Romance

On the day Ran Ling returned to the capital in triumph, his long-lost first love was brought back to him.

She had once cast aside reputation and status to elope with him, and he had once taken a sword for her.

Everyone said the star-crossed lovers of their youth would finally get the happy ending they had been denied.

But I wasn’t worried, because my mother had transmigrated into this novel—and I was a devoted mama’s girl.

It didn’t matter what anyone schemed against me; I was the hollow rose my mother had raised.

My father, the emperor, once traveled through Jiangnan in disguise and encountered a diviner.

The man exposed his identity at a glance and left him with a prophecy: ‘The one who will plunge my realm into chaos stands even now at Your Majesty’s side.’

Even after my father ordered him beaten to death, he refused to name the traitor.

And so my mother, the most favored consort in the Six Palaces, was given a bowl of arsenic by that brutal, suspicious emperor.

After her death, he ordered her hair draped over her face and her mouth stuffed with rice chaff, so that even her ghost would be too ashamed to face anyone and unable to speak.

All because she had been the only person beside him that day.

But there was one thing my father did not know.

At nine years old, hidden behind a curtain, I had heard everything too.

The general saved a woman.

Then he asked me to surrender my place as his lawful wife.

I held the divorce paper and laughed coldly.

“Gu Nianwu, success has gone to your head.”

You may command a thousand troops, but I command ten thousand ghosts.

Without me, where would all your glorious victories have come from?

On the second day of the tenth lunar month, the great warlord Lu Zhi took a second concubine: Song Anran, the youngest daughter of the chairman of the Shanghai Chamber of Commerce.

Lu Zhi had made a name for himself in recent years.

He had won battle after battle, commanded a formidable army, and wielded immense power—but surely not so much that the chairman of the Shanghai Chamber of Commerce would deliver his own daughter to him as a concubine.

Oh, but it was.

My father did exactly that.

I transmigrated into a matriarchy whose beauty standards were the exact opposite of mine.

My father was soft and delicate, my older brother fair and tender, and my younger brother slender.

The Crown Princess wanted to win over the Grand General.

Unfortunately, the general’s son was tall, wheat-skinned, and blessed with enormous pecs.

With a body that hideous, no woman in the capital wanted to marry him.

I stepped forward without hesitation. “For Your Highness, I volunteer!”

A dark-skinned, big-chested muscle daddy? Yes, please. I would devour every last bite.

The Crown Princess burst into tears.

“When I win the throne, beloved cousin, the greatest share of the credit will be yours!”

On my first day as the City Goddess, a half-grown boy came to offer me incense.

“Make my father meddle in my life less!”

So I kept his father busy with business, leaving him no time to press the boy to study.

Then his grandfather arrived, wielding an enormous sandalwood ruler.

After the beating, the boy limped back into my City God Temple.

I quietly poked my head out and saw him baring his teeth as he complained, “What a lousy deity!”

I could not stop myself from muttering, “I am not lousy.”

My elder sister disappeared when she was little, but fortune favored her: the Yong’an Marquis household took her in and raised her with every comfort.

By the time she returned to us, our mother had already arranged one marriage for her, while the marquis household had promised her to someone else.

One man was the adoptive brother who had grown up beside her; the other, her childhood betrothed.

Unable to let either go, she proposed a compromise: she would marry whichever man found the jade hairpin she hid.

The day she hid hers, however, she hid mine as well.

In my last life, Wei Heng found a hairpin first, but the one in his hand belonged to me.

The smile had barely touched his lips when her adoptive brother said coldly, “You cannot even recognize Ah Zhi’s hairpin. I suppose that leaves you no choice but to marry Ranran.”

After we married, every quarrel between my sister and her husband sent her running to Wei Heng in tears.

His heart ached for her, and his old regret never faded.

“If you had married me,” he would murmur, “I would never have made you cry. Not even once.”

I found them together beneath the moon, composing poems, and side by side among the spring blossoms.

Whenever I showed the slightest displeasure, Wei Heng called me jealous and narrow-minded, saying I could never match my sister’s poetry or painting.

Now I had returned to the day Wei Heng picked up my hairpin.

I held out my hand.

“Young Master Wei, Mother is already considering matches for me. Please return my hairpin.”

When Fanyin dreams that her betrothed will carve out her immortal bone for a scheming mortal woman, she refuses to become anyone’s disposable supporting character.

Determined to ruin the treasure they covet, she descends to the mortal realm and chooses Gu Fei, a disgraced young lord with vengeance in his heart, to help her break its power.

But Gu Fei’s love survives death and reincarnation, and the conspiracy surrounding Fanyin’s bone reaches far beyond a stolen romance.

To save both heaven and earth, she must expose a fallen war god, face an ancient demonic grudge, and discover the true identity of the man who never stopped searching for her.

“Fine. I’ll marry him.” I raised my hand from behind the other princesses.

Father had many daughters, but his favorite was Princess Changning, his eldest and the only daughter born to the Empress.

I was the most inconspicuous of them all; Father had probably forgotten I existed.

My possessiveness has always been off the charts.

Luckily, my boyfriend is the obedient type—his phone open to me anytime, reporting in around the clock, and keeping two meters away from every passing dog.

But a voice calling itself “the System” appears in my head: the male lead doesn’t love me, and I’m just a control-freak extra who should leave.

I brush it off—until Xie Ji really starts acting strange, and I find a diary entry that chills my blood.

My possessiveness evaporates in an instant, and I run away that very night.

Three days later, the System comes online, sobbing: the female lead who tried to help me escape has been kidnapped by the man I once thought I knew.

Me: ?