Transmigrated into a lowly palace maid in the cold palace, Shen Ying spent five years climbing from menial tasks like cleaning chamber pots to becoming the most trusted confidante of Consort Wan.
With her twenty-fifth birthday approaching, she could leave the palace and return home to live a life of wealth and leisure.
But in the dead of night, the Consort Wan placed the blood-stained Second Prince into her arms.
“Shen Ying, take him…to live!”
Looking at the infant in her arms, Shen Ying gritted her teeth and embarked on a path of no return.
One second she was a palace sparrow in a cage, the next she was the empire’s most wanted fugitive.
The stable boy was greedy? Kill him.
The maid betrayed her? Kill her.
The refugees robbed her? She turned the tables and recruited them into her first army.
Her long escape route became her recruitment ground.
In three years, she forged a scattered army into a formidable force,
put a down-on-his-luck scholar in charge of finances, and transformed a wandering assassin into a shadowy figure.
From the capital to the South China Sea, she picked up people along the way.
The sickly doctor she rescued became a miracle healer, the deserter general she took in became a commander, and even a starving orphan on the roadside could be honed into the sharpest blade in her hand.
Everyone says women are weak, but Shen Ying believed only one thing: only by surviving can she rewrite the rules.
They laughed at her for fleeing with a baby, unaware that she was carrying the future emperor in her arms.
They criticized her for her ambitious interference in politics, unaware that the world should have been ruled by someone else long ago.
Until the iron cavalry crashed through the gates of the tyrannical emperor’s city, Shen Ying helped the young emperor ascend the throne and vindicated the imperial concubine.
Behind her stood a rough-and-tumble Han prince who had fallen into banditry but now bowed before her, and an iron-blooded army she had forged from mountains of corpses and seas of blood.
Since this chaotic world devours people, she would set things right.
