Spring's Message Enters the Eastern Palace

Shen Zhiwei, the concubine-born daughter of the Junior Minister of the Court of Imperial Sacrifices, and her elder sister Shen Lingyi, the legitimate daughter, are both reborn on the eve of the marriage assignments at the Double Ninth Palace Banquet. In their previous lives, Shen Lingyi made a lofty match with the Eastern Palace, but after Crown Prince Pei Huaijin "died of illness," she was sent to the Cold Palace to join him in death. Shen Zhiwei married down to the neglected Fifth Prince, Pei Jingzhan. She exhausted the wealth of her late mother's Jiangnan incense shop and its secret art of blending incense to treat Pei Jingzhan's hidden ailments. Though he seemed broad-minded, he was suspicious and jealous beneath the surface. She won over court officials for him and helped him ascend the throne, only to be jointly condemned to drink poisoned wine by Pei Jingzhan, who feared she knew too much about him, and Shen Lingyi, on the eve of her appointment as empress.

Reborn, Shen Lingyi stages a self-sacrificing ploy in the ancestral hall and steals the Fifth Prince's marriage decree, leaving Shen Zhiwei with the marriage to the Eastern Palace as a low-ranking consort destined to live as a widow. Shen Zhiwei brushes her fingers over the incomplete incense recipe hidden in her sleeve and goes along with it, entering the Eastern Palace's Moonlit Veranda. With a burner of "Spring Letter in the Snow," she sees through Crown Prince Pei Huaijin's scheme to use coughing up blood as a cover. She helps him root out the Eastern Palace's hidden agents and treat the cold poison that has built up in him for years. Meanwhile, Shen Lingyi, having stolen the "new ruler," soon discovers that without Shen Zhiwei's incense blends to keep his condition in check and her schemes behind the scenes, the gentle, jade-like Fifth Prince is not only impotent and violent, but also jealous. In the struggle for the throne, he missteps at every turn and loses everything.