Josei

On the day my father placed third in the palace examination, my mother was found unconscious in a busy street, her clothes in disarray.

Mindful of the many years she had supported his studies, my father did not fault her for having been violated.

Everyone praised him for his honor.

Even the emperor marveled at his devotion.

Yet, concerned for my father’s reputation, His Majesty decreed that he marry the Marquis of Yongyang’s legitimate daughter and expected my mother to step aside and become a concubine.

Proud and unyielding, my mother hanged herself that very night.

On the first day after my wealthy birth family found me, my biological parents gave me a warning.

“Now that you’re back, don’t go thinking you can compete with Nian for anything.”

I surveyed the family’s opening show of hostility, smiled, and pulled out an employment contract.

“I think you two have misunderstood something: a parent-child relationship is a legal fact.”

“But asking me to play the sweet, obedient daughter while serving as your adopted daughter’s stepping stone would qualify as premium emotional labor.”

“It’ll cost extra.”

On the day Mother was buried, Father gave me three copper coins.

He sent me all the way to West Street for candied hawthorns, but when I returned, he was gone.

Two days later, I found him at the lantern festival with a beautiful lady and another little girl in his arms.

The candied hawthorns he claimed to want were still wrapped in my hand.

Rather than waste them, I offered them to a pale, handsome prince who refused to drink his bitter medicine.

That small gift changed both our lives—and gave two abandoned hearts a home.

I ran a wonton stall and raised a young master who had fallen on hard times.

But young masters do not stay fallen forever.

He was a wealthy family’s son, born with a silver spoon in his mouth. Sooner or later, he would return to the heavens and become a star.

I had grown up begging for scraps from swill buckets. No matter how you looked at it, I was mud beneath his feet.

When Princess Huaying catches a lowly musician wearing her ceremonial robes, mysterious floating comments reveal that she is meant to be the vicious supporting villainess in someone else’s triumphant love story.

Refusing the fate of disgrace, exile, and death assigned to her, Huaying turns every trap against the scheming Prince of Qi and follows a buried imperial secret to the heart of a decades-old succession struggle.

Yet when rebellion finally erupts, Huaying discovers that her cleverest ally may be her formidable mother—and that surviving the story requires more than defeating its supposed heroine.

I was my birth parents’ third child.

While my birth mother was pregnant with me, the village fortune-teller swore I would be a boy.

They could hardly wait.

They hid from place to place throughout the pregnancy and finally brought me into the world in the bitter cold of the twelfth lunar month—

a girl.

The whole capital knows Zhao Qingzhi as a jealous woman.

Only young General Pei dares to marry her, declaring that a man who can catch tigers and kill bandits has no reason to fear a fiery wife.

After the wedding, he proudly tells his friends he has tamed her.

But one friend knows the truth: the maid Zhao Qingzhi had beaten was her father’s illegitimate daughter, and the story behind her jealousy is far more painful than the rumors suggest.

Humiliated by the correction, the young general decides to prove who rules his household.

The next day, he brings that very maid home.

While I lay unconscious after giving birth, my husband’s cousin swapped her daughter for mine.

The moment she fell asleep, I switched them back.

From then on, she tormented her own daughter every day while lavishing all her love on mine.

I watched with tears in my eyes—what a tragedy.

Served her right.

Yu Taozi has seen mysterious comments floating before her eyes since childhood, but only after learning to read does she discover the truth: her world is a romance novel, and she is the greedy country-bred villainess destined to be expelled for making the heroine cry.

When the rich male lead offers to keep her for one hundred thousand yuan a month, Taozi refuses to follow the script.

She rolls on the floor, demands justice, and turns every dramatic confrontation into a lesson in rural common sense.

Soon the heroine calls her an idol, the genius second lead begs to learn her farm skills, and the arrogant male lead is digging fields and getting rammed by pigs.

Taozi wants none of their romance.

She only wants to study hard, make her grandmother proud, and get into a good university.

But by derailing the plot, this simple country girl may give all of them a happier story.

Chun Tang and I were both senior maids in Grand Madam’s household.

Chun Tang was dazzling and seductive, while I was delicate and mild.

When we turned fifteen, Grand Madam decided that one of us would become a bedchamber maid to her eldest grandson, Pei Yi.

Chun Tang volunteered for the position.

I was promised instead to Steward Jiang of the Pei household.

Everything should have gone smoothly.

But just before the arrangements were to be finalized, Chun Tang ran away.

The day before she fled, I heard her muttering strange things to empty air.

“Once I’m gone, Grand Madam will probably give Xia Zhi to Pei Yi.”

“That girl is dull-faced and deathly boring.”

“Put the two of us side by side, and Pei Yi is bound to remember how much better I was!”

“People treasure what they can’t have.”

“When I come back, he’ll crawl through hell trying to win me over.”

“Once he promises to make me his lawful wife, my mission will be complete!”