- Action
- Celestial xianxia
- Language: English
Mourner of the Seventh Veil
by @mesmerpercy · made on FicPal
In a post-imperial mourning court, young Queen Dowager Seo Ha-eun must publicly grieve for one hundred days to keep her dead husband's title, lands, and her imprisoned mother alive. Ha-eun is a perfect ritual reader who can cry on command, but she never loved the king she married for only forty-one days. When a note in the late king's handwriting accuses her of crying the wrong number of tears, she follows the trail into the forbidden seventh-veil sanctum and finds her husband alive, chained, watching, and grading her sincerity. As the court punishes her technical failures and the hidden king rewards them, Ha-eun realizes she is trapped between two systems of ownership. Her only rebellion is to fail beautifully enough that the right witness cannot look away.
