Ashes to Crown Episode 5 Review: Chu Zhao Forges a Truth, and the Man She Wants Dead Sails Away Anyway

By Mira Vance · Editor & Lead Reviewer

The Grand Princess builds a flawless trap out of borrowed ink and a faked report, binds an entire clan to her lie, and still loses Xiao Xun by a single move. Episode five is the hour where her cunning meets the one thing it cannot script — other people's choices.

The episode opens not on Chu Zhao but on the man who decides whether her plans survive the court. Deng Yi plays a board game with an old companion named Wangyou, who congratulates him, then needles him. What do you know about her that makes you help her? You even abandon the alliance with Xiao Xun. Deng Yi’s answer is the grammar of the hour. I’m not helping Chu Zhao. I’m securing my own bright future. He knew she would use the young emperor as bait, knew Xiao Xun would poison the boy, and watched her run the risk anyway. The easier a game seems, the more hidden threats there are. Then he loses the match and goes to dine with his mother. Everything that follows tests whether his loyalty is bought or only rented.

Chu Zhao apologizes to the boy she used as bait

The first private scene is an apology. Chu Zhao sits with Yu, the young emperor she calls her brother, and admits what the cold open already confirmed — she used him as bait to catch Xiao Xun. I swore to the late emperor I’d keep you safe. But I put you in danger. I don’t deserve to be your sister. Yu refuses the guilt. He insists it was their plan together, that being protected made him happy even after learning the villain was Uncle Xun.

He shows her what he treasures: a handwoven longevity thread she made by hand, each knot meant to bind good luck. He wants to pair it with a jade pendant or a gold lock to make it more regal. She keeps apologizing; he keeps refusing the apology. The scene plants the object the whole episode keeps returning to. The longevity thread is sincerity in Yu’s reading. By the final scene it has become a threat.

A cloak, a swing, and the man who ties knots that don’t break

Then the hour loosens into memory. Jiu — the retainer at Chu Zhao’s side — brings food to Yu and gets teased for it, demands his cloak back claiming he means to give it to someone else, and lets her snatch it anyway. I lent that to you. After you use it, you give it back. The banter is light, but it carries a question Jiu finally asks aloud: Zhao, do you remember your promise?

The flashback is the episode’s softest stretch. A younger Chu Zhao orders Jiu to blow petals for Yu, builds a swing she swears is sturdy, ties a knot, and falls the instant she sits. Jiu watches without lifting a finger. Your Highness, you just wouldn’t believe me until you fell. Then he shows her a real knot — we soldiers use this to tie up prisoners. Once tied, no one can break free, whoever he is. A children’s game about trust and restraint reads, in hindsight, like a lesson about the woman she becomes: certain her plans hold, undone by the one knot she tied wrong.

The second life, said out loud

The flashback ends and the present sharpens. Yu, frightened, asks her to stop fighting Xiao Xun and let Uncle Xun go home to Xiaonan. This time, he escaped by luck. Next time, he won’t. Chu Zhao agrees the Lord of Xiaonan still holds power and that the man is hard to deal with — but she will not relent. When Jiu presses her on why she hates a suitor who once traveled to Yunzhong to propose, who seemed to care for her, the answer comes flat and sick. Loved each other? That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever done. Even thinking of it makes me sick now.

Then she tells him the truth nobody in this life has heard. Jiu, do you believe one can live a second life? In her past life she married Xiao Xun, became Empress, got her father and her whole clan killed for it, and was strangled by Xiao Xun. Jiu does not laugh. He gives her the only thing she needs: belief. Everything exists for a reason. People must bear the consequences of their choices. When she lays out that Xiao Xun escaped once by luck and won’t get another chance, she asks, if I do, will you help me? He says, I will.

The forged report, and the truth she manufactures

The court scene at Taiji Hall runs in two passes. First we see it forward: Yu floats releasing Xiao Xun after seven years as a hostage, Xie Yanlai objects hard, Deng Yi spars with him over whether questioning the emperor is loyalty or treason. Then Chu Zhao produces a secret report — unusual troop movements on the Northern Desert frontier, suspicious figures gathering in the Capital. If it’s true, she argues, the heir to the Lord of Xiaonan must not leave the Capital. She refuses to let Xie Yanlai read it.

Only then does the hour cut to a Two hours ago card and show the trick. Chu Zhao wrote the report in Pine Soot Ink, exclusive to the Xie Family, on purpose. The point was never the desert. It was to bind the Xie clan to her lie — because Xie Yanfang, the clan head, would rather suppress a forgery in his own family’s ink than expose it and ruin himself. Court struggles have been like this. No permanent enemies. No permanent allies. It is the cleanest articulation of her method so far. A forgery woven from truth is the hardest to disprove. As someone reborn, I know it better than anyone else. And the gut-turn: Even if this secret report turns out to be false, it has to be true. She knows, from a life she already lived, that the Lord of Xiaonan and his heir really do collude with the Northern Desert. She is faking evidence for a crime that is genuinely real.

Two plans, one bait, and the move she didn’t see

The back half is a duel of contingencies. Xiao Xun, warned that Chu Zhao received a report about his collusion, can’t fathom how she knows — over the past years, I’ve stayed vigilant — and concludes she must be bluffing. Stay and risk public execution; flee and be branded a traitor. Whatever choice we make, she will firmly hold the initiative. Then his adviser offers a third option.

Chu Zhao, meanwhile, buys insurance. She visits Deng Yi after returning his elderly mother, whom she found in the West Market picking vegetable leaves off the ground — a pointed kindness aimed at a man who rose from a country boy to Grand Mentor. She trades him a longevity thread and a promise of Xiao Xun’s hoarded treasures for one thing: stay out of the way. It’s easy to have wealth. But it’s hard to have confidants. Deng Yi shakes on it. Deal. I always keep my word.

Xie Yanlai lays the kill. Naval forces will blockade the docks under cover of a salt inspection, forcing Xiao Xun onto the official road, where crossbowmen wait at Woniu Ridge. Tomorrow, I’ll lead the ambush myself. Nothing will go wrong. It goes wrong. At the Waterway of the State of Chu, a merchant ship has already slipped out at the third quarter of the Yin hour. The blockade that should have closed every exit left one open. Xiao Xun is gone, and Xie Yanlai rides after him into an ambush of his own — gravely wounded, treated just in time, having lost too much blood. In the chaos, Xiao Xun names the wound that explains the man chasing him: the boy of the Wei Village who survived alone… Xiang. Xie Yanlai is the lone survivor of the village burned in the premiere, and a memory surfaces — I’m Xiang. What’s your name?

The coffin wood

The unraveling is short and cold. Chu Zhao learns the leak: Fang Du, a follower of Deng Yi, made Naval Commander last year, signed the pass that let Xiao Xun’s ship leave the dock. What a duplicitous Deng Yi. The man who shook her hand on a deal had already sold the gap in the blockade. She comes to him at night with a present — golden-thread nanmu, of noble grade, the kind of wood that buried underground will never rot. She makes him keep it in his yard, in view, unmovable without her order. It is a coffin’s worth of timber dressed as a reward, and they both know it. Her last line ties back to Yu’s gift and turns it inside out. If you think the longevity thread is too long, I can give you a shorter one.

Tiny details worth clocking

• Deng Yi loses the board game in the cold open and resigns it the moment his mother calls him to dinner. The man who plays both sides knows exactly when to abandon a board.
• The Pine Soot Ink is the episode’s version of the premiere’s matched jewelry: the lie lives in the object, not the words. Chu Zhao doesn’t forge a document so much as forge a signature she can blackmail.
• Yu wants to dress the longevity thread up with a jade pendant or a gold lock. Chu Zhao instead spends the hour using longevity threads as currency and threat — the same gift, weaponized.
• Xie Yanlai vows nothing will go wrong and I’ll lead the ambush myself — then bleeds out on the ambush he led.
• Old Madam picking vegetable leaves in the West Market is the only tender image in the episode, and Chu Zhao uses even that — returning her safely is the soft approach that opens Deng Yi to the hard bargain.

Verdict

Episode five runs its heroine’s intelligence at full speed and then lets it fail anyway, which is the smartest thing it could do this early. The Two hours ago structure is the standout — by showing the court scene forward and then rewinding to the forgery behind it, the hour lets you admire Chu Zhao’s trap as a spectator before it hands you the blueprint, and the reveal that she’s faking evidence for a crime that’s actually true is the kind of moral knot the premiere only gestured at. Against that, the loss lands hard. She bound the Xie clan, bought Deng Yi, blockaded the river, and still lost Xiao Xun to a bribed pass she didn’t know existed.

It is a slightly busier hour than the premiere, and the flashback stretch slows the middle more than it needs to. But the pieces it sets are sharp. Track the coffin wood sitting in Deng Yi’s yard, a leash she can yank whenever she likes. Track Xie Yanlai bleeding for her plan and the Wei Village wound that now ties him to the same villain she’s hunting. And track the lesson she keeps relearning the hard way — that a plan woven from truth still snaps at the one knot somebody else gets to tie.

Rating: 8.4/10

More episodes from Ashes to Crown — A betrayed empress, reborn to undo her own ruin. Jump to any episode in the season:

Reviewed by Mira Vance · QuizFandom Editor & Lead Reviewer. Every rating is an honest per-watch assessment from the desk that also writes the quizzes — not a press release rehash.

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