Tragedy

In my previous life, before my elder sister entered the palace to become empress, she bent her head to tell me, “Ah Ting, when I’m gone, you must take care of yourself.”

I promised her through my tears.

Five years later, the empress fell out of favor.

Her enemies had her raped, and that night she hanged herself.

The emperor decreed that the deposed empress of the Meng family was without virtue.

No one in the capital was permitted to wear mourning white.

I went to beg forgiveness on behalf of the Meng family.

Struck by my beauty, His Majesty took me into the palace, where I became the most favored woman in his harem.

The day I dragged him into the flames to die with me, he closed his hands around my throat in a rage.

“I have treated your family well!

For your sake, I even overlooked that defiled, deposed empress!”

I let the fire climb over me as though I could feel nothing.

“I didn’t.”

When I woke again, it was the day my sister entered the palace.

She stroked my head, then turned toward the palace that devoured people.

I stripped off my fine clothes and jewelry, then turned toward the bloodshed of an army camp.

Let us see whether that imperial bastard would still dare call her “deposed empress” when I surrounded his palace with my army.

After eight years in a nunnery, I received a cup of poisoned wine from my twin sister.

Her face was full of contempt.

“You live in a nunnery, yet you bed His Majesty every night.

Have you no shame?”

“Tomorrow, His Majesty means to bring you back to the palace.

Someone as lowly as you has no business being a Noble Consort.

Let your elder sister take that place.”

Smiling, I drank the poison and watched her step over my corpse to board the phoenix palanquin bound for the palace.

What she did not know was that being summoned to his bed at any hour, in any place, was worse than death.

When Nan Mu was very young, he met someone who told him: never, under any circumstances, become friends with Wen Miao.

As the years passed and he was on the verge of forgetting that warning, he met a girl. Her name was Wen Miao.

Even more shocking than the genius girl Wen Miao winning the nation’s highest award in physics was the fact that she was murdered in the Biology Research Lab like a common lab rat-with her very skull sliced open.

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.”

I’d finally scraped together enough money for an immortal sword.

Then some godforsaken sword cultivator used Ten Thousand Swords Return to the Source and summoned mine away.

When it flew back, it had thirteen notches in its blade.

Damn you!

Give me my sword back the way it was!

After nearly six months of being bullied by the other four girls in our dorm, my roommate He Xiaorui finally snapped.

That night, she and I were alone in the room.

She suddenly climbed into my bed and kept telling me she was Noble Consort Xi of the Great Qing, of the Niohuru clan.

I was so frightened I had no idea what to do.

Then she suddenly smiled.

“Listen well.

Her Highness is about to take her revenge!”

After my enemy tortured me to death, the crown prince went mad.

He avenged me, then shaved his head and became a monk for my sake.

The whole country cursed me as a temptress who had brought ruin upon the realm.

But I didn’t even know him!

I had always thought I was the heroine’s sworn enemy.

Only when I saw her willingly confine herself to a husband’s household for love did I realize how terrifying blind devotion could be.

Stroking her belly, she urged me to find a good man and discover the pleasures of love.

I shook my head, as determined as ever to follow my own path.

In time, she lost sight of her dreams in that household, all for love, while I made love itself a stepping-stone and climbed to the highest seat of power.

I loved slithering around like a twisted little creep so much that the System turned me into a snake spirit.

In Journey to the West.

Watching Tang Sanzang being lowered into a cooking pot, I fell silent.

To stay alive, I had no choice but to become his disciple.

Sun Wukong: “Huh?

We’ve already survived fifty-four of the eighty-one ordeals, and now you want to join?”

Me: “Fate works in mysterious ways.”

I was so fond of writhing around in the shadows that the System made me a snake spirit.

A snake spirit in Journey to the West.

I stared at Tang Sanzang being lowered into a cooking pot.

Words failed me.

To stay alive, I had no choice but to become his disciple.

Sun Wukong: “Huh?

We’ve already survived fifty-four of the eighty-one trials, and you’re joining us now?”

Me: “Fate works in mysterious ways.”