2026

When I was young, I once kept a lover behind my husband’s back.

When the affair came to light, my husband forced me to choose.

I gritted my teeth and chose my husband.

The lover I abandoned vowed, “Cast me aside today, my lady wife, and one day you will regret it.”

“No, I won’t,” I said guiltily.

Years later, my husband took revenge by sending me to the Eastern Palace.

“I hear the crown prince has a taste for married women.

With your wanton nature, my dear, you should serve him very well.”

That night, I knelt in the Eastern Palace.

My beautiful “kept lover” and I stared at each other.

Seated high above me, he ground out, “Never imagined I was the crown prince, did you?”

“You’d drop a poor man for a rich one!”

The shock brought on my heart condition, and I died on the spot.

Given another life, I returned to the day the affair was exposed.

My husband asked, “Will you remain a lady of the distinguished Cui clan, or become a runaway wife despised by all?

I suggest you think carefully.”

This time, my voice rang out loud and clear.

“I’ve thought it through.

I’m eloping with him!”

After ten years by my side, my husband brought home a beauty and announced he would make her empress.

He said, “You have no son, but I need a crown prince.”

“What man under heaven doesn’t have three wives and four concubines?”

“When did you become so jealous, so incapable of tolerating others? You’ve changed. You’ve become hideous.”

That very night, I took my Young General with me and charged out through the city gates without looking back.

After I left, he said with red-rimmed eyes, “Ning Huan, come back.”

Of course I would come back.

Clad in the imperial yellow robes, I led three hundred thousand troops back to the capital, my loyal Young General standing at my side.

“Men, drag the Deposed Emperor and that beauty out and behead them. Hang their heads from the city walls. Let them go to hell and reflect on their disloyalty and lack of filial piety.”

I was once my young mistress’s senior maid.

Simply because the heir cast one extra glance my way, she gave me away and I became his bedchamber maid.

Later, the heir became engaged.

His future wife disliked me, so he gave me to another man.

Later still, he begged me to return.

But by then, I was already the lawful wife of the Chief Grand Secretary.

My father’s wife always said she treated me as her own daughter.

Whenever she went out, she insisted I accompany her—an unpaid bodyguard.

When the Empress wanted to raise me at the palace, she refused on my behalf.

All a girl needed, she said, was a good husband who would cherish her.

I ruined both hands saving her son.

She still refused to register me as her legitimate daughter, saying only shallow families cared about birth status.

She would find me a fine young man someday.

When marriage was finally discussed, she cited my mother’s low birth and my damaged hands, and persuaded Father to marry me to his old nurse’s grandson.

The nurse despised my mother.

My husband took no interest in household affairs.

They tormented me to death.

When I opened my eyes again, it was the morning of the day I had saved my little brother.

You are a village girl from the mountains.

By a twist of fate, you save the Crown Prince from an assassination, and you leverage that debt to demand he marry you.

But he disdains your plain looks and gently refuses many times.

You settle for the next best thing and ask him to appoint you as an official.

Since you were five, you’ve decided you will rise above your station in this life.

If you become a consort, you’ll be like Wu Zetian.

If you become an official, you’ll be like Sima Yi.

I am the Deity of Marriage. One day, without warning, I fell into darkness.

On the day I became a fallen god, thirty-six phoenixes danced in unison above the Nine Heavens. Within Yuze Palace, divine light blazed, and auspicious homage arrived from every direction.

Li Lan was taking his Heavenly Consort as his bride.

On my last night in the palace, Xiao Zhao got drunk and took me to bed.

The next morning, I slipped a palace maid into his bed to take my place.

Four years later, a little girl held my husband’s hand and called him Uncle in her sweet little voice.

His eyes reddened.

“Ah Jie, how can she call me Uncle?”

he asked, aggrieved.

I smiled.

“But she really is my husband’s daughter.

What else should she call you?”

When the palace announced that I was being elevated to Noble Consort, everyone in my family looked grim.

Everyone understood the principle that great merit can threaten the throne.

My father’s achievements were already so great that there was nothing left to reward him with.

This rank of Noble Consort was a naked warning.

If I wanted to keep my whole family safe, I had to hand the emperor a weakness of mine-something he could hold over me and use to put his mind at ease.

Father, Mother, your daughter is off to be arrogant by imperial command!

Starting today, I’m going to be the most outrageously overbearing little menace in the harem!

A girl had been secretly in love with my boyfriend for years, using “business trips” as an excuse to see him four times a year-once in each season-and spending the rest of her life longing for him.

On the night before my boyfriend and I were to get engaged, she finally decided to let go, offering him her virginity as a parting gift.

My boyfriend told me he had only done it because he pitied her.

I had fallen for a shadow guard.