Her unwed son turns out to be the product of a 1 night setup by two families. The more powerful family drugs the Crown Prince (CP) and has him defile/r*pe the original body of the female lead, to have him wake up next to their untouched daughter. They achieve their aim of guilting the CP into marrying their daughter. The FL is setup by the unfavored concubine mother with designs on the dowry left to the FL by her deceased birth mother.

By the time everything is uncovered the female lead has become the CP's concubine and we eventually discover she is the only woman he has ever slept with.

The CP has other concubines stuffed into his palace by his father or grandmother. These women either die, get sent to a temple or become irrelevant.

There are other females interested in the CP that create trouble for the FL but they face karmic retribution.

The female lead has a few males around her that spark the CP's jealously and irrationally push him to treat her severely such as starvation, estrangement from their children, isolation, leading to her attempt to die ending up in coma just before she becomes empress. Eventually the couple improve their communication skills and resolve their misunderstandings. They become closer by overcoming the various problems created by their adversaries (both foreign and domestic). The most significant male around the FL is the CP's youngest paternal uncle, aka the God of War. He extorts the CP/ later-Emperor into making the comatose FL the Empress at the cost of surrendering his military commission, rank, royal title and exile from the country.

I did not like the time skips and I did not like the plot twists from left field. Yes, it is a happy ending in that the FL and male lead end up together. But I got bored with the "wash, rinse, and repeat" nature of the story.

Some characters and story arcs were weird.

• Why did the FL allow the fourth Prince to insert the pendant bells?
• Why were the bells bestowed with magic to feel the emotions of the CP's uncle?
• The story could have worked without the initial two concubines in the CP's palace.
• Why couldn't the writer allow the leads to live happily-ever-after without having to hide the identity of the CP/former Emperor?
• Did the writer really need the FL to become the Queen of the other country?
• Wei Hongdou, aka, Hongluan, aka Jialuo, aka Red Bean, aka Adzuki beans,
  the friend and servant of Yun Dai. Met the FL when both worked in the kitchen of CP's house. She could have had a happy love story right from the start of Jin Lin's interest in her. The writer did not need to make her a secondary wife and have her be so dour and unhappily wed to Jin Lin. I wish she could have been happy married and mutually in love with Jin Lin.

Weird distracting plot elements abound in the story but eventually it all leads to a happy ending 3856 chapters later. I got bored at 1257 and skipped ahead to 3550 and finished the novel.

In the end the story was meh. I really wanted to love it but maybe because the love scenes were either tepid or nonexistent I found it hard to truly see and feel the love between the female and male leads.

It seems there were more written details describing the way looks were exchanged or interactions between the Fourth Uncle and the FL or between the CP and Concubine Jin. There was not enough description of how attentive the CP was in taking care of the FL. It seemed more was written about how others cared or paid attention to the FL than the CP.

Sigh.

I really wanted to love this story.