Drama

Pei Xu was the Chancellor’s son.

On a wager, he disguised himself as a poor young man and set out to win me over.

Instead, he fell deeply in love with me and swore he would marry no one else.

When his sister learned of it, she had my younger brother and sister killed, then sold me to a brothel to put an end to my presumptuous dreams.

Years later, she was to marry the young marquis.

But on their wedding day, he never came to fetch his bride.

Dressed in his wedding robes, he was at a brothel, spending a fortune on me.

My youngest sister had been flirting with three men.

Unfortunately, she had used my name and our middle sister’s.

All three came to ask for her hand.

To smooth things over, our parents suggested that we each marry one of them.

My other sister wavered.

I refused.

There was nothing wrong with me.

Why should I marry a man who had loved my sister?

Didn’t I deserve a love untainted by all this?

I looked up at my youngest sister, who kept avoiding my eyes, and said evenly: “First, tell me exactly what happened between you and those three men.”

In my previous life, before my elder sister entered the palace to become empress, she bent her head to tell me, “Ah Ting, when I’m gone, you must take care of yourself.”

I promised her through my tears.

Five years later, the empress fell out of favor.

Her enemies had her raped, and that night she hanged herself.

The emperor decreed that the deposed empress of the Meng family was without virtue.

No one in the capital was permitted to wear mourning white.

I went to beg forgiveness on behalf of the Meng family.

Struck by my beauty, His Majesty took me into the palace, where I became the most favored woman in his harem.

The day I dragged him into the flames to die with me, he closed his hands around my throat in a rage.

“I have treated your family well!

For your sake, I even overlooked that defiled, deposed empress!”

I let the fire climb over me as though I could feel nothing.

“I didn’t.”

When I woke again, it was the day my sister entered the palace.

She stroked my head, then turned toward the palace that devoured people.

I stripped off my fine clothes and jewelry, then turned toward the bloodshed of an army camp.

Let us see whether that imperial bastard would still dare call her “deposed empress” when I surrounded his palace with my army.

I had been married to Shen Shi’an for eight years, but he still cherished the woman he had never forgotten.

He had grown tired of me, sick of me, finding me dull and vulgar.

When I cooked porridge or simmered soup, I was a woman with no ambition, forever fussing over a stove.

When his beloved washed her hands and made a bowl of soup, she was gentle, considerate, and understanding.

Later, after I had written our divorce agreement, Shen Shi’an traveled all the way to Jiangling to ask me for a bowl of jujube porridge.

I smiled and told him, “We don’t grow jujubes in Jiangling.

I haven’t made it in years.

I’ve quite forgotten how.”

Years ago, I saved the crown prince from a falling beam.

It broke my leg, and I became the capital’s notorious young lady with a limp.

Later, when he ascended the throne, he sat high in the imperial hall and asked what reward I desired.

Everyone thought I loved him deeply and would surely ask to enter his palace as a consort and remain at his side.

After all, no official family in the capital would take a woman with a limp as its mistress.

What they did not expect was that I would ask for a title of my own and the revenues of a thousand households.

As they whispered among themselves, no one noticed the faint tension in his brow vanish.

“Then let it be as you wish.”

I hung from the city wall while the rebel leader taunted my husband.

“My lord, choose: your old love or your wife!”

Beside me, Li Yaoyao cried out with righteous resolve, “Sui’an, don’t worry about me!

Storm the city!

Tell the crown prince I’ll marry him in my next life!”

Two arrows whistled through the air.

The rebel holding Li Yaoyao at his mercy fell dead.

I watched in silence as Shen Sui’an and the crown prince came flying toward us.

Both crowded around Li Yaoyao.

Neither noticed that my rope had been cut.

After eight years in a nunnery, I received a cup of poisoned wine from my twin sister.

Her face was full of contempt.

“You live in a nunnery, yet you bed His Majesty every night.

Have you no shame?”

“Tomorrow, His Majesty means to bring you back to the palace.

Someone as lowly as you has no business being a Noble Consort.

Let your elder sister take that place.”

Smiling, I drank the poison and watched her step over my corpse to board the phoenix palanquin bound for the palace.

What she did not know was that being summoned to his bed at any hour, in any place, was worse than death.

I woke up as the Queen Mother of Heaven.

The moment I arrived, I caught the Seventh Fairy sneaking down to the mortal world.

Naturally, I gave her my blessing.

I even thoughtfully made her a mortal body, took away her magical powers, and escorted her down myself, so she and Dong Yong could be a mortal couple in every sense.

After she left, I gathered every fairy in Heaven to watch a livestream of her life on earth.

Peaches of Immortality and celestial wine were unlimited; daily reflection papers had a three-thousand-character minimum.

Afterward, not a single young fairy yearned for mortal life again.

My mother had come from another world, and she believed firmly in monogamy.

When she discovered that my husband was keeping a mistress, she stormed into his princely residence, demanding that I divorce him and come home with her.

I stared at her.

“Mother, your daughter already has power and wealth.

Why should I care if he keeps another woman?”

By the time Xie Ruo’an realized he had mistaken me for someone else, I was already his wife, three months with child.

That night, the eldest young master, always so dignified and composed, got drunk.

He looked at me for a long time, then sighed.

“Very well.

Let things stay as they are.”

And so I spent my whole life as the Marchioness of Xie.

I alone shared his bed, adorned in pearls and jade.

Everything seemed perfect.

Yet whenever I woke from dreams in the middle of the night, I remembered the stillness in Xie Ruo’an’s eyes that evening.

There had been no joy in them.

No dislike, either.

A twist of fate had kept him from marrying the girl he loved.

So he accepted it, and spent the better part of his life quietly by my side.

When I opened my eyes again, I was back on the day he came to ask for my hand.

Lavish gifts filled the hall with gold and jade.

I refused the marriage and told him calmly, “My lord, you have the wrong woman.”