Romance

[Experienced Heroine, Virgin Hero | Marriage Before Love]

A gentle noblewoman fallen on hard times vs. a cold, aloof, and powerful court official

Ji Hanyi’s family fell into ruin when she was fourteen. At sixteen, she arrived at the prestigious Xie Family with a marriage contract and married into their household.

Throughout their three years of marriage, she fulfilled every duty expected of a wife despite her husband’s cold indifference, determined to be a good and virtuous spouse.

Her husband was as elegant as a jade tree, an honorable gentleman with limitless prospects.

Everyone told her she ought to be satisfied. Her family no longer had anyone to rely on, so being able to marry into the Xie Family was an incredible stroke of fortune.

Yet on a snowy night, when her husband abandoned her once again for the woman in his heart, Ji Hanyi suddenly saw the truth: her husband had never loved her.

And so, at nineteen, she stubbornly took the Divorce Agreement and walked away alone, even as her husband mocked her and declared that she would regret it.

After the divorce, Ji Hanyi had planned to take her mother to Jiangnan, where she would run a shop and live a quiet, peaceful life. But then the most noble — and most aloof — scion among all the aristocratic families in the capital suddenly said he wanted to marry her.

Shen Si was like the high-hanging moon on a cold winter night, forever beyond reach. Noble by birth and immense in power, he was also notorious for his icy ruthlessness and unapproachable demeanor. Yet he told her, “You may take two days to decide whether you are willing to marry me.”

In his heart, however, he had already prepared what he would say next:

If you are unwilling, then I will keep waiting for you.

Ji Hanyi had no idea that Shen Si, that eternal block of ice, had fallen for her back when he first discovered love as a young man. Every trace of distance and aloofness he showed her was born of restraint and deep devotion. He had even hidden his possessiveness toward her perfectly.

At fourteen, naive Ah Yuan enters the imperial palace beside her fearless friend Xiaochun, believing the two of them can survive anything together.

But as Xiaochun rises through the emperor’s favor, the women around them are drawn into a harem where affection is political currency and every child can become a weapon.

Ah Yuan survives by holding fast to kindness, even as loyalty turns into leverage, ambition demands blood, and the people she loves make choices she cannot undo.

Across a lifetime shaped by palace secrets, she bears witness to the cost of clinging to power—and to the quiet courage it takes to walk away.

Zhao Qingzhu and I were betrothed through an exchange marriage.

The agreement was that his older sister would marry my older brother, and I would marry him.

He was a scholar, which meant his education was a money pit.

My family had to tighten our belts to provide for him, and the entire village laughed at us for being fools.

But five years later, he passed the imperial examinations with top honors and became the most sought-after bachelor around.

Suddenly, everyone was saying I was no longer worthy of him.

My father was the richest man in Great Zhou, and I was his only daughter.

To protect me, he arranged for me to marry into Marquis Manor with an enormous dowry.

On the day of my engagement, I had a dream.

I dreamed that Marquis Manor looked down on me for being born to a merchant family, while the Young Marquis doted wholeheartedly on his talented cousin.

After my father died, my dowry was swallowed up completely.

To make his cousin his legitimate wife, the Young Marquis bribed the midwife to murder me while I was in childbirth.

When I woke from the dream, the Young Marquis walked into my family’s jewelry shop with his cousin in tow.

“Since you’re going to marry into Marquis Manor, you ought to shed that stink of money. Marquis Manor can’t afford that kind of embarrassment.

“Give this shop to my cousin. Consider it a greeting gift from you, her future sister-in-law.”

I looked at his smug, superior face and let out a cold laugh.

Then I turned and ordered the steward to throw him out.

“What kind of down-and-out household starts eyeing a wife’s dowry before she’s even married in?

“Your highborn Marquis Manor has worse manners than a farming family!”

I am the only member of the Ice Clan born without a Snow Soul. To survive, I had to undergo Bonding with a man.

The partner chosen for me was the cold, ascetic High Priest. Eventually, I gave up on trying to win his heart. I abandoned the pendant he gave me and fled in secret.

When we met again, I was slumped weakly in a bath barrel, wearing nothing but that very same pendant. The High Priest’s deep voice drifted from behind me: “Princess, how is the water temperature?”

On the day I was deposed and consigned to the Cold Palace, Yan Yuheng came personally to see me off.

Before the palace gates were locked, he asked whether I hated him.

I touched the old gold hairpin hidden in my sleeve and smiled. For three years as Empress, I learned to speak like her, to carry myself like her, and to love him the way she once had.

But even as I was dying, he never understood: I was never like Shen Zhaotang. I had only acted too well.

During the poorest year of my life, I sold myself to Zhou Jinyan for three hundred thousand yuan to serve as a substitute for his White Moonlight.

His friends once egged me on to drink until I suffered a gastric hemorrhage.

They asked him, “Don’t you feel bad for her?”

He looked down, his tone indifferent. “She’s just a substitute.”

Later, to save his White Moonlight, Zhou Jinyan stood by and watched as I fell from a cliff into the sea.

The search and rescue team never found my body.

He suddenly went mad, searching the entire world for me.

Five years later, I was invited back to the country and ran into him at an event.

He stared at me intently, his eyes rimmed with red. “I knew you weren’t dead. I’ve been looking for you-”

I took a step back, offering a polite yet distant smile. “I’m sorry, who are you?”

I was the heroine of a sweet-wife story: delicate, soft, and made to be swept off my feet.

All I had to do was behave and let one man after another dote on me.

My stepbrother was walking toward me with a glass of milk when a system appeared.

It told me that, according to the plot, I was supposed to develop a sex addiction that very day. From then on, the slightest contact with a man would leave me unbearably aroused, and it would only get worse.

That sounded pretty good to me.

I drained the milk in one gulp.

My stepbrother smiled.

I smiled too.

The system gave an even more wicked little chuckle.

“Except I just changed it into an addiction to studying.”

After Southern Xu fell, sixteen-year-old Princess Xihe fled through a land at war with the young heir to the throne, only to be delivered into a Northern Qian military camp.

An enemy general fell in love with her, believing her to be an ordinary girl, while she watched those dearest to her die before her eyes.

Hatred for a fallen nation and vengeance for her family drove her onto a road paved with thorns.

Years later, she became empress of Northern Qian and laid her plans one careful step at a time amid court intrigue and bloodshed.

Even when she had been wounded beyond bearing, someone still broke through every obstacle to reach her – but she would have to choose between her own love and hatred, and the lives of all beneath heaven.

The year my parents died in an accident, I was a sophomore in high school.

My relatives had their eyes on the inheritance and compensation money they left behind, and they kept coming by to harass me.

Finally, I knocked on the door of my Tattooed Neighbor.

“Hey, are you in the underworld?”