Top of the Consort Roll

Synopsis

Cao Ling-er enters the Imperial Consort Examination with one goal: fail gracefully for thirty days and receive the return-bride tattoo that will legally free her from marriage forever. Armed with her dead aunt's secret notebook of beautiful failures, she sabotages her poems, music, clothing, and embroidery without crossing the line into treason. But the dawn rank board keeps climbing instead of falling. By day three she learns that someone has been correcting her failures; by day ten a rival princess is protecting her rank; by day twenty-one the Crown Prince himself has begun overturning her losses. The higher Ling-er rises, the more she realizes the examination is not choosing a bride — it is reopening the sealed truth of her aunt's death.

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