In the winter of the third year of Yonghe's reign, Shen Zhiyi, the legitimate daughter of the prime minister's palace, stepped into the vermilion palace gate dressed in plain clothes. The world only saw her downcast eyebrows and eyes as gentle as willows, but they could not see the cold light of the dagger tightly clutched in her wide sleeves - it was not her wish to enter the palace and become a concubine, but to find out the truth about her brother's death on the battlefield.
"Miss Shen, do you know that the snow in this deep palace is full of blood?" Amid the eunuch's sinister laughter, she knelt on the cold white marble steps and heard a cold voice coming from the dragon chair: "Raise your head."
The moment their eyes met, the young emperor Xiao Jingheng tilted the tea cup in his hand slightly. Three years ago at the border post, the girl who bandaged his arrow wound turned out to be the newly named Concubine Shen. The hatred in her eyes at this moment was even more frightening than the poisonous arrow he was hit by back then.
The night rain in the palace wetted the military reports that Shen Zhiyi had secretly checked, but the black dragon-patterned cloak suddenly enveloped his shoulders. "Are you looking for this when you visit the library at night?" Xiao Jingheng threw the blood-stained military pay account book on the case, and the candlelight reflected the overlapping figures of the two people: "Why don't you make a deal with me?"
When she woke up in a thunderstorm night, she found that the Nine-Five Lord was caressing the "Pure Heart Mantra" for her; when he was assassinated in the paddock, she saw her using the golden hairpin as a blade to stain her skirt with blood; the truth hidden behind the blood and tears gradually tore apart - it turned out that her brother's death was implicated in the late emperor's secret, and the enemy she cherished had broken a red plum for her as early as that snowy night.
"When I betrothed you with mountains and rivers, what you asked for was my life." At the heaven-sacrifice ceremony, Xiao Jingheng held the hairpin that pierced his heart, but he held her hand tighter. Shen Zhiyi used her trembling hands to cover the blood spreading on his chest, and then she was shocked to realize that under Feng Guanxia's robe, she had already abandoned her armor.
When the setting sun reflected the palace wall like blood, the new queen Shen Zhiyi stood on the Star-Zhaing Tower, looking at the emperor who set up a private medical clinic for her and sighed: "I have always carried that dagger with me." Xiao Jingheng smiled and took out the old purse from his sleeve. There were still dried blood stains on the faded peace charm inside.
——How many wishful thoughts have been burned up in this deep palace, but our love and hate have bloomed flowers in the ashes.
Intention: "Love is a knife that lets go of hatred, and a sheath that cuts through thorns."