdom.

To assassinate a powerful Qin official, she was forced to attach herself to Chu Jiuhe, a Qin general.

He taught her archery and military strategy, raising her into a stunning yet deadly beauty with a blade for a heart.

She willingly let him use her, obeyed his every command, risked her life for him, assassinated his political enemies at court, and helped him consolidate his military power.

When the time was right, she defied his orders for the first time and begged him to send her into the palace:

"Offer me up to become the woman in King Qin's bed. Only then can your position as a general be secure."

In the end, Zhao Huayu got her wish and was sent to King Qin's bedchamber.

She sat quietly on the couch, her crimson sleeve concealing the dagger she had carried for years.

After years of enduring humiliation, she was on the verge of assassinating the Qin king and restoring her country. Everything would be decided in this one attempt.

She sat there all night, but the king never came.

Instead, the palace doors flew open, and the night wind rushed in. Chu Jiuhe stood there with a long sword in hand. Blood ran from its icy blade and soaked his armor, while flames blazed behind him as far as the eye could see.

His bloodstained fingers clamped around her chin as he asked in a husky voice:

"How dare you?"

Chu Jiuhe was born to humble beginnings. Through ruthless killing, he rose step by step until he held immense power, second only to The Outcast.

He betrayed others without hesitation to gain power and profit, cold and without desire.

No one knew that, in his impoverished youth, he had once pledged his life to a mute woman in Chu.

She was the woman he'd spent half his life searching for, the beloved he had burned into his heart.

Only after he personally sent her to the dragon bed did he realize that the woman he had longed for was the beautiful blade he had raised himself.

At first, he thought she was nothing more than a plaything to be controlled and an instrument in his struggle for power.

He never expected that the beautiful blade would strike true with every blow, each one cutting straight to his heart. Every calculated step she took toward him was part of her plot to assassinate the Qin king and restore her country.

Later, he embraced it all willingly, ready to become the sharpest blade in her hand.

#Love begins in humble beginnings, then spreads like wildfire#

#You save your country, and I'll save you#

[A pair of equally matched people who use each other, love and fight each other, and are both far from good. They choose each other for the sake of their own interests, in a story of extreme romance set in a turbulent age.]

[One-on-one romance, both leads' first time, set in the Spring and Autumn and Warring States period. The nations in the story are not the historical ones; the setting is entirely fictional.]

The heroine's surname is Zhao, one of the three great aristocratic surnames of Chu. Her given name is Huayu, and her childhood name is Ruoying, taken from "The Mountain Spirit" in the Songs of Chu.

The hero is Chu Jiuhe, a name taken from "The Earl of the River" in the Songs of Chu. Those born by the rivers of Chu take Chu as their surname. The one who destroys Chu is not the hero.

Blurb written on February 6, 2023, revised on June 26

Theme: Country, family, and the world