Nine Graces

Nine Graces is a long romance novel by the web novelist Huaizhen Gongzhu, serialized on Qidian Chinese from October 2008 and published in print by Zhaohua Press in successive volumes from 2009 to 2010. The complete work runs 346 chapters and about 1.21 million Chinese characters. Set against the backdrop of the Western Song dynasty, it follows the heroine Leng Jiurong, a mild-mannered country girl who, to save her father's life, is forced to give up her childhood sweetheart and is tricked into becoming a concubine in the Shen household. Amid the schemes and betrayals within the Shen family, she maneuvers step by step and gradually stops seeking only to keep herself safe. Yet the person pulling the strings behind the Shen family's fate turns out to be the former lover she once thought she could entrust her life to. Jiurong weathers repeated storms in the Shen household, becomes the family's winemaker through her skill in brewing, and is eventually summoned to the palace. Facing harem intrigue, corrupt court politics, and foreign invasion, she endures the murder of her own flesh and blood and the tragic death of her dearest friend, and at last turns from withdrawing to protect herself to purging the treacherous and resisting foreign foes, quelling a powerful minister's rebellion and supporting a young emperor—completing her transformation from a country girl into an imperial consort. The book uses the rise and fall of the Shen family as its thread, linking family infighting, palace intrigue, and border warfare, with the emotional and political threads advancing together.