The court sees a feeble fake prince. My painting's goddess trains me nightly to bring nations to their knees.

A stand-in prince. A forbidden scroll. And a goddess-emperor who steps out of the ink to strike a deal: seize a kingdom's destiny in three months—and she'll share her bed. But when the painting comes to life, the real game has only just begun. Lin Ye is a nobody wearing a crown—a counterfeit prince propped up to keep the throne warm while the real powers pull the strings. In court, he treads on thin ice. In the harem, no one even bothers to fear him. That all changes the night he unrolls the legendary Nine-Dao Diagram—a mythical scroll said to hold one great path per page. The first image stirs awake Mo Lingyan, a sovereign empress who has been trapped in ink for a thousand years. Her offer is stark and irresistible: deliver the imperial fate of the Great Xia Dynasty into her hands within ninety days, and in return, she will enter into a dual-cultivation bond with him—body and soul. From that night on, the fake prince gains a shadow no one sees coming: a master strategist in silken robes who can overturn a minister's conspiracy with a flick of her brush, and silence an assassin with a single sword stroke before he draws breath. Step by step, under her merciless tutelage, Lin Ye transforms from a pawn into a player. But as the pieces fall and the throne draws nearer, he begins to suspect that Mo Lingyan's hunger for "national destiny" is only the surface. What she truly seeks may be far older, far deeper—and far more dangerous than mere power. This is a story of false faces and true fates—where the immortal in the painting is no fairy, and every stroke on the scroll hides a knife.