The Empress Is Clear-Headed, Rising to the Top Through Palace Intrigue

Not a one-true-pairing story. The heroine is a natural at palace intrigue.

Career-focused version

After being reborn, Xie Ning awakened a natural talent for palace intrigue and casually ruined Xie Fengping, the narrow-minded and twisted legitimate daughter of the Marquis's household.

She then schemed to take the legitimate daughter's place and enter the palace as a consort. Unexpected twists followed one after another, and within days she had soared to great heights, fallen to rock bottom, and risen again. At a temple, she finally learned the explanation for it all, received a great inheritance from the ancestors of Great Zhou, and began striving toward her goal.

Romance version

Because her rival wasn't much of a challenge, Xie Ning's corruption was only halfway complete, leaving her with a bit of a girlish heart. Just then, she met the first great sage ruler of Great Zhou in three hundred years, and couldn't help feeling a little shy.

The sage ruler, meanwhile, fell for her at first sight because of her theory of Chang'e.

They fell for each other at first sight, but their positions forced them to part for now. Neither could have guessed that the beautiful future ahead would never go as they wished.

Though their hearts were joined and they longed for each other, fierce strife in the imperial harem dragged the entire court into the fray. Everything became tangled and complicated, leaving them in love but unable to be together, yearning for what they could not have.

But after they joined forces to remove every obstacle, they discovered that the beauty of those early days had, at some point, developed a tiny crack...