Drama

Chapter 0

My Empress Mother was a transmigrator. Before she returned to her original world, she told me:

I am the vicious villainess in a side story. I would supposedly be consumed by hatred born of love, commit all sorts of evil, and ultimately bring about my own destruction, my corpse abandoned in the wilderness.

“Until you have the power to protect yourself, remember: you must stay far away from Gu Qinglan.”

At first, I truly intended to stay away from Gu Qinglan.

But the plot still forced us to cross paths in the capital.

Left with no choice, I took on the role of the villain and began actively sabotaging him.

Yet, Gu Qinglan looked at me in confusion and said:

“Why is it that even though you’re so wicked, I still find myself falling for you?”

Tsk, tsk. Honestly? I have no words!

My sister was a transmigrator who originally planned to stay and watch me grow up.

However, because I was such a naive airhead, she completed her mission far too quickly and was forced to return to her original world.

Before she vanished, she screamed at the top of her lungs:

“Oh, for heaven’s sake! How are you so easy to win over?! Just make sure you remember what I told you!”

But the plot was too powerful. Over time, I gradually forgot I ever even had a sister.

When I grew up, I met and fell in love with Prince Rui, Pei Heng.

One day, he was targeted by assassins. Just as I was about to throw myself in front of a blade to save him, I suddenly remembered my sister.

Didn’t she say I was the tragic heroine of some story?

The way I looked at Pei Heng instantly became much clearer.

During the poorest year of my life, I sold myself to Zhou Jinyan for three hundred thousand yuan to serve as a substitute for his White Moonlight.

His friends once egged me on to drink until I suffered a gastric hemorrhage.

They asked him, “Don’t you feel bad for her?”

He looked down, his tone indifferent. “She’s just a substitute.”

Later, to save his White Moonlight, Zhou Jinyan stood by and watched as I fell from a cliff into the sea.

The search and rescue team never found my body.

He suddenly went mad, searching the entire world for me.

Five years later, I was invited back to the country and ran into him at an event.

He stared at me intently, his eyes rimmed with red. “I knew you weren’t dead. I’ve been looking for you-”

I took a step back, offering a polite yet distant smile. “I’m sorry, who are you?”

My possessiveness has always been off the charts.

Luckily, my boyfriend is the obedient type—his phone open to me anytime, reporting in around the clock, and keeping two meters away from every passing dog.

But a voice calling itself “the System” appears in my head: the male lead doesn’t love me, and I’m just a control-freak extra who should leave.

I brush it off—until Xie Ji really starts acting strange, and I find a diary entry that chills my blood.

My possessiveness evaporates in an instant, and I run away that very night.

Three days later, the System comes online, sobbing: the female lead who tried to help me escape has been kidnapped by the man I once thought I knew.

Me: ?

In my second year as empress, I fell ill and was left barren. From then on, I could no longer bear children.

The emperor turned his favor to Consort Zhen and spent ten years doting on her through seven pregnancies.

Then the imperial physician knelt before the emperor and said Consort Zhen did not have long to live.

The moment I fell ill in this life, I already knew the day Consort Zhen would die.

After all, in my previous life, the one who died was me.

An accident while tasting medicine for the Noble Consort left me disfigured.

She arranged for me to marry the Fifth Prince, who had been stripped of his rank and reduced to a commoner.

The Fifth Prince did not like me.

He despised my ugliness and the shame it brought him. He never acknowledged me as his wife.

I knew better than to press myself on him, so I stayed out of his sight as much as possible.

Other people treated my disfigurement as an insult to him.

But I could not think of myself as something filthy.

Later, after painstaking effort, the Fifth Prince regained his rank and gradually won the emperor’s favor.

Everyone came to congratulate him.

Even my parents arrived with my younger sister, hoping to secure her a place among his women.

“Aqiao, you can’t possibly attend to His Highness looking like that.”

“If someone is going to benefit, it might as well be one of our own family.”

“His Highness likes your sister, too. Look for yourself if you don’t believe us.”

The Fifth Prince really did like her.

He allowed her to stay by his side, grinding ink, cleaning his inkstone, and keeping him company in his study.

Whenever he brought gifts home, there was always something for her.

He even let her choose first from the gifts bestowed by the palace.

Everyone said she was certain to become his secondary consort one day.

She thought so, too.

Yet he never formally took her as a concubine.

I no longer wanted to wait, either. I asked for a divorce.

For a moment, the Fifth Prince looked distracted. Then he asked quietly:

“Are you serious?”

My funeral was held with the highest honors.

After all, I was Zhao Xun’s first wife. For four years I had reigned as empress, mother to the nation, carrying out every duty without a single misstep.

Even after he began doting on Consort Chen and fell out with the Empress Dowager over her, I was the one who mediated between them.

When Consort Chen fell ill, he stayed at her bedside for three days without changing his clothes or taking so much as a sip of water.

When my turn came, there was no grief on his face. He merely held my slowly cooling hand and sat there for a long while.

“If there is another life, I will make you my empress again.”

Another life truly came.

Zhao Xun had not yet met the love of his life. He had agreed to let the Empress choose a virtuous young noblewoman to be his princess consort.

The Empress pointed to me.

Then, just as he looked my way, her fingertip shifted an inch and settled on someone else.

“On second thought, let us choose Second Miss Li.”

Shen Zhuozhuo is the hidden second beauty of a merchant family. After a depraved young marquis abducts and brutalizes her elder sister, then wipes out the Shen household for daring to demand justice, Zhuozhuo survives with one purpose: revenge. Assuming the identity of a scholar’s dead sister, she enters the imperial palace and draws the emperor close, turning her beauty, patience, and even her own body into weapons. To destroy the Marquis of Cheng’en and the Empress Dowager who shields him, she baits each enemy into a trap more dangerous than the last. But when calculated affection meets the emperor’s unexpected sincerity, Zhuozhuo must decide whether vengeance has left any room for a future.

Five years after her elder sister fails to produce an heir, concubine-born Song Yao is forced into the palace as the Song clan’s replacement pawn. With her mother and ailing brother held hostage, she turns the family’s coercion into a weapon, pledging herself to a ruthless emperor while plotting to dismantle the clan that murdered her brothers. In a harem ruled by rival families, every act of devotion is a gambit—and Song Yao intends to survive long enough to claim the board.

At ten, Li Shuquan’s family brings home her frail elder sister and renames her Xiaoman, ordering her to yield everything—from her name to her future.

Years later, when both sisters fall into a lake during a matchmaking meeting, Xiaoman wakes to a physician’s diagnosis of memory loss.

The Grand Princess takes her hand and declares herself Xiaoman’s mother.

With one quiet word—Mama—Xiaoman chooses the family that chooses her and begins to reclaim a life long sacrificed to someone else’s happiness.