Entangled with the General

Li Wei Wei is a modern nursing intern with one weakness: she cannot put down a good novel. Falling asleep over a battered old book called The General, she wakes inside its pages, as the inconvenient bride of General Hua Leijian, the most feared soldier in Chang An. Cold, ruthless, worshipped by his army and feared at court, the great general wants nothing to do with the wife the emperor forced on him. His plan is a marriage on paper, two strangers under one roof. Her plan is bolder. She has read his story, she knows how it ends, and she refuses to let it end that way.

But Chang An eats gentle women alive, and Li Wei Wei was never gentle. A masked rider kidnaps her to bait her husband, and the rider turns out to be Teli Sin, a western prince who will become the truest friend she has in two worlds. War calls the general to the border, an enemy blade carries poison, and Li Wei Wei follows into the mountains to bargain with a cave hermit for the one petal that can save him. At the palace archery festival, her husband wins the right to choose a lady's hairpin, and he chooses it for her. She talks back to princes and wins the servants with kindness, until a stolen kiss in the dark unmasks the second prince Dan Lan's hidden hand, and the first prince Dan Yu decides he wants her for himself, even if he must lock her away for it. To reach her, the untouchable general defies the emperor in open court.

Every salvation has a price. An old senior arrives with a warning carried on temple smoke: the child growing in her will cost Li Wei Wei her life. She keeps the baby anyway, and on the birthing bed she pays. Her soul opens its eyes a thousand years away, in a hospital bed in a world of cars and machines, while the man she loves refuses to bury the body everyone calls dead. He keeps her breathing with needles and stubborn hope, until the night her fingers twitch beneath his hand and open.

Years later a western envoy rides through the gates of Chang An. Teli Sin has come home with a treaty, a private letter, and an old crime: the crown prince offered western gold to stay silent while the general was removed. At the banquet of blades a poisoned cup is meant for the general and takes a caged songbird instead. Arrows tear through a carriage in the rain, and under a dead assassin's sword lies a gold serpent token that leads through goldsmith ledgers and a frightened monk to a sealed letter bearing the heir's own private mark.

Then, deep in the dark, a door the heavens never sealed swings open. The pull offers Li Wei Wei her mother, her friend, her whole lost world. This time the choice is hers, and she means to make it out loud.