The Consort Only Wants to Be a Salted Fish

【Historical · Romance Fantasy · Comedy】

The dowager empress says the daughter of the Xie family was born to stand at the very top of Taiji Palace, but Xie Shujun thinks the pepper-salt pastries from the Imperial Kitchen are much tastier.

On the day of the palace selection, she wears a head full of gold hairpins and plays dumb, even taking the peony-patterned jade hairpin bestowed by the dowager empress and giving it to a cat as a toy: “This thing is too heavy. Snowball’s bell is much crisper!”

Then she turns to the emperor and winks: “Your Majesty, whether a salted fish flips over or not, it’s still a salted fish. Wouldn’t you say so?”

She wanted to lie flat and muddle through as an invisible nobody, but instead she is forced to watch the consort fight the empress and the virtuous consort poison a beauty.

Until one day—

“Yesterday, Lady Xie fed the instructor nanny’s ruler to a civet cat to sharpen its teeth!”

“This morning, Lady He used mint tea to wither the consort’s Western-region peonies!”

“Just now, Lady He of the noble consort rank accidentally dropped the empress’s gilded hair ornament on the Nine-Bend Corridor...”

Li Zhen crushes the bowl of contraceptive soup and laughs coldly: “My dear consort’s life as a salted fish is really lively.”

Xie Shujun, chewing on a salted plum with her legs crossed, looks up at the sky:

The first rule of survival in the deep palace—

the one who lies flattest often falls the hardest.