Supernatural

My sister took my jade hairpin, then used it to frame me for an illicit palace affair.

Our parents and my fiancé begged me to take the blame.

Three years of torment ended with my death.

When I opened my eyes again, I was kneeling before the emperor on the day it all began.

This time, I would spare none of them.

After my husband leaves on a business trip, my best friend moves in so I won’t be lonely.

Then I hear the stray cat’s thoughts and realize it is my husband, plotting with my friend to kill me for my inheritance and insurance payout.

He thinks I will never discover the truth.

So I decide to take him to the vet and have him neutered first.

I was the legitimate daughter of an illustrious clan, mild by nature and untouched by worldly desire, and I should have become the sacred monk’s disciple at the imperial temple, spending my life before an ancient Buddha and a solitary lamp.

For the sake of prestige, however, my parents insisted on marrying me to the eldest son of a ducal household—a well-matched libertine notorious for his debauchery.

Before I left, the monk heaved a long sigh and gave me a fragment of the Buddha’s bone, warning me to wear it at all times and never let it leave my body.

After I entered the Zhu household, my husband first brought home a concubine, then took a proper wife, but I did not mind, and my husband’s aunt praised me for knowing my place.

When my husband molested a colleague’s female relative and the Censorate denounced him, I did not mind, and my husband’s aunt praised my sweet temper.

My sister-in-law kept control of the household accounts, claiming that someone as pure as I was should never sully herself with the stink of money.

My mother-in-law demanded that I wait upon her morning and night and handle every task myself, so that I might become a model noblewoman.

At an imperial banquet, the Grand Empress Dowager took a fancy to the Buddha’s bone at my breast and demanded it for herself.

My mother-in-law hurried to tear it from my neck and offered it up with both hands, fawning shamelessly.

At last, I smiled in deliverance.

Twenty years, you damned bald donkey—let us see how you plan to keep the evil inside me chained now.

My father is a black dragon.

My mother is a white dragon.

So my left half is black, and my right half is white.

In my spare time, I cover the left side of my face and cosplay as the White Wuchang, then cover the right side and cosplay as the Black Wuchang.

My parents will never have to worry about me finding a job again.

Every night, Chen Youlan’s grandmother kowtows backward before a red-draped Buddha, cursing the family whose prosperity was bought with her blood.

When Grandma dies smiling and Youlan is chosen to inherit the ritual, the old house begins exposing every bargain, every stolen life, and the true firstborn hidden behind the family’s lies.

To survive until dawn, Youlan must decide whether the weeping statue is a god, a demon, or merely the patient judge of a debt generations in the making.

I was a flower Shen Yan had planted.

He tended me lovingly for years, and I finally took human form the year he killed the emperor and claimed the throne.

One night, I slipped into his bedchamber and lay down beside him, only for him to seize me by the throat.

I looked at him pitifully.

“But this is how I always used to sleep.”

While my brother discussed the most elegant way to sever an artery, I tended my vegetables.

While my sister sharpened her fangs for the coming feast, I tended my vegetables.

While the whole family prepared to revel beneath the blood moon, I was still tending my vegetables.

I cared so much about growing them well that I converted the cellar into a climate-controlled greenhouse and trained our familiar bats to serve as pollinators.

Mom and Dad took one look at the sea of green filling our grounds.

Exasperated but helpless to change me, they took the rest of the family on vacation so they would not have to see it.

For a long while after that, I enjoyed the idyllic peace of country life.

Then one day, as I was picking pests off my cucumbers, a luxury car screeched to a halt outside the gates.

A wealthy young lady in a lace dress pointed at my castle and shrieked coquettishly to her eight brothers, “Baby wants it turned into a Barbie dream castle!

This is where a princess belongs!”

Everyone in my family had sickly bones.

My eldest sister coughed three times for every three steps, spat blood every third day, and fainted every fifth.

My brother’s bones broke at a touch—one a month, seven or eight times a year.

I alone had a head of iron and a body of bronze.

I could ram a peach tree with my forehead to bring down the fruit.

The tree shook, the peaches fell, and I was perfectly fine.

When I was seven, an eminent monk passed by.

One look at me, and he blurted out: “Bronze skin over bone.

A demon born.”

I couldn’t be bothered to listen.

I charged him headfirst and knocked him flat on his back.

It took him ages to wake up.

When he did, he laughed instead of getting angry and asked my parents: “Would you have your children live long lives, sound in body and bone?”

“Take one bone each from your eldest daughter and your son.

Nurture them beside your youngest daughter’s heart, then cut them out when she turns eighteen.”

“Your eldest daughter will then rise like the sovereign moon, and your son will be the richest man in the realm.”

My parents trembled.

“And this girl?”

The monk held my wrist, half closed his eyes, and chuckled out a little song: “No future as a human.

As a beast, she’ll have plenty of room to roam.”

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.

After breaking up with Zhou Yanxu, Ying Xu steals his family’s treasured white pet snake and takes it home.

Floating comments soon reveal that her new pet is actually Zhou Ci, the Zhou family’s ancient patriarch—a snake god who has waited thousands of years for her.

As Zhou Ci sheds his harmless disguise and coils himself into every corner of her life, Ying Xu begins to uncover a bond that reaches far beyond her disastrous romance.

Their reunion may have begun by accident, but some promises are written into the soul.