Belated Love? I refuse!

She was a noble daughter fallen from grace, a pearl gathering dust in the capital's pleasure district.
For the man she loved, she sacrificed her name and her innocence, paving a golden path for his ambition with her own tears.

He returned as the nation's Top Scholar, his brocade robes a stark contrast to her silken rags. But the promise of a shared future turned to ash. He repaid her devotion with a cruel decree: she was to become his bedchamber maid, a final, crushing humiliation.

Just as despair threatened to consume her, the tides of fate turned with the arrival of an imperial carriage. The Son of Heaven himself, the ruler of the realm, stood before her.

He remembered a forgotten kindness from years long past, a simple act of compassion she had shown when he was but a man in hiding. Now, the woman the scholar sought to trample underfoot had caught the eye of the dragon on the throne.