Psychological

In the twelfth year after my rebirth, the first thing I did upon leaving the Xie estate was visit my grave from my former life.

It lay alone in the wilderness, with Qingming as cold as winter and weeds growing ten feet high.

I added a shovelful of fresh earth and told myself, “Ah Lan, don’t look back. Keep walking.”

When my beloved childhood friend publicly humiliated me, my own sister called it harmless fun.

I answered by turning his joke into a scandal that swept the capital.

After years in exile, I returned unwilling to bend—to my scheming sister, her five doting brothers, or the prince who treated my marriage as a bargaining chip.

They expected a disgraced noblewoman they could sacrifice.

Instead, I used every plot against them, exposed every betrayal, and chose to break before I bowed.

After my sworn enemy and I both lost our memories, we lost control and ended up in bed together.

He was “gifted beyond measure,” and I was “shamelessly uninhibited.”

Physical desire and psychological disgust tore viciously at each other.

When my memories returned, I stared at my longtime nemesis, bare from the waist up, loving him and hating him all at once.

While enjoying his top-tier stamina, I maliciously recorded a video of him acting like my dog.

The shock brought his memories back.

After a brutal fight, we went our separate ways.

When we met again,

the wedding convoys of Hua Kingdom’s two great families ran into each other on a narrow road.

Song Jinbie and I regarded each other coldly, then brushed past without a word.

But late that night,

my newlywed husband was hanging upside down from the ceiling. Song Jinbie’s tone was lazy as he said,

“Become a widow, or marry me. Pick one.”

I likewise handed a hemp rope to his newlywed wife.

“Either tie it around yourself, or loop it around your husband’s neck.”

Fu Huaijin gave up a free and prosperous modern life to save Xie Shi’an, the orphaned slave who rose to become the empire’s chief minister.

Seven years into their marriage, the man who once swore to love only her begins longing for the temptations his power can buy—and for a dazzling young transmigrator who reminds him of the woman Huaijin used to be.

When Huaijin agrees to let him take a concubine, Xie Shi’an believes she has finally yielded, never suspecting that she has also asked the empress to dissolve their marriage.

But a possessive man at the pinnacle of power has no intention of releasing the moonlight that once saved him, even after she chooses freedom over everything he can offer.

And when Huaijin finds her way home, Xie Shi’an learns too late that love without equality, respect, and acceptance was never the devotion he imagined.

Born in a brothel and raised as its future commodity, Liu Yuan’er watches her mother work herself raw to buy them both a life of freedom.

The day before they can leave, the daughter of Grand Tutor Song has her mother beaten to death—and Yuan’er learns that the powerful man behind the murder is her own father.

With no law willing to touch the Song clan, Yuan’er enters the imperial palace under a borrowed identity.

Every favor, poison, pregnancy, and betrayal becomes a move in her revenge, while Prince Su watches from the shadows and offers the one blade sharp enough to cut down the empire’s most untouchable family.

Yuan’er was named for a kite meant to fly free.

To avenge her mother, she may have to trade that freedom for a cage of gold.

I had been the most pampered princess since childhood, yet everyone called me brutal, cold, inhuman.

Even my younger brother, now emperor, had slowly begun to distance himself from me.

He said he had found his real elder sister.

I smiled at Princess Ronghua.

She did bear a certain resemblance to my imperial brother.

Indeed.

A pair of bastards passing themselves off as imperial blood.

Everyone in the capital knows that every beauty who disappears into Minister Luo’s rear courtyard carries him one step higher in office.

Born mute—or so the household believes—his ninth daughter survives by making herself small and useful to the family’s favored eldest daughter.

As sisters are sold, married, and sacrificed for the ambitions of men, Ah Jiu realizes that obedience will never buy her freedom.

To escape the Luo estate alive, she must wager the one thing society says determines a woman’s future: her face.

The auspicious hour had arrived. The wedding rites were complete, yet the bride remained kneeling in her blood-red wedding dress.

A gust of wind lifted her bridal veil, revealing a woman’s half-rotted head. Her lifeless eyes stared straight at me.

I tried to flee, but an icy hand clamped tightly around my wrist.

“Where are you going, my lady?” the wedding attendant asked with a smile. “It’s time for the banquet.”

Dark purple corpse spots stood out starkly on his powder-caked wrist.

So none of the guests at the wedding banquet were alive.

Myself included.

Qiu Yue learned young that in troubled times, only a hard heart and a ruthless hand could keep a woman alive.

When the innocent Jiang Wanning searches an entire city and saves her from death, Qiu Yue vows to protect her for the rest of her life.

So when a scheming scholar tries to ruin Wanning’s reputation and force his way into her family, Qiu Yue quietly leads him into a dark alley.

The scholar dies, a tale about a pig demon spreads through the capital, and her trusting young mistress believes every word.

Anyone who wants to hurt Jiang Wanning should understand one thing: Qiu Yue may wear the sweet smile of a harmless maid, but she has never hesitated to kill.

For four years, Emperor Pei Guannan has refused to fill his harem, and the court blames the man at his side.

Xie Yuanzhen has shared his hardships for fifteen years, asking for neither power nor reward.

But loyalty cannot give the dynasty an heir, and love cannot silence the ministers.

To protect the emperor’s name, Yuanzhen leaves the palace to serve the people.

Across snowbound roads and the endless rain of Nanyue, the words they cannot say become letters—and a promise to live to eighty.