I have not studied ancient history, so please don't nitpick errors in terminology.
Any resemblance in names of people, places, or countries is purely coincidental. Please do not associate them with any real individual or group.
I'm worried there may be a lot of names, so let's pretend every male character over twenty in this story has a courtesy name.
In ancient society, women seemed to be nothing more than tools. Qu Zhu realized this very young, having learned it from books written from a male-dominated perspective.
Everything she did that defied convention amounted to riding horses, practicing martial arts, reading books that ordinary women had no interest in, and trying to share her elder brother's worries about the family.
Her elder brother, Qu Yin, had always loathed the fake Han man with a foreigner's appearance. To keep his little sister from being bewitched by that foreign-looking man, he had drummed it into her since childhood: "Zhu'er, I'll find you a good match in the future, but it will absolutely not be someone surnamed Fang!"
Qu Zhu nodded. "Zhu'er doesn't like people with such a murderous air about them. That Fang Yunling looks sinister, just as you said, Elder Brother."
It was only after Qu Zhu married Fang Yunling, left the Central Plains, and ventured into the vast Western Sands, facing life and death along the way, that she discovered... perhaps Fang Yunling was not quite the person everyone thought he was.
Fang Yunling once told her, "Cross the open plain, and the wilderness comes into view again. No matter how far you look, you can see only one corner of it."
Perhaps she had realized her feelings for him long ago. At the time, she thought he was simply being stubborn and did not want to go with her, so she replied, "There's no place for me in your little corner."
Fang Yunling smiled meaningfully. "The people of the whole world are there. You should be first among them."
Qu Zhu, trying to understand the ways of the world, x Fang Yunling, a half-Hu, half-Han man who knows all its tricks.
Theme: Girls, don't give in! Reading changes your fate.
