MTL - Your San Value is Zero - Chapter 89 The usefulness of favorability

Clara Vance had it all.Millions of followers, a beauty empire built on glamour, and a life curated for the camera. But a lost bet with her mother sends her away from a marvelous weekend trip to Mykonos and into the dusty attic of her family’s decaying ancestral manor.The catch was her inheritance. Her task? A dreary clear-out. Her discovery? A centuries-old diary belonging to her great-grandmother, Eleanor Thorne.The ink tells a story of a forgotten history. Eleanor’s forbidden obsession with her guardian and step-uncle, Casimir Guggenheim, a ruthless railroad tycoon with a heart of stone.But when Clara touches the tear-stained pages, the scent of crushed gardenias doesn’t just fill the room, it drags her back to 1879.Trapped in Eleanor’s corseted body, Clara finds herself under the roof of the very man who haunted the diary. To the world, Casimir is a cold, untouchable magnate. To Clara, he’s a puzzle she’s determined to break.The problem? Clara isn’t the timid, fragile girl Casimir remembers. She’s a 21st-century It Girl with no filter, a strategic mind for business, a total lack of respect for Gilded Age propriety and a defiance waiting for trouble to happen. While the original Eleanor was a victim of her station, Clara is ready to burn the cage down.As Clara navigates a world where a single misstep means ruin, scheming relatives see her as a pawn, and a powerful suitor sees her as nothing but a business merger. She realizes the history books were wrong.Rewriting Eleanor’s tragic end is dangerous, especially when she starts falling for the man she was never supposed to have.History says they’re a tragedy. Clara says history is about to get a makeover.

I’m an imperial uncle; his imperial majesty’s uncle.

Once, someone with nothing better to do took a comprehensive survey of the current dynasty, and summed up the imperial court’s three great cancers.

Wang Qin leads in corruption; the treasury is never full.

Yun Tang favours a few, forming cabals; leading to corruption in our politics.

Prince Huai plays with power, and serves as the head of a hundred poisons — thus causing instability to the throne.

When they talk about the most venomous of vipers, the wicked one who plays with power, the biggest cancer of them all, they’re talking about me: this insignificant prince, Prince Huai, Chengjun.

I can only say that I feel rather hapless in the face of these theories.

In truth, I have been ever dutiful, ever devoted, devoid of intention to monopolise power, and possess even less of a heart to covet the throne. In the entire imperial court, I dare say there is no loyal subject more loyal than I.

But, most tragically, in all the realm, the matter of my being a loyal subject is something that not many would believe.

- Description from Novelupdates

Sixty Years ago, one middle aged man brought a Qilin that looked like a pug and a mandarin duck that looked exactly like a duck, walking into the Imperial City of the Central Plains for the first time.