Historical

My elder sister and I were twins, born of the same womb.

But an eminent monk declared that I was the reincarnation of a fox demon, and that one day I would become a Wicked Concubine who bewitched the sovereign.

My family concealed my identity and sent me to Fahua Temple to cultivate a pure heart in seclusion.

In the sixteenth year of my quiet practice,

I had almost forgotten I was a demon. I only wanted to be a good person.

But then the Empress, favored above all in the six palaces, had a dream. She dreamed that one day, a woman of the Shen Clan would steal her phoenix throne.

And so my elder sister, who was soon to be married, was taken by bandits and violated again and again before dying an innocent, miserable death.

I held her body in my arms and wept until I had no tears left.

Three months later, the emperor came up the mountain to pray for blessings. The moment he saw me, he fell in love.

He asked if I was willing to follow him back to the palace.

I thought,

That title of Calamitous Demon Concubine… I suppose I ought to make it true.

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.

That dog of an emperor ordered me to marry a young eunuch, and I didn’t even blink before agreeing.

Yet, on the night of the wedding, I was tied up and hauled into the emperor’s bedchamber before I even had the chance to remove my bridal veil.

When the marquis’s household finally brought me home, I was already twenty years old—old enough that women my age had children, while I remained unwed.

Only after entering the estate did I learn that I had been promised in marriage before I was born, but the false heiress raised in my place had already married my betrothed.

She and the ducal heir were deeply in love, with both a son and a daughter, and theirs was celebrated throughout the capital as a perfect match.

When she faced me, guilt overwhelmed her so completely that she could not speak through her tears.

Mother held her close and comforted her, while the ducal heir vowed that she would be the only woman in his life.

I stood straight and composed, pretending none of it mattered.

Hidden inside my sleeve, however, my fingers clutched my skirt so tightly that they ached to the bone.

That night, Mother took my hand and sighed, urging me to accept that everything was already settled and let it go.

She promised to find me a better marriage and said she had already considered several fine young gentlemen.

I stared at the osmanthus tree perfuming the courtyard and found myself thinking instead of the pigs back home, with no one left to tend them.

“Mother,” I said, “I don’t want a marriage. Please let me go home.”

I was Princess Jiuhua’s study companion, destined to one day enter the palace as a female official.

But at the welcome banquet, the General of Agile Cavalry asked His Majesty to bestow me upon him.

His mistress left a letter behind and ran away with the child.

After he sobered up, he traveled a thousand li to make amends and only then brought that woman back.

On our wedding night, he said coldly, “That day was merely drunken nonsense; I only blame you for blocking my sister’s path. But an imperial decree is hard to defy. Once this act is over, we each return to our own places.”

I asked him, “General, you see me as a mere object, and with a few words you cut off my path to becoming a female official. How can you speak of returning to our places?”

He replied indifferently, “That is your fate, not something you can blame on me.”

But I refuse to accept my fate.

I am a woman of boundless kindness.

So when Song Lin’an told me that the only woman he had ever loved was my elder half sister, I sent him straight to the grave without hesitation.

“My sister is dead, and since your devotion runs so deep, you should join her. No need to thank me. Nothing delights me more than helping true lovers fulfill their wishes.”

When I opened my eyes again, I was back on the day of our betrothal.

Song Lin’an glared at me and humiliated me before everyone. “The Song family will only welcome a truly virtuous woman. We will never let a vicious shrew through our doors!”

He broke off the match and made me the laughingstock of the capital.

He also branded me a vicious woman.

Song Lin’an schemed his way into marrying my elder half sister instead.

No one wanted me after that.

On the day they returned to visit her family, Song Lin’an sneered at me. “Everyone knows what you really are now. Let us see who else you can ruin!”

I only smiled.

The fool had no idea that in our previous life, I had lived to eighty while he had dropped dead at twenty.

I knew far too many things he did not.

Xu Feiyun has spent her life as the obedient maid of the privileged half-sister who taught her to call suffering a blessing.

When that sister stages her death to test her husband’s devotion, Feiyun enters the Shen household as a temporary second wife and quietly turns every piece of the reckless scheme to her own purpose.

Between a frightened child, a husband awakening to the truth, and a family built on buried crimes, Feiyun must decide how much tenderness is real and how much is another weapon.

Her revenge will bring the Xu family to judgment—but true freedom lies beyond vengeance, in the ordinary world someone once taught her she deserved to see.

I spent ten years in the imperial harem testing rouge, and not once did I fail to detect a single trace of poison.

That was until Consort Hua dropped dead after applying the “Drunken Beauty Red” I had personally verified.

It was then that a newly arrived talented lady told me: what truly kills isn’t the rouge, but the intent to murder.

When I married into the Shen family, I already knew my husband had one great love.

She was the fisherman’s daughter who had saved him after he was gravely wounded while suppressing bandits.

They had sworn themselves to each other through life and death and privately pledged to marry.

But his mother threatened to take her own life and would only permit the woman to become his concubine.

On the eve of my wedding, Mother wept with worry and asked, “How will our Zhen’er ever live like this?”

How else?

He could play the devoted lover.

I would be the lady of the household.

Shen Yunfeng and I were merely two people traveling the same road toward entirely different ends.

The first time I killed someone, the blade was dull.

I was fourteen that year. It was winter, and the north wind whipped against my face with a stinging bite.

Three bandits had scaled the wall of my grandfather’s courtyard, intent on stealing the last half-sack of millet he had hidden in the cellar.

My grandfather was blind. Hearing the commotion, he called out my name: “Shen He, Shen He!” He was using my alias.

My real name is Shen Heyi, and I am a girl. But the bandits didn’t know that, and Grandfather pretended not to know either.

He just kept calling, his voice urgent and hoarse, sounding like an old crow being strangled by the neck.

I fished out that Bone-Cleaver from beneath the stove.

Its edge was curled and nicked, so dull it couldn’t even slice through sheepskin cleanly.

But a human neck is softer than sheepskin.

I didn’t think about that day again for a very long time-not until I met Xie Changgeng.