The Empress's Handbook for Ruling

Jing Xin, Empress of Xuanhe, ascended the throne at the age of three, married at nine, and at fifteen deposed and executed the regent prince and wiped out her mother's clan, the Huan family, before formally taking power.

By the time she was eighteen, in the fifteenth year of Xuanhe, the war in the northwest had ended in a great victory. The realm was peaceful and prosperous.

Her glorious achievements were already enough to shine in the history books. There was nothing left to regret.

The empress therefore paid her respects at the Imperial Ancestral Temple and went on an excursion to Jiangnan.

Jiangnan was a land of beauty, home to more beauties than anywhere else.

But when she awoke from a dream in the middle of the night, the empress seemed to see a pair of beautiful, childlike eyes, as if filled with endless tears of blood.

They belonged to the little empress chosen for her by the empress dowager when she was six. The legitimate son of the chancellor, the two had gone everywhere together and were inseparable day and night.

One was a young puppet emperor, always teetering on the edge of danger; the other, a nominal empress, walking on thin ice. Yet they had shared a deep and devoted affection.

But in the sixth year of Xuanhe, the empress dowager ordered the execution of the chancellor's entire household. The young empress watched helplessly as her little empress was implicated and exiled with the rest, dragged out of the resplendent Hanguang Hall. The hand gripping hers was pried away inch by inch. Looking back at her, the girl had eyes full of bloody tears.

Childhood sweethearts are the hardest to forget.

…

There was also the handsome imperial companion who had served at her side since childhood, skilled in both letters and warfare; her beautiful, virtuous cousin, carefully raised by the Huan family with the intention of securing the position of empress; the upright censor who had seen her every day in her youth and seemed utterly loyal; and the grand tutor who instructed the emperor and kept himself beyond reproach...

They had all once received the emperor's special favor, only to become faint, blood-red shadows beneath the empress's unprecedented achievements.

So when the imperial female attendant, her face stern, bowed and presented a secret report aboard the imperial ship sailing through Jiangnan, the empress read the few lines of ink on the page and fell into thought.

The largest underground black market in Jiangnan, Changfeng House, had posted a reward of unprecedented size, unseen in a century.

A million in reward money for the death of the emperor.

Clues pointed to someone from Her Majesty's past.

The empress stared at the report for a long while, baffled.

She had so many old acquaintances. Which one could it be?

Note: This is not a matriarchy. The setting is a normal feudal society.

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