The royal capital, Saining City.
In the bedroom at the very heart of Red Leaf Manor, the air was steeped in the scent of extravagantly expensive incense.
This spice cost ten gold coins per gram, affordable only to the highest-ranking nobles.
Elena lay on an absurdly enormous velvet bed, covered by an exceedingly thin silk summer quilt.
Curled beneath the covers, she restlessly stirred her two fair, long legs.
Something was wrong.
Very wrong.
Elena abruptly sat up.
The quilt slipped down from her shoulders, exposing a dazzling expanse of snowy white skin to the morning's faint light.
She lowered her head and looked at her hands.
They were fair and smooth, and the thick calluses on her palms, worn from gripping a sword year after year, had vanished completely.
Her nails were trimmed perfectly, painted with a light coat of nail lacquer.
These were not the hands of a female grand duke who had slain countless people, hands covered in innumerable tiny scars.
Elena raised her left hand and viciously pinched the snowy white fullness of her chest.
It hurt.
This wasn't a dream.
Elena was utterly stunned. She sat blankly on the bed as the chaotic memories in her mind surged up like a raging tide.
She clearly remembered that after that bastard Su Li left her a hundred top-grade enchanted swords in the basement, he had vanished completely into the heavy snow.
In that dark, damp basement, she had collapsed beside that pile of scrap iron. That beast of a man had tormented her so thoroughly that she had not even the strength to lift a finger.
Later, relying on those hundred swords, she had forcibly raised her family to heights it had never reached before.
She became the Empire's only female grand duke.
She lived to