Romance

My fiancé was keeping a little canary.

I told him to bring her over so I could take a look.

Perfect timing-I could take my little puppy out for a walk too.

On the day we met, I showed up with a handsome guy. He showed up carrying a birdcage.

I was completely dumbfounded. “Wait, Your Highness, the canary you’re keeping is an actual bird?!”

He looked even more confused than I was. “Wait, princess, you take your dog for a walk without bringing the dog?”

I am a bastard born of a concubine, yet I carry a face that could topple a kingdom.

When I was nine, a local thug tried to snatch me to make me his bride.

Mother risked her life to save me.

The next day, she took me through the streets and alleys of the capital for three hours, until every passerby had memorized my face.

Then she carried me to the gates of the Marquis of Pingyang Manor, knelt, and cried out:

“I, Lady Liu, a humble concubine, bore this girl for the Marquis on the ninth day of the twelfth month nine years ago in Apricot Blossom Alley, west of the suburbs. The neighbors can all attest to it.

“I know my lowly station and dare not ask for a title. I can only trade my death for the Marquis to acknowledge this child and raise her within the household!”

With that, she slammed her head against the stone lion at the gate and breathed her last.

My mother exchanged her life for my place in the Marquis’s household.

And she let the entire capital know that I am a bastard born of a kept woman.

My mother had been a pawned wife, passed through many households and made to bear many sons.

When age took her beauty and she could no longer have children, she opened a wife-pawning house of her own and began selling other men’s wives.

One spring day, a carriage stopped outside our shop.

A handsome young scholar stood there with tears reddening his eyes.

“Mother,” he said, “I’ve come to take you home and give you a life of comfort.”

The newly appointed imperial scholar claimed he was one of the sons she had borne, and he had returned to repay the gift of life.

My mother taught me that a concubine could only live well by pleasing her husband until he cast aside his wife for her.

But I discovered that the lawful wife was beautiful, kind, and—most importantly—rich.

So I switched sides without hesitation and asked, “Madam, may I work for you instead?”

I heard the daughter of Tailor Han in the east of town had become an official’s concubine.

Some said she was off to a life of comfort.

Others said she was off to suffer.

I was that daughter of the Han family.

Bai Qiqi once saved a woman from another time, only to watch that woman claim the achievements, husband, and son Qiqi had spent years protecting.

When her husband and six-year-old son dismiss her medicinal cooking and household work as worthless, Qiqi walks away from the Prince of Qi’s estate without looking back.

Inside the palace, her healing soups win the trust of the Empress Dowager and the imperial women, while the brilliant younger official Jiang Pu insists that the warmth he feels around her is love, not gratitude.

As Liu Yan’s reckless schemes endanger Qiqi’s child and shake the court, Qiqi must expose the men who steal women’s work—and decide whether she is ready to accept a gentler life of her own.

“Fine.

I’ll marry him.”

Everyone around me breathed a sigh of relief when I said it.

My elder sister most of all.

She didn’t want to marry him.

I didn’t mind.

Mostly because the Crown Prince was offering far too much to refuse.

Besides, he’d treated me rather well in my previous life.

Now that I’d been reborn, of course I would clear the thorns from his path.

I wanted to make his journey to my side a little easier.

Before I was born, my father dreamed of a phoenix.

The very next moment, my mother went into labor.

Father therefore decided I had been born to a magnificent destiny.

And since good fortune ought to stay in the family, I would simply have to find myself a live-in son-in-law.

On Xianyu, I spotted an offer for a 3,888-yuan luxury buffet for just 188.

Half convinced, half suspicious, I placed an order.

The seller told me to wait outside the restaurant the next day.

So I did, like a good girl.

What arrived was a group of impeccably suited high-flyers.

It turned out to be their company outing, with family members allowed.

Apparently, I was family now.

At that point, all I could do was grit my teeth and follow them inside.

I was happily stuffing myself when someone told me we had to take turns toasting the boss.

I raised my glass too and stammered, “M-Mr.

Shih, a toast to you.”

The whole table fell silent.

Someone turned red trying to hold it in.

The boss’s handsome face darkened.

“It’s Shi.”

I was the daughter of a wealthy merchant, married into the Marquis of Dingyuan’s household as a bride meant to bring good luck.

On the first day of our marriage, the old marquis choked to death on his medicine.

On the second, my younger sister-in-law drowned.

On the third, my younger brother-in-law fell from his horse and died.

A month later, only the young marquis and I remained alive in the entire estate.

We stared at each other, and he decided to divorce me before I could doom him too.

Before he could finish writing the divorce letter, however, an imperial edict sent him to the frontier to fight the enemy.

Sure enough, a month later, a servant returned with news of his death.