Tragedy

I held my little sister’s hand as we crossed the street.

A police officer stopped me and asked, “Whose hand are you holding?”

I glanced at the empty space behind me and smiled.

From the moment I decided to become a criminal, I never thought of regretting it.

On the day the divorce was finalized, I booked a high-speed rail ticket back to my hometown. A phone, an ID card, and a bank card with a meager balance were all I had left.

When the butler called to say the young master was crying for his mother, I finally understood that the son I had borne and his father loved the same woman.

Before the train left, I made one last promise: I would never disturb him again.

Six years after our divorce, I ran into my ex-husband on a street corner while holding my three-year-old daughter.

He stared blankly at the girl in my arms for a long time before knitting his brows. “She’s almost six years old,” he said, his voice laced with accusation. “Why does she look so thin and small?”

Ha!

He actually thought the child I was holding was his.

I suppose he believed I loved him so deeply that even after he cheated and divorced me, I would have gone off and raised his child all on my own.

One year into her marriage, Xie Wu refuses when her husband asks to take Lin Manrou as his concubine. The feud that follows costs Xie Wu her unborn child, her reputation, and thirty years of freedom—only for her to learn that both women were pawns in her husband’s plan to marry the cousin he truly loved. Reborn on the day he makes the same request, Xie Wu says yes. This time, she will play the dutiful wife, give every rival exactly what she wants, and quietly turn the Marquis of Annan’s household into a board on which only she knows the next move.

The night I went to collect Prince Jing’s corpse, I saw my own jade bracelet and sleeping robe inside the coffin. My husband, returned from the dead, choked me and said, “Lanyin, die once in my place.”

When I opened my eyes again, I had returned to three months ago. This time, I will be the one collecting their corpses first.

After my Senior Sister died, Master brought back a Seductress Spirit.

The Seductress Spirit looked exactly like Senior Sister, only far more alluring.

Seductress Spirits were wanton and wicked by nature. All she had to do was crook a finger, and my senior brothers would slip in and out of her bedchamber night after night.

She had stolen Senior Sister’s face and used it to do every filthy, degrading thing imaginable. I hated her to the bone.

But when I went to kill her, she took out a plum candy and spoke in a voice gentle enough to bewitch me:

“Since I’ve already used this skin, I have to fulfill its original owner’s dying wish.

“Seductress Spirits have their own rules. But do you want to avenge your Senior Sister with your own hands?”

After transmigrating into the neglected wife of an impoverished prince, Song Xuewei wants only enough money to escape and live in peace.

Instead, her sharp tongue and modern business tricks turn Prince Dun’s failing flower estate into a fortune—and draw her close to his gentle secondary consort, Lin Chuxue.

When imperial cruelty shatters their unlikely family, Xuewei is forced onto the revenge path fate intended for her.

Armed with a deadly bond that makes every corrupt courtier share her wounds, the self-proclaimed slacker walks into the New Year banquet ready to topple a dynasty.

At sixteen, Fu Zhiya wakes on the day she finished her high school entrance exam, decades before her husband, sister, and mother shattered her life.

This time, she refuses to carry anyone else’s debts.

As she cuts ties with a family that never truly chose her, faces old betrayals in their earliest forms, and fights for her education, she begins to discover what it means to live for herself.

But freedom is never given freely—and every boundary she draws forces the people around her to reveal who they really are.

During the first year of our marriage, at my birthday banquet, a songstress appeared wearing a silk dress identical to mine.

My husband’s expression turned ice-cold. “Someone, strip that dress off her.”

He was clearly defending my honor, yet I felt not a single spark of warmth in my heart.

For I knew that he was also the man who had once spent a fortune on that very songstress and made a pact to elope with her.

In the fifth year of our marriage, I got pregnant, and Fu Chi wept with joy.

Everyone said I was lucky, that I had married an up-and-coming tycoon like Fu Chi.

But no one ever mentioned the actress he was keeping on the side.

It was as if everyone had forgotten that I, too, was the girl he had confessed to at seventeen, his eyes red-rimmed with emotion.

Behind his back, one of his friends warned him, “You’re being such a bastard. Aren’t you afraid Xu Man will divorce you?”

Fu Chi had nothing to fear. He only gave a lazy smile and said, “She won’t.”

Later, without making a scene or saying a word, I aborted the child.

When the news got out, Fu Chi flew back from London overnight.