A Coffin for a Throne: I'll Take the Crown

That year, a terrible drought left the land strewn with corpses for miles. I sold myself to a broker for a sack of millet, leaving it behind for my starving younger siblings. Seven years later, when the new emperor chose his consorts, I was picked from among the lowest-ranking servants in the laundry bureau. Everyone laughed at me, calling me a lowborn wretch from a family of famine victims. None of them knew that over those seven years, I had quietly eaten away at my enemies' power. Tonight, at the palace banquet, the new emperor, whose wine I poured with my own hands, lies at death's door. I shed my gown, revealing the dreadful scars on my back, and step toward the dragon throne. The favored consort who once mocked my lowly birth now kneels at my feet, trembling as she asks who I really am. I run my fingers over the late emperor's jade seal and say softly with a smile, “The three thousand starving people your father buried alive that winter were all my kin.”