A slow-to-warm, life-loving empress dowager who lies flat x a cunning, scheming emperor who plays the pig to eat the tiger and acts like a sweet, harmless fool
(Younger man, three-year age gap between the leads)
Jiang Yinli had only just turned nineteen when her father, a high-ranking minister, and her stepmother sent her into the palace.
The reason was that her elder sister, the empress, had died in childbirth. In recognition of the Jiang family's merits, the imperial family had graciously allowed them to send another daughter to the palace.
It seemed like a great honor, if not for the fact that the emperor was nearly sixty, several years older than her father.
She was registered under her stepmother's name when she entered the palace and given the title of consort.
Only a few days after she arrived, one of the concubines who had made an enemy of her elder sister set her up. She looked at the guard she had accidentally stabbed to death when he tried to molest her...
And at the boy standing beside the pond, watching her with an expressionless face...
Jiang Yinli: Could you pretend you didn't see anything?
The boy readily agreed. "Sure, but I have one condition. Ask His Majesty to register me under your name and raise me."
This gloomy-faced boy in ordinary clothes was actually a prince?
She didn't understand. "Why?"
He smiled. "I need a consort mother with a respectable status."
It had to be said, her unofficial son was a master of palace intrigue. In just a few months, he had the troublesome concubines eating out of his hand.
Yet everyone saw him as a harmless little white flower.
Especially when he would ask her for affection with a blank expression. "Consort Mother, Consort Song flew into a terrible rage today and wanted to hit me. I was so scared."
Jiang Yinli: ?
Weren't you the one who ran off crying to complain to the old emperor, then came back as cool as a cucumber to eat grapes, young man?
Their peaceful days lasted only a few months before her unofficial son became emperor.
Oh no, now life was going to be even more comfortable!
She had become an empress dowager without lifting a finger, and her unofficial son continued to treat her with filial devotion.
Wait, it would be even better if he stopped looking at her with those strange eyes and saying such strange things...
---2024.12.11
Core idea: Enjoy life
