Rising in Court by Lies

Yao Yun wakes in the middle of a divine court chamber with the wrong name on everyone’s lips and a death he remembers from a book he once read. Before that, he had spent years as the youngest child in a small city, reading lies in the air and using quiet choices to help his family inch forward. That life taught him how to stay unseen, how to listen, and how to survive by never becoming the most important person in the room. In the court, that habit becomes his shield. He knows the role he was meant to play, and he refuses it. But the heavenly official Fang Zhi keeps circling closer, and every kind choice Yao makes seems to pull the old fate tighter around him.