Short Story

On the day my father placed third in the palace examination, my mother was found unconscious in a busy street, her clothes in disarray.

Mindful of the many years she had supported his studies, my father did not fault her for having been violated.

Everyone praised him for his honor.

Even the emperor marveled at his devotion.

Yet, concerned for my father’s reputation, His Majesty decreed that he marry the Marquis of Yongyang’s legitimate daughter and expected my mother to step aside and become a concubine.

Proud and unyielding, my mother hanged herself that very night.

On Mars, every breath costs money, wanting is treated like a moral failure, and Chen Xiaoba has spent her life longing for one impossible luxury: savory flatbread from Earth.

After that longing costs her job and home, a reunion with her childhood friend Ah Zhi leads them to Black Rose Street, where Earth’s discarded scraps can still be traded for hope.

Together they build a food stall, save for passage to Earth, and discover that the road to freedom may demand far more than money.

In a world designed to make the poor stop dreaming, Xiaoba must decide whether a seemingly wasted journey can still be a life worth choosing.

My dream guy suddenly asked why I had stopped simping for him.

I checked my spreadsheet and realized I had accidentally left him off the roster.

So I sent him a queue number and promised he would get his turn after two more rounds.

“Don’t worry, I work fast, Ziyue.”

He replied, “My name is Qi Pei!”

When a grotesque mass of “immortal flesh” falls from heaven, the emperor declares it a divine gift and distributes it among the realm’s most powerful families.

Lady Yan refuses to eat it after receiving a warning written in her father’s blood, only to watch her household descend into ravenous horror.

Fleeing a plague of man-eating monsters with her young brother-in-law Wen Ge, she races toward the ruined capital in search of her father—and the truth.

The flesh may indeed grant immortality, but only if they survive long enough to learn how.

Cheng Xi once mistook Yan Jin’s possessiveness for devotion, but his attention fades until she can hear the impatient thoughts he hides behind a perfect smile.

Just as their relationship fractures, Qin Zheng—the dangerously obsessive first love she never truly forgot—returns from abroad determined to reclaim her.

Caught between a boyfriend who realizes too late what he has lost and an ex learning that love cannot be a cage, Cheng Xi must decide which kind of devotion she actually wants.

Qiao Xiaohe knows from the beginning that Jiang Haozhi is a wealthy heir pretending to be a poor delivery worker.

Lonely and exhausted by debt, she accepts his false romance because even borrowed companionship feels like a gift.

But when the truth comes out, Haozhi discovers that his game became real for him long before Xiaohe was ready to choose herself.

Walking away gives her the chance to build a life where happiness is something she creates, not something she begs another person to provide.

As a child, Li Sujun saved an immortal lord who promised to answer whenever she lit the Heaven-Seeking Incense.

She called for him three times.

He never came.

Years later, Sujun has become a healer—and the same immortal lord lies powerless at her door after failing his tribulation.

He insists she is the trial of love he must overcome.

She thinks he should look closer at his own mistakes.

But the dog, cat, and little snake in her home are not what they seem, and the path Sujun abandoned is already winding back toward her.

To understand what Zhao Yunzhi truly lost for her, she must face the family that discarded her, the sect that used him, and the difference between love as possession and love as freedom.

Wan Youling is a washed-up celebrity mocked across the internet for having no class.

Pressed for money, she joins a livestreamed wilderness survival show in the Ailao Mountains.

When a boastful rival claims to know the range better than anyone, Youling calmly says she is a native—and no one believes her.

Twenty minutes into the mountains, the cameras capture impossible creatures bowing to her, and the cast realizes she may have been telling the truth.

After being stolen from her husband and caged in the palace, Jiang Yunshu dies branded as the stain on an emperor’s perfect reign.

Reborn before her disastrous marriage, she breaks her engagement, evades Prince Jing’s search, and chooses the sickly Crown Prince Xie Zhao as her unlikely ally.

Armed with memories of betrayal and rebellion, Yunshu pursues revenge against everyone who destroyed her first life.

Yet the partner she meant to use may become the one man willing to share both his throne and his years with her.

My daughter spots a handsome man in a magazine and asks who he is.

Since he heads my company’s biggest business partner, I jokingly call him our “sugar daddy.”

The next day, she pins his son to the floor at school and declares that he is her father.

One spectacular misunderstanding later, the man I left years ago walks back into my life—and discovers the daughter I never told him about.

Zou Fengsheng wants an explanation.

I want to keep the peaceful, independent life I built without him.

But between meddling children, an office reunion, and feelings neither of us truly buried, keeping our past in the past may be impossible.