Ning Yingying knows her husband is a bad person. She just realized too late. Less than a year into their marriage, Ning Yingying has become nothing more than a bed warmer in a set of seven. She isn’t an assassin like Liu Mingyan or a general like Sha Hualing. She didn’t help Luo Binghe ingratiate and take over a new sect. She wasn’t a conquest of old enemies. She knows that the only care her husband has for her is reliant upon her being a safe, comforting pair of arms to lay in, to comb his hair and nurse his grudges. Already she knows she’ll never be named empress. She doesn’t want to be. All she wants to kill the sick bastard that tore the limbs, tongue, and eye from the man that raised her. She wants to wake up on a firm bed in a bamboo forest, secure in the knowledge that Luo Binghe is dead, and can’t hurt anyone she cares about any more.
So she draws a bath for her husband. He’s sore after another unsuccessful campaign against Yue Qingyuan. He’s already taken out his anger for the day— the jade pass to the water prison still hangs on his belt. Ning Yingying undresses him, flatters him, rubs his shoulders like a docile, doting wife should. She helps him into the bath, grabs the salts and powders from the hutch, and activates the acid. The fire and heat it produces is enough to singe off several inches of her hair, but it does the job. In minutes, there is no more Luo Binghe that can regenerate. Just a nasty pool of foul smelling liquid.
The takeover was far easier than expected. Liu Mingyan doesn’t want the sect destroyed. Sha Hualing and Mobei Jun respect anyone capable of killing Luo Binghe. Little Palace Mistress won’t miss her hands too terribly. Within a day, Ning Yingying became an empress, and within a fortnight she dismantled an empire. She took her Jiu-jiu from that filthy place her own naïveté condemned him to. Huan Hua is little more than a vassal sect to Cang Qiong, its riches going a long way to repair the damages done by its former master. Even so, things can’t go back to how they were. To say nothing of the lives lost, Shen Qingqiu cannot and will not return to his former post. In the end, Ning Yingying does get to wake up on a firm bed in a bamboo forest— only as its master instead of its student. Every year she pulls in droves of children from the muddy roads. She cleans their faces and bandages their scrapes, and tells them there won’t be any more wars. She will make sure there are no more Luo Binghe’s.
