The Daughter They Buried Came Back

Xie Mingzhao's father, her stepmother, her half sister and the man she was betrothed to agree among themselves to be rid of her, and they carry on as her family right up to the day they roll her in a mat and put her in the ground alive. She is a minister's daughter. The person who comes round under the earth is someone else. An office worker from a much later century, who had worked herself past what her body would take, opens her eyes in that body, gets a hairpin through the matting and pulls herself out. She goes to Lu Heng, a young general she grew up with, and he takes her in. She carries the mat with the blood still on it into the wedding her half sister and her former betrothed are holding, says in front of the guests what was done to her, and takes back her dowry. The big houses come at her after that. Rumours go round about her, her goods get shut out of the markets, and she is walked into traps at court. She opens a house that trades in gossip, and the information and the money coming through it give her something to work with. She starts digging into what her father has taken in bribes, and she and Lu Heng go down the list of the people who put her in the ground.