My Daughter Was Drugged into Silence for Three Years, and I Was Reborn As

In her previous life, Zhou Xing'er was a widow who ran a tofu shop in the south of the city. She died of illness in the twelfth lunar month, hearing only two things before she passed: her daughter, Shen Mingyue, had been called a "jinx who killed her own mother" in the palace, and someone had paid silver to make sure she kept her mouth shut for life. When she opened her eyes again, she had become a low-ranking laundry maid in the palace, back in the fourth year after her daughter had entered the palace.

On the ninth day of the twelfth lunar month, beside the lotus pond in the imperial garden, she lifted her daughter out of the icy water. For three years, the girl had not spoken a single word, and even when she fell into the water, she hadn't struggled. That single rescue bound the lives of mother and daughter together again, and pushed Xing'er into the coldest set of accounts in the palace.

Her daughter's muteness was not an illness, but a drug; the half-basket of charcoal was not a mistake, but an order; the half-piece of hard rice cake hidden in her sleeve was not greed, but a habit left behind by the mother who had been taken from her three years ago. Xing'er had no cheat-like powers and asked no one for help. She relied only on her laundry skills, her knack for bookkeeping, and the palace rule that "whoever writes the prescription must sign it," pursuing the truth one entry at a time: from the matron who ordered people slapped to the eunuchs of the Imperial Household Department, from the hidden monthly accounts of thirty taels of silver to the old case, dating back thirty years, of the previous dynasty's exchange of the eldest princess.

She saved her daughter's life, overturned her own case, and settled the accounts of the entire palace. At the end of the story, the books are balanced, her name is restored, and the tofu shop opens again. In front of the stall, her daughter speaks: "Mother, I'm well. I came to see you."