Romance

I had transmigrated over a decade ago, and my face-slapping counterattack System finally arrived, late as ever.

By then, I was already the Empress.

“Host,” the System said, “first mission: the maidservant slaps the young miss.”

I gazed at the young miss’s grave and couldn’t help but laugh out loud.

The Cui family precepts held that a daughter of the Cui clan married no merchant and became no concubine.

So when the edict naming me a Noble Consort arrived, the great aristocratic families all assumed that the new emperor meant to humiliate our house.

And yet I did not hesitate to break with my family and entered the palace in that small sedan chair.

Because I had already died twice.

This was the third life I had been given.

For a year after I was brought back to the Prime Minister’s mansion, I grew used to admitting fault.

When Song Ruoyun fell at my side yet again, she filled her eyes with practiced tears and looked at me as if words failed her.

My mother, utterly disappointed, struck me without a second thought.

I realized I would never live to see the day they understood they had wronged me, so I chose to leave.

Braving the rain, I knelt before my aunt, who had never gotten along with my mother, and wept: ‘Please take me in, Aunt. Even as your maidservant, I would fare better than as my mother’s own daughter.’

“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.

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.

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.

My stepmother was a hopeless romantic with an unusually clear head.

Over nine years, she invested in a hundred men.

Every last investment failed—my father included.

After placing third in the imperial examination, he was snatched up as a son-in-law right beneath the honors board.

When the news reached Gaoyou, my grandmother was beside herself with joy.

She promptly threw both my stepmother and me out of the house.

“It’s all right,” my stepmother said.

“I’ll find you another father.”

“Haven’t men cheated you badly enough?” I asked.

She took my hand and strode on.

“What is there to fear?”

“Whoever I love, I love with everything I have!”

And she meant it.

On the day she finally avenged her family, her passion kept the Duke of Zheng from leaving his bed for three days.

When newly crowned Qin Bai casts Yun Qing aside for his first love, her formidable family stops holding his empire together.

As the frontier falters, the capital descends into chaos, and the treasury runs dry, the emperor discovers too late that the people he betrayed were the ones propping up his throne.

While the Yun family watches his favorites fail spectacularly, a battle-hardened prince with an old debt to Yun Qing quietly begins rewriting her future.

After refusing to enter the imperial harem in her elder sister’s place, Shen Wanning awakens in the past with every memory of the life that destroyed her.

Emperor Qin Zheng remembers that life too, and his determination to reclaim her draws Shen Wanning back into the palace she tried to escape.

Surrounded by a resentful sister, ambitious consorts, and powerful men who mistake her compliance for dependence, she turns their desires against them and plots a ruthless path to freedom.

A courtesan cast out to die is rescued by a penniless scholar, only to lose him to the schemes of his former betrothed.

Returning to the pleasure house under her old name, Xiangsi trades everything she has left for revenge—but the cruel nobleman who claims to love her will not let either her body or her memories escape him.