A great novel, I really enjoyed it, 4.3 stars! It's not so much as a romance, as it is a story about a woman finding her place in the world (and the heart of her dao) and falling in love on the side.
Qiu Xinran is an unusual protagonist. She is not a young miss that is amazingly beautiful with the best background and a powerful family. Neither is she the daughter of a powerful family that is wronged and mistreated by that family... nor is she reborn for revenge.
In fact, she is a beautiful young girl from a very questionable background - dropped off at a mountain as a baby - and a fortune teller that comes to study under her master's junior brother. That junior brother just happens to be an official in the palace and so she ends up there as well. For a while, she is the study companion of one of the princesses, but most of the time she is a junior official following her martial uncle and trying to earn a bit of money.
Through some incidents she also meets the ML of the novel, Xia Xiuyan. He is the nephew of the emperor through his mother and his father is a general at the border. According to the rumors he is in bad health which is why he is staying in the capital. You know how rumors are and just keep in mind that his father is a great general. So great that the emperor wants a hostage.
At the beginning of story the FL returns to the capital after she left it in disgrace seven years ago. Back then she made a divination which send the ML to the border that just broke out into war and everyone though he would die there. Now he is back victories too and the public expects him to get even with her. After their first meeting after many years, the flashback starts and it gives us the entanglements and unfinished issues, both between the two of them and the royal family.
The setup and the flashback were pretty well done. It slowly unraveled the matters of the past and showed the complicated relationship between the two leads and how and why she ended up sending him to his death.
They were not lovers before everything and they only really get together at the end, but they always were allies of a kind and left a big impact on each other. It was pretty interesting to see how they ended up in the situation that the novel opens up with.
And it needs to be said: He fell first.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.