Daien Zheng is an overworked, overpaid wage slave whose only hobbies are working out, smoking, and avoiding social interaction. She is, by most metrics, fine. Then she gets stabbed stopping a robbery, which is the most interesting thing she has done in her entire twenty-seven years of living.
She wakes up in the body of the Cold Duke of the South: war criminal and cannon fodder villain of Courts of Flowers and Silk, the five-thousand-chapter novel her company is adapting into a game. The Duke is supposed to die. Daien would prefer not to.
Her best bet to survive seems to be working with the Duke's scribe, an overworked, underpaid civil servant who is the world's most unfortunate plot device. His brutal death is a key trigger for the novel's main arc, so he is most certainly doomed by the narrative.