Historical

Xu Man is forced into the Crown Princess Academy with only one goal: get her tuition back and save her ailing father.

When the academy uses rules and money to grind its noble students into submission, she joins forces with her classmates, exposes its corruption through a single ledger, brings the bride-training institution to a halt, and balances the books for women determined to win back their freedom.

The day I married into the Gu marquis’s household, my father-in-law died and my mother-in-law fell ill.

The wedding feast became a funeral banquet, and I was forced to take charge in the midst of the crisis, assuming control of the household and carrying the funeral through with composure.

My husband thanked me for preserving the Gu family’s dignity, yet never set foot in my room again.

In time, he filled the household with concubines and fathered a brood of sons and daughters by them.

I raised them conscientiously and planned for their futures.

Then I overheard my husband speaking to them behind my back.

“I have never met anyone as coldhearted as your mother. Your grandfather died, and she did not shed a single tear. You may call her Mother, but never learn from her. She is unworthy of the name.”

By then, a physician had already told me I did not have long to live.

Not one of those children came to visit me or bring me medicine; they simply left me to die.

With my last strength, I set fire to the Gu residence and burned that cold, loveless place to the ground.

When I opened my eyes again, I had been reborn.

The Gu family came to propose marriage, and as I looked at the refined, handsome man before me, we spoke the same words at the same time.

“I refuse.”

It turned out I was not the only one who had returned.

When bandits swept through our village, every man in the family vanished without a trace.

The women, hobbled by their tiny bound feet, could not keep up and were abandoned to die.

Before he left, Father handed Mother a knife.

“If they violate your chastity, use this to kill yourself.”

“When I return, I’ll see you enshrined in the Chaste Women’s Hall.”

After Father left, Mother smashed the memorial tablets in that hall and used the wood to build several beds.

Then she and my sisters-in-law went into business with the bandits.

That night, every woman suffered worse than death.

But every one of us survived.

When Father finally came home, he asked Mother how she wanted to die.

Mother set down the knife, raised a pistol, and aimed it at his head.

When my mother died, she entrusted me to the Yu family in the capital.

Only after I arrived at their gates did I discover that the “madam” she had named was merely one of the master’s concubines.

When I was fifteen, my royal father chose me from among his many daughters.

I was Xizhou’s brightest pearl, yet he sent me by carriage across the Gobi, the desert, and the grasslands.

I was to travel to the distant Central Plains and marry their Crown Prince.

The Crown Prince had his moonlight and his childhood sweetheart.

But the bright moon must sink, and green plums must ripen.

In the end, only the pearl’s light endures.

The man I secretly loved was the legitimate princess’s fiancé.

I was the unfavored Seventh Princess, and the fiancé bestowed upon me was a drunken libertine who gambled, kept concubines, and maintained a mistress outside his estate.

But that was all right.

My best friend had the ultimate cheat code.

In a secret chamber beneath my imperial father’s former residence, I found a breathtaking woman who claimed to be my birth mother.

She told me my true father was the deposed crown prince who had died long ago in the old capital.

The realm, she said, should have been mine.

But when I finally took the throne, she went mad.

My mother waited for my father her entire life.

Even when illness confined her to her deathbed, she never got the snowy stroll among plum blossoms he had promised her.

So when Second Young Master Cui and I took a liking to each other, I told him I would wait for him only three times.

The first would honor the joy of our meeting.

The second would honor the bond of truly knowing one another.

The third would honor the love we had shared.

After the third, our ties would be severed, and we would have nothing more to do with each other for the rest of our lives.

Second Young Master Cui agreed with a smile, saying that such a fine match was a blessing from Heaven and that he would never dare cast good fortune away.

Later, he rescued a young woman.

For her sake, he made me wait again and again.

The final time, he sent word that our wedding would be postponed and that we could discuss it again after he had safely brought the young woman back.

I gave a cold laugh and asked, “Whether I marry, and whom I marry, is no concern of yours, Young Master Cui.”

The wedding went ahead as planned after that.

Only the groom had changed.

Anyone who tried to steal my betrothed was certainly detestable.

But anyone who tried to steal Cui Zhaoyu’s bride was, in my eyes, utterly adorable.

Le Yao wakes inside an ancient romance as the personal maid of Prince Li, a brilliant war hero whose violent obsession with Wei Qingzhi turns every workday into a fight for survival.

As she becomes the unwilling go-between in their toxic courtship, Le Yao schemes to buy freedom with fellow maid Qingping-until the story’s ordained romance demands a price she refuses to accept.

Before I married into the Eastern Palace, I secretly kept a man in Jiangnan behind the Crown Prince’s back.

He had broad shoulders, a narrow waist, and worked hard in bed.

His only flaw was that he bragged far too much.

He was plainly a rough country man, yet he spoke of imperial treasures with utter disdain.

He claimed the Cloud-Mist tea reserved for the imperial family tasted like swill and that he used it to feed his cattle.

Rubies worth a fortune, he said, had been nothing but marbles to him as a child.

Even when I decided to leave him, he kept boasting.

Kneeling at my feet with both arms wrapped around my legs, he begged, “Weiwei, don’t go. I’ll make you Crown Princess!”

I rolled my eyes at him. “I have no interest in being Crown Princess.”

He stared at me in shock and muttered, “Weiwei, how are you even better at bragging than I am?”

Later, I married into the Eastern Palace. I heard the Crown Prince had long cherished another woman in his heart.

Though he had lost his memory, he had remained chaste for her.

He told me coldly, “I do not love you. Expect nothing from me.”

I blinked at that familiar face. Even after he crouched down to wash my feet, he still could not make sense of it.

With an adorably baffled look, he asked, “What’s going on? How come I’m so good at taking care of you?”