Drama

On my first day as the City Goddess, a half-grown boy came to offer me incense.

“Make my father meddle in my life less!”

So I kept his father busy with business, leaving him no time to press the boy to study.

Then his grandfather arrived, wielding an enormous sandalwood ruler.

After the beating, the boy limped back into my City God Temple.

I quietly poked my head out and saw him baring his teeth as he complained, “What a lousy deity!”

I could not stop myself from muttering, “I am not lousy.”

My mother had been a pawned wife, passed through many households and made to bear many sons.

When age took her beauty and she could no longer have children, she opened a wife-pawning house of her own and began selling other men’s wives.

One spring day, a carriage stopped outside our shop.

A handsome young scholar stood there with tears reddening his eyes.

“Mother,” he said, “I’ve come to take you home and give you a life of comfort.”

The newly appointed imperial scholar claimed he was one of the sons she had borne, and he had returned to repay the gift of life.

After Shen Linzhang fell from his horse and lost his memory, the House of Shen fell out of imperial favor.

Everyone avoided them as if they carried the plague.

Only I begged my father to let me marry into the Shen household at its most precarious hour.

Shen Linzhang had the mind of a child.

He understood nothing of worldly affairs; he knew only that I was his wife.

Three years later, the woman general who had guarded the frontier rode back to the capital.

The instant he saw her, Shen Linzhang was seized by a splitting headache.

A moment later, he abandoned me, vaulted onto a horse, and galloped after her.

When we met again, his eyes were clear.

He handed me a letter of divorce.

He said that I had been raised in the inner courtyard like a bird in a cage and had never seen how vast the world was.

He declared that the love of his life was a brilliant, valiant woman general like Feiying.

He spoke with easy arrogance, his chin held high.

Then I calmly accepted the letter.

This time, he was the one left speechless.

On the second day of the tenth lunar month, the great warlord Lu Zhi took a second concubine: Song Anran, the youngest daughter of the chairman of the Shanghai Chamber of Commerce.

Lu Zhi had made a name for himself in recent years.

He had won battle after battle, commanded a formidable army, and wielded immense power—but surely not so much that the chairman of the Shanghai Chamber of Commerce would deliver his own daughter to him as a concubine.

Oh, but it was.

My father did exactly that.

My celebrated fiancé casts me aside for the brilliant female thief who became his partner in solving the capital’s most sensational cases.

Branded a discarded woman, I am forced by imperial decree to marry Li Fu, an unlettered general whose rough manners could not be further from the refined husband I once imagined.

Yet beneath his beard and battle scars lies a loyalty steadier than any storybook romance, while I discover that managing a difficult household may demand more courage than grieving a broken engagement.

When the applause fades and ordinary life begins, both Gu Huaichuan and I learn which kind of love can truly survive beyond the stage.

By day, Song Wenxi is presented as a chaste Daoist nun; by night, Yuzhen Convent sells her to powerful men.

After her abused younger sister dies, Wenxi refuses to accept the same fate and uses a pregnancy to enter the household of Gu Zhun, heir to the Prince of Pingnan.

Inside the princely estate, she discovers that noble wives, concubines, and prostitutes are all trapped by the same brutal order.

To avenge the dead and free the women still imprisoned at Yuzhen Convent, Wenxi turns the desires of the men around her into weapons and sets out to make sure the long night finally ends.

Every night, Qin Shen comes home at seven and treats his wife, Jiang Li, as though she matters more than life itself.

When one tiny change in his flawless routine leads Jiang Li to a secret villa, a mistress, and a hidden child, the perfect marriage she trusted collapses in an instant.

Even divorce cannot free her from a husband whose devotion is as obsessive as his betrayal is cruel.

To reclaim her life, Jiang Li must survive confinement, treachery, and one final act of violence without becoming as ruthless as the people who destroyed her faith in love.

In 1993, twenty-two-year-old Huang Xincheng goes to prison after defending his pregnant girlfriend, Li Fang, from a drunken harasser.

Four years later, he comes home determined to rebuild his life and earn her family’s trust.

For a brief season, hard work gives him everything he has ever wanted: a wife, loving parents, and a child on the way.

Then one senseless act takes Li Fang from him, leaving him with a newborn son, two grieving elders, and a promise he will spend the rest of his life trying to keep.

When Meng Wei—the man whose kidney he destroyed in that first fight—returns to ruin his livelihood, Huang discovers that prison settled nothing.

Backed by a powerful clan, Meng Wei attacks every honest path Huang tries to take until the only door left open leads into the underworld.

Huang rises from mahjong-parlor manager to crime boss and real-estate tycoon, telling himself every compromise is for his family.

But as loyalty becomes murder and ambition becomes corruption, the good man Li Fang loved grows harder to recognize.

Over seventeen years of revenge, two men drag each other toward destruction.

One father’s dream of giving his son a spotless future is built upon crimes that refuse to stay buried.

At sixteen, a food-loving girl enters the imperial harem as lowly Attendant Yun, determined to survive its suffocating rules and earn enough favor for a decent meal.

Her accidental bond with the formidable Empress Dowager and the neglected Princess Ruyi lifts her through the palace ranks, but every kindness hides a calculation and every pregnancy can redraw the balance of the throne.

When rebellion, poisoned bloodlines, and a stolen son force her to choose between motherhood and survival, Yun must bury her heart behind palace walls—until the child she surrendered returns as Emperor and asks her to become his mother at last.

I am the real heiress who was deliberately switched at birth by a nanny.

Raised among the worst people at the very bottom of society, I grew up seeing nearly every shade of darkness this world had to offer.

After I returned to my biological family, everyone expected me to give way to the fake heiress and stop competing with her for their affection.

What they did not know was that shallow affection could never satisfy my ambition.