Tragedy

My father was once the best-known peddler on Qingyun Street.

He walked from lane to lane selling everything from thread to malt candy.

Then he became addicted to opium.

He sold Mother back to a brothel and stuffed my little sister and me into the baskets on his carrying pole.

The last time he shouldered that pole, the rest of our lives swung from either end.

In my fifth year of trying to make it in Beijing, my boyfriend cheated on me with an intern.

The other woman posted his massive pay stub online.

The watermark on the image was clear as day.

He was done for.

By the tenth year of failing to find a human skin, I was ready to flay even the old yellow dog at the temple.

Then I met a beautiful concubine who had been thrown out of the marquis’s estate.

She knelt beside my white bones and burned paper money at the altar.

“The Immortal Lady likes the skin of beauties, and I hate this pretty face of mine. Let’s trade.”

My sister was a goldsmith who entered the palace to deliver jewelry, only to be knocked unconscious by Consort Yi.

Consort Yi had quarreled with the emperor, so she stole my sister’s clothes and exit token and slipped out of the palace for fun.

Furious and frantic, the emperor cut my innocent sister down with a single stroke, then rode out to find the woman he loved.

In the end, my sister’s body was thrown into a mass grave.

The emperor and Consort Yi returned sweetly together on the same horse, and their reunion became a celebrated romance.

Half a year later, I became one of the emperor’s beauties.

After all, I am not human—I am a marten.

If a fox spirit can bewitch a ruler, so can a marten.

On the day the Su Clan was raided and seized, Father dressed me in a magnificent gown and threw me in front of the soldiers.

“She is Su Yueying, the Eldest Young Miss of the Su Clan.”

Everyone said Father was a loyal servant.

When I saw him again, Father had become the New Emperor’s most trusted Divine Martial Great General.

Su Yueying had become Empress, the New Emperor’s one and only for the rest of his life.

And I was a courtesan in a brothel, a woman anyone could have.

To buy back my freedom, Mother dragged her gravely ill body to beg Father for help.

The gatekeepers beat her to death with two strikes of their staves.

I begged Su Yueying to let Mother be buried.

But she said, “There are plenty of untouched entertainers in the pleasure houses. If you had held fast to your principles, I might still have helped you. But you chose to debase yourself. I will not help someone like that.”

That very night, someone hacked off my limbs and sank me into the river.

When I opened my eyes again, I had returned to the day the Su Clan was raided.

This time, let Su Yueying go to the brothel herself and hold fast to her precious principles.

Liang Yu had always thought the first time they met was at an amusement park. But in fact, it was not.

Those days were marked by endless rain, and even her memories carried a damp, overcast gloom.

That morning, her older sister developed a fever again. She lay in bed, sleeping through the entire day until night fell.

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.

After eight years of marriage, divine physician Huo Yunqiao discovers that her beloved husband has betrayed her to protect the junior martial sister who has always hated her.

Bound to a System that will send her home only if she dies by the male lead’s hand, Yunqiao chooses to drink the poisoned prescription he writes for her—and spends her final days exposing every lie, reclaiming her dignity, and forcing those who wronged her to face the ruin they made.

I was the greatest beauty in the capital—and the demon consort cursed by all as the ruin of the realm.

While the emperor was away at war, the empress poisoned me to death.

She believed that once I was gone, the emperor would become her wise and mighty husband again.

What she did not know was that I was the last chain holding his bloodlust and murderous rage in check.

I died.

And he went utterly mad.

While I lay unconscious after giving birth, my husband’s cousin swapped her daughter for mine.

The moment she fell asleep, I switched them back.

From then on, she tormented her own daughter every day while lavishing all her love on mine.

I watched with tears in my eyes—what a tragedy.

Served her right.