2026

Lu Jia wakes inside a novel as a beautiful orphan doomed to die after drugging her adoptive brother, Lu Fang.

Desperate to survive both the gentle Lu Fang and his ruthless alternate personality, she accepts an arranged marriage and escapes to quiet Spring Mountain Temple.

There she meets Ye Yi, a tenderhearted traveler who promises her a life beyond the Lu family’s walls.

As Lu Fang’s forbidden feelings surface, Lu Jia clings to the freedom and future she has chosen, while her brother must decide whether love means possession or letting her go.

Before I was born, my father dreamed of a phoenix.

The very next moment, my mother went into labor.

Father therefore decided I had been born to a magnificent destiny.

And since good fortune ought to stay in the family, I would simply have to find myself a live-in son-in-law.

My cousin was so determined to stay with her bleached-blond bad boy that her parents locked her at home and refused to let her out.

I saw the light: all I had to do was fall for a blond, and I could become a shut-in with a perfectly legitimate excuse.

So I went home and told my stepbrother, “Wenzhou, I’ve fallen for a guy with blond hair.”

Jiang Wenzhou smiled and poured me a cup of hot water. “Was it cold out today? Drink this and warm up.”

Disappointed by his lack of reaction, I took a sip and stubbornly continued with my lines.

“Don’t look down on him. He’s not like other blonds—”

The next second, I lost consciousness.

When I woke again, a gleaming silver chain had appeared around my ankle.

Still as gentle as ever, Jiang Wenzhou stroked the chain.

“Tong Jia, you have no idea how awful men out there can be. Until you forget him, I’m not letting you leave this room.”

I froze for a moment, then resolutely lay back down.

“I’ll never forget him, even if it kills me!”

My mother was a woman from another world.

Right beneath my imperial father’s nose, she taught me that all people are equal and that women hold up half the sky.

Because the emperor doted on her, he made an exception and let me, a princess, attend the imperial school.

Once I learned to read, everything became clear.

I understood exactly why my brothers fought for the throne.

The emperor’s wet nurse praised the medicinal cuisine my family made, calling it miraculous.

That very night, soldiers came to seize the secret recipe.

My father and mother guarded it with their lives and died beneath the blades.

My sister-in-law was dragged away, violated, and left to rot in the wilderness.

I only survived because she had hidden me in the water vat in the back courtyard.

The tyrant’s wrath destroyed my family, all while my brother was far away at the border, defending his city for him.

Five years later, the newly appointed Guardian General returned triumphant from the war.

At the victory banquet, the tyrant asked what reward he desired.

He knelt and bowed solemnly: “Your servant has lost both parents and has only one little sister left in this world.”

“She has long admired Your Majesty. I beg Your Majesty to grant this wish.”

I have never been able to stand idle people.

The moment I married into the Li family, I found my new husband surrounded by a flock of talented beauties—and not a single one of them doing a day’s work.

So I lined everyone up and put them all to work: the pipa player to the music house, the dancer to the embroidery shop, and my useless heir of a husband off to perform for Prince Qi.

What started as a scheme to pay off the manor’s debts snowballed into a commercial empire—until the court, the temples, and a rebellion turned my money-making machine into something far more dangerous.

My possessiveness has always been off the charts.

Luckily, my boyfriend is the obedient type—his phone open to me anytime, reporting in around the clock, and keeping two meters away from every passing dog.

But a voice calling itself “the System” appears in my head: the male lead doesn’t love me, and I’m just a control-freak extra who should leave.

I brush it off—until Xie Ji really starts acting strange, and I find a diary entry that chills my blood.

My possessiveness evaporates in an instant, and I run away that very night.

Three days later, the System comes online, sobbing: the female lead who tried to help me escape has been kidnapped by the man I once thought I knew.

Me: ?

I had transmigrated over a decade ago, and my face-slapping counterattack System finally arrived, late as ever.

By then, I was already the Empress.

“Host,” the System said, “first mission: the maidservant slaps the young miss.”

I gazed at the young miss’s grave and couldn’t help but laugh out loud.

I transmigrated into a tragedy novel.

I became the true daughter of the Jiang family—abandoned by my parents, unloved, and kidnapped as a child.

No matter what I said, nobody believed me. Instead, they were convinced I was malicious and scheming, trying to frame the fake daughter.

It wasn’t until I got cancer and took my own life that they finally woke up and saw the truth.

They cried. They regretted. They mourned me.

The System said excitedly, “After you die, they can never have you again.”

“From now on, their whole lives will be filled with nothing but pain and regret.”

“You’ve used your life to take revenge on them! You’ve made them lose what they love most!”

I frowned. Cancer? A tragedy novel?

Then I turned around and slit my own throat.

I became a vengeful ghost.

The Cui family precepts held that a daughter of the Cui clan married no merchant and became no concubine.

So when the edict naming me a Noble Consort arrived, the great aristocratic families all assumed that the new emperor meant to humiliate our house.

And yet I did not hesitate to break with my family and entered the palace in that small sedan chair.

Because I had already died twice.

This was the third life I had been given.