2026

In our village, a child who dies before his parents cannot be given a funeral—unless he dies in an unclean place.

When my drowned best friend is laid in the mourning hall, a seven-day vigil turns my guilt into terror, and the truth behind the hauntings proves more horrifying than any ghost.

I run a brothel staffed by men.

But my courtesans don’t cater to men with a taste for other men.

They serve women with perfectly ordinary needs.

I named the place the Hundred Stallions House.

I don’t actually have a hundred male courtesans, of course, but I do have quite a few.

Gentle, aloof, strapping, dangerously obsessive—we have every type imaginable.

Our clients range from widowed officials’ wives to farm women who have lost their husbands, and even wandering swordswomen.

Now and then, a noble young lady sneaks out to satisfy her curiosity.

All in all, business is booming.

But there are complications.

Take that judicial officer from the Capital Prefecture, for example.

He has tried every trick in the book to shut down my Hundred Stallions House.

So when the opportunity presented itself, I drugged him.

Then I locked him in the woodshed out back.

After dying under the torture of the man she once saved, Lu Shiyi awakens on the day her younger sister frames the penniless scholar Gu Ningcheng.

Armed with memories of her first life, she refuses to play the merciful victim again and sets out to strip Gu Ningcheng and her treacherous sister of every advantage they once used against her.

But destroying her enemies is no longer enough, because Lu Shiyi intends to escape the inner quarters, enter the imperial examinations, and seize the power that women have always been denied.

I cultivate the Way of Detachment, but I don’t prove my enlightenment by killing a husband—I temper my mind by getting cheated on.

After three cultivation partners betray me in increasingly absurd ways, every heartbreak becomes a breakthrough, until I ascend on the spot and discover just how useful infidelity can be.

At twenty-five, the eldest son of the Cui family lived a life of such restraint and purity that he still had no intention of taking a wife.

Madam Cui could wait no longer.

With tears, tantrums, and threats to hang herself, she forced Cui Lanzhang to choose a bride.

At his wits’ end, Cui Lanzhang pointed at me at random.

And just like that, I landed myself one very eligible catch.

Later, I asked Cui Lanzhang why he had chosen me.

After thinking for a moment, he said, “That day, when you saw me, your cheeks were flushed and your eyes were hazy.

I assumed you must have liked me.”

I spent the entire night debating whether to tell him the truth.

My cheeks had been red because I had put on too much rouge, and my eyes had been hazy because I had stayed up reading storybooks the night before and was exhausted the next day.

My mother-in-law brought home a child whose features looked just like my dead husband’s.

She called it fate.

My husband had been reincarnated and returned to repay my kindness.

So I rallied the full strength of our clan to make the boy heir to the marquisate.

But once he had risen to power and made a name for himself, he locked me in a woodshed in the rear courtyard and left me to die.

Then my supposedly dead husband came to my grave with his wife.

“Our son saw you to your end, at least.

That makes your life worthwhile.”

Now that I had been reborn, they could play their parts onstage, and I would applaud from below.

I would help them put on a tragedy of blood ties severed and a family destroyed.

At our wedding, Duan Yingze’s first love showed up in a bridal gown to steal the groom.

“Duan Yingze, if you still love me, come with me.”

Without a moment’s hesitation, he took her hand.

He left me alone to face the pity and ridicule of every guest in the room.

Everyone thought I would be devastated, that the pain would destroy me.

What they did not know was this: The one I had never stopped loving had come back too.

Duan Yingze was nothing but a poor substitute.

I no longer cared about him at all.

In my dreams, I kept giving myself over to wild passion with a man.

One day, I finally saw his face.

It was Li Jici, the icy Chief Justice of the Court of Judicial Review, a man said to have no interest in women.

When my brother is falsely accused, Li Jici mocks me for begging him for help—yet that very night, the man in my dreams is more passionate than ever.

Only after a drunken guest reveals the peach-shaped birthmark on Li Jici’s chest do I realize the truth: the beautiful dreams we have shared belong to both of us.

Everyone in the capital knows that every beauty who disappears into Minister Luo’s rear courtyard carries him one step higher in office.

Born mute—or so the household believes—his ninth daughter survives by making herself small and useful to the family’s favored eldest daughter.

As sisters are sold, married, and sacrificed for the ambitions of men, Ah Jiu realizes that obedience will never buy her freedom.

To escape the Luo estate alive, she must wager the one thing society says determines a woman’s future: her face.

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.