Romance

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.

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.

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.

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.

A gripping tale of betrayal, revenge, murder mystery, hidden identities, an original wife’s counterattack, and one woman’s awakening.

Qin Jiajia, granddaughter of the renowned painter Qin Mo, loses her womb and then her life in a fire after being betrayed by her husband, Zhong Mingjiang, and his mistress, Luo Xia.

But soon afterward, an anonymous text appears on Luo Xia’s phone.

“A life for a life. Your reckoning is here. Are you ready?”

On his way home from work, Zhong Mingjiang encounters something equally horrifying: photographs of Qin Jiajia’s charred, mutilated body suddenly appear inside his car, along with a blood-soaked uterus on the passenger seat.

Every chilling incident leads back to Qin Jiajia’s death.

Trapped in boundless terror, the cheating husband and his mistress cry out for help, but no one answers….

Chun Tang and I were both senior maids in Grand Madam’s household.

Chun Tang was dazzling and seductive, while I was delicate and mild.

When we turned fifteen, Grand Madam decided that one of us would become a bedchamber maid to her eldest grandson, Pei Yi.

Chun Tang volunteered for the position.

I was promised instead to Steward Jiang of the Pei household.

Everything should have gone smoothly.

But just before the arrangements were to be finalized, Chun Tang ran away.

The day before she fled, I heard her muttering strange things to empty air.

“Once I’m gone, Grand Madam will probably give Xia Zhi to Pei Yi.”

“That girl is dull-faced and deathly boring.”

“Put the two of us side by side, and Pei Yi is bound to remember how much better I was!”

“People treasure what they can’t have.”

“When I come back, he’ll crawl through hell trying to win me over.”

“Once he promises to make me his lawful wife, my mission will be complete!”

When the marquis’s household finally brought me home, I was already twenty years old—old enough that women my age had children, while I remained unwed.

Only after entering the estate did I learn that I had been promised in marriage before I was born, but the false heiress raised in my place had already married my betrothed.

She and the ducal heir were deeply in love, with both a son and a daughter, and theirs was celebrated throughout the capital as a perfect match.

When she faced me, guilt overwhelmed her so completely that she could not speak through her tears.

Mother held her close and comforted her, while the ducal heir vowed that she would be the only woman in his life.

I stood straight and composed, pretending none of it mattered.

Hidden inside my sleeve, however, my fingers clutched my skirt so tightly that they ached to the bone.

That night, Mother took my hand and sighed, urging me to accept that everything was already settled and let it go.

She promised to find me a better marriage and said she had already considered several fine young gentlemen.

I stared at the osmanthus tree perfuming the courtyard and found myself thinking instead of the pigs back home, with no one left to tend them.

“Mother,” I said, “I don’t want a marriage. Please let me go home.”

A diary chronicling the last two months of my life…

Maybe I was simply born unworthy of love. Why else would everyone who loved me leave?

My junior brother curses every peeping tom to be struck by lightning—and when forty-nine bolts come for me, I discover I was the immortal undergoing a mortal tribulation all along.

Between a shameless master, a lovesick senior brother, a possessive silver dragon, and one disastrous scheme involving aphrodisiac tea, surviving my sect may be harder than ascending to heaven.

But when my memories return, so does the truth: the beautiful junior brother I meant to seduce, kill, and abandon is actually the husband who has waited seven thousand years to take me home.