Historical

I was the bedchamber maid of the Second Master of the Marquis’ Mansion.

I heard he was quite handsome, but incapable of performing as a man, which had only made his temper stranger by the day.

So on the day I was to attend his bed, I stewed him an enormous pot of lamb tails. “My lord, as they say, for limp-tail syndrome, you supplement form with form…”

Before I could say another word, he lifted his eyes and smiled.

“Get out.”

In the second year after my husband took a mistress, I heard a voice:

“A man who won’t behave? Break his legs, and won’t he behave then?”

I had spent two years in the Buddhist shrine, chanting sutras day after day, trying to cleanse myself of my sins.

But I could never understand what my sins were.

Everyone in the Ling Family blamed me for being unable to keep my husband.

Being childless was a sin. Being jealous was a sin.

That voice had to be guidance from heaven.

At last, I understood. If his legs were broken, he would no longer be able to leave.

So when Ling Xu came to the Buddhist shrine once again to ask whether I agreed to let his mistress enter the household,

I snapped the candle off the candlestick and drove the copper spike into his leg.

After dying under the torture of the man she once saved, Lu Shiyi awakens on the day her younger sister frames the penniless scholar Gu Ningcheng.

Armed with memories of her first life, she refuses to play the merciful victim again and sets out to strip Gu Ningcheng and her treacherous sister of every advantage they once used against her.

But destroying her enemies is no longer enough, because Lu Shiyi intends to escape the inner quarters, enter the imperial examinations, and seize the power that women have always been denied.

Pei Yizhi was the boy my father had taken in to raise as my future husband.

But after he placed first in the imperial examinations, he married a princess.

I should have stormed up to their gates on their wedding day.

Then the princess’s vicious servants would have beaten me out into the street, where I would die a miserable death.

This time, though, I didn’t.

Imperial Father has six daughters.

I am the fifth.

Mother Consort was once a kitchen maid at the Hall of Mental Cultivation.

She received the Emperor’s favor only once in her life, and that one night gave her me. She treasured me above all else.

When I was seven, Noble Consort Lan framed her for infidelity, and she died.

A few months later, by every means at my disposal, I became Noble Consort Lan’s “adopted daughter.”

My older sister was about to be married when a serial rapist attacked her.

In a single night, her reputation was destroyed and her engagement broken off.

Father fell ill with rage; Mother cried herself blind.

And the rapist?

He became the personal guard of a princess from a marquis’s household.

The gentle, kindhearted princess said, “Ah Qing isn’t bad at heart.

He only made a mistake because he briefly lost his way.”

Later, I killed the child she had struggled so hard to conceive.

My sister, now a prince’s wife, took her hand and said gently, “My little sister isn’t bad at heart.

It was only an accident that led her to do something wrong.”

But the princess’s face twisted with hatred, her eyes venomous.

All her former gentleness and kindness were gone.

Princess Ci’an has loved the frail Shen Yanbai for six years. The day he promises to seek an imperial marriage decree, floating comments reveal that he is destined to fall for another woman. So Ci’an drops his hairpin, changes her groom, and chooses Chi Song—the scandalously healthy, sharp-tongued heir she has secretly watched train. But when the comments’ heroine and male leads refuse to follow the script, Ci’an must decide whose story she intends to live.

Everyone envied me for being born into the splendor of the Prime Minister’s Mansion.

But in the Prime Minister’s Mansion, there were four daughters like me.

The beauty I took such pride in was hardly worth mentioning before my eldest sister’s effortless grace.

The schemes I had painstakingly built were no match for Fourth Sister, who could overturn the clouds and summon the rain with the slightest lift of her hand.

I watched in satisfaction as my eldest sister entered the palace as an imperial consort, only to be promised by my father, in the blink of an eye, to a boorish man who had nothing but an empty noble title.

Only then did I understand.

From the day my eldest sister entered the palace, my marriage had become nothing more than a stepping stone to support her.

The poisoned, honeyed words of the women in the inner residence, and the impatience and contempt in my husband’s eyes.

Every single day reminded me of my failure.

But I refused to admit defeat.

If blood ties could not be severed, then I would bow even lower.

As long as the bloodline of the Kong Clan remained, I could still stir this dead game back to life.

When the Imperial Astrologer declares twin princesses an ill omen, one of them must be sent to the brutal frontier.

In their first life, Princess Jinghua remains in the palace, only to be poisoned by her embittered sister.

Reborn together, her sister seizes the chance to stay, certain that Jinghua will suffer in her place.

Instead, Jinghua grows into a formidable warrior and strategist while her sister’s stolen palace life collapses around her.

With Great Zhou weakened by betrayal and Jiang’s monstrous emperor demanding a bride, Jinghua transforms a marriage procession into an army—and sets her sights on the throne itself.

After Yun Xiu survives a staged drowning, she claims she has returned from a disastrous first life.

Armed with memories of the future, she steals her concubine-born sister Yun Xia’s fiancé, certain that Wen Changfeng is destined to become prime minister.

Yun Xia yields without protest—but only because she has spent years building a fortune and plotting revenge for the mother Yun Xiu left to drown.

While Yun Xiu chases status and love for a second time, Yun Xia quietly guides every ambition toward ruin.

Some sins cannot be atoned for in a single lifetime.