Josei

After being lost for fifteen years, the prime minister’s true daughter, Song Weilan, finally returns home and comes face-to-face with the false heiress who took her place. Beneath Song Jinyu’s tears and feigned innocence lies a vicious campaign to ruin Weilan, but this time Weilan refuses to remain a helpless victim. Armed with a sharp tongue, an unyielding will, and memories of suffering, Weilan fights for her family, exposes every scheme against her, and claims the freedom to live on her own terms.

At our wedding, Duan Yingze’s first love showed up in a bridal gown to steal the groom.

“Duan Yingze, if you still love me, come with me.”

Without a moment’s hesitation, he took her hand.

He left me alone to face the pity and ridicule of every guest in the room.

Everyone thought I would be devastated, that the pain would destroy me.

What they did not know was this: The one I had never stopped loving had come back too.

Duan Yingze was nothing but a poor substitute.

I no longer cared about him at all.

Liu Yin survives by refusing to be ashamed: after her husband sells her, her song wins Prince Chen’s favor and carries her from the streets into the heart of imperial power.

Between a calculating prince, a brilliant consort, a former husband who never stopped protecting her, and a court that despises her origins, she learns to turn every humiliation into leverage.

When death leaves her holding the imperial brush, the woman once dismissed as secondhand goods must defend a child emperor and rule a realm that never meant to make room for her.

Song Yayue has spent fifteen years trapped behind a talisman-enforced silence, so no one suspects that the supposedly mute, illiterate bride is a born chatterbox.

On her wedding night, she catches her husband in bed with the Crown Princess—and nearly exposes herself to the blind Crown Prince who guides her through the dark.

But He Zhiyu is no more blind than Yayue is mute, and the two betrayed spouses strike a bargain: she will become his eyes and ears, and he will keep her alive.

As an adulterous affair unravels into a royal conspiracy, Yayue discovers that the deadliest weapon in the palace may be the voice she has been forbidden to use.

When I was eleven, my stepmother pushed me into a river, and after being passed from hand to hand, I ended up in the pleasure quarter.

Five years later, on an ordinary morning, I painted my brows, opened her door with a smile, and said, “I’m back. I missed you.”

Not long afterward, my stepmother’s body was found in an old well.

A year after I married Xie Yunye, he met with danger at the border and was saved by a passing female physician.

To repay her for saving his life, he brought her back to the manor and took her in as his sworn sister.

Gu Qinghan never married after that. She practiced medicine all her life, healing the sick and earning the people’s deep respect.

Later, when Xie Yunye was poisoned, she tested medicines day and night. In the end, the accumulated poison took her life.

And I became the Old Madam of the Marquis Manor for fifty years.

My son was afraid I would be hurt, so he never let me enter the ancestral hall.

Only when I was on my deathbed and wanted to offer Xie Yunye one last stick of incense did I discover that a memorial tablet had appeared in the hall. On it were the words: Wife of Xie Yunye, Gu Qinghan.

My son sighed helplessly. “Mother, Father said before he died that only after meeting Aunt Gu did he understand who his true love was. Sadly, Aunt Gu was too proud to become a concubine, so he promised her burial beside him as his lawful wife.”

“Mother, it is only a title. Once a person dies, everything is empty. Please let Aunt Gu have it.”

When I opened my eyes again, I had returned to the day Xie Yunye brought Gu Qinghan home.

“Rong Yu, Qinghan has no father or mother. I want to take her in as my sworn sister. You…”

My expression was indifferent. “As you wish, my lord.”

By day, Song Wenxi is presented as a chaste Daoist nun; by night, Yuzhen Convent sells her to powerful men.

After her abused younger sister dies, Wenxi refuses to accept the same fate and uses a pregnancy to enter the household of Gu Zhun, heir to the Prince of Pingnan.

Inside the princely estate, she discovers that noble wives, concubines, and prostitutes are all trapped by the same brutal order.

To avenge the dead and free the women still imprisoned at Yuzhen Convent, Wenxi turns the desires of the men around her into weapons and sets out to make sure the long night finally ends.

I was the widow everyone despised.

One summer night, I went out intending to seduce Censor Zhang, only to be stopped by the Crown Prince.

He bent to my ear and murmured, ‘Aunt, am I not good enough for you?’

Oh, he was good.

Just rather exhausting.

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.

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.