Romance

I used every trick in the book to marry my wife.

In front of others, she refused to acknowledge me. Behind closed doors, she kept me at an even colder distance.

I knew she hated me.

But I could live with being hated by her.

Until one afternoon, at the dining table, she suddenly said to me, “He’s back from overseas. We… should spend some time apart.”

I froze.

From the day my wife and I met until now, seven years had passed.

And I still hadn’t managed to warm her heart.

Looking at her indifferent face, I was suddenly overcome with exhaustion. “Okay.”

She had always been efficient and decisive. That very night, the villa was emptied out, leaving only me behind… She had even taken the housekeeper with her.

I drank beneath the moon until dawn, yet my mind only grew clearer.

I had waited all these years. Suffered all these years. What right did I have to give up now?

Who the hell did some bastard back from overseas think he was, daring to compete with me?!

When the hundredth prodigy of Sword One Sect abandons the Way of Heartlessness for love, its exasperated master orders the entire sect to embrace the Carefree Way instead.

Fourth disciple Ying Ruge expects a delightfully chaotic new life filled with matchmaking schemes, sect rivalries, and the silent devotion of her second senior brother, Meng Yu.

But when Demon-Suppressing Mountain breaks open, their carefree creed is tested by a battle that forces every disciple to decide what freedom, duty, and love are worth.

The System told me to teach Pei Yu, the disabled campus heartthrob, how to go bad. I agreed.

At the internet café, I snatched his Five-Year Gaokao, Three-Year Simulation out of his hands.

“Teach me how to play Minesweeper.”

Pei Yu gave a soft scoff. “What a joke.”

During a fight, I grabbed his prosthetic limb and used it as a weapon, swinging it in a full arc to smack Yellow Hair.

“Not gonna lie, this thing’s pretty handy.”

Pei Yu: “Heh.”

On a rainy, overcast day, Pei Yu’s stump started spasming. I ignored it and treated it like a massage gun, using it to help me snag concert tickets.

After I got them, I rewarded him by kissing his stump.

“A kiss, and it won’t hurt anymore.”

Later, Pei Yu pinned me against the headboard.

And coaxed me too. “Baby, hold on a little longer. A kiss, and it won’t hurt anymore.”

My mother was a woman from another world.

Right beneath my imperial father’s nose, she taught me that all people are equal and that women hold up half the sky.

Because the emperor doted on her, he made an exception and let me, a princess, attend the imperial school.

Once I learned to read, everything became clear.

I understood exactly why my brothers fought for the throne.

Before I became the bedchamber attendant of the Heir of Dingguo Duke Manor, I was once a “skinny horse” kept in the household of a Yangzhou salt merchant-a girl raised to be sold as a concubine.

To them, I was nothing more than a plaything passed between the powerful.

But they did not know that Qingliu, with her willow-slender waist, could also be a gentle, curved blade.

In my third year as Empress Dowager, my greatest fear is not the court officials, nor the brushes held by the court historians.

It is the moments when I wake from a dream in the dead of night and instinctively call out the name of Xie Wuyang.

As the palace lanterns flicker to life, I am reminded that three years ago, I was the one who personally wrote the secret order sending him to his death at Yanhui Ridge.

I was ordered by my master to assassinate Han Zhaoye, the Young Master of the Demonic Sect. Instead, standing beside the broken blade buried in his chest, I lit a Life Lamp to sustain his ebbing life. From that moment on, if he was injured, I spat blood; if he sought death, I was the one driven mad. Now, the entire Immortal Sect says he and I should become Dao Companions. But what they don’t know is that fourteen years ago, in the great fire of Floating White City, our lives had already been bound together by another’s hand.

He Died Before Spring When Lu Chen died before my eyes for the sixth time, I finally stopped trying to block that car, that river, and that fire.

I no longer clung to a medical report, fruitlessly arguing with fate.

Over the past three years, I had dragged him back from the brink of spring time and time again, only to finally realize that someone eventually has to walk that path to the end.

But I still couldn’t let go. At the very least, this time, I wanted to tell him I loved him to his face before he closed his eyes for good.

Ten years after I became Xiaotian, the Celestial Hound, I finally took human form.

As a woman.

Yang Jian went silent.

All three of his eyes blinked for ages.

He still couldn’t work it out.

His best buddy was definitely male.

Liu Xingzhi is dead.

His wife traveled all the way from Wuxi to Beiping to invite me to the funeral.

She did so because among his personal effects, there were dozens of letters, every single one of them addressed to me.

Yet, in the past ten years, I had only met him seven times.