2026

Grandfather and I returned to the capital in late spring, through days of drizzling rain.

He rode the old gray donkey he kept, holding our only umbrella, a green oil-paper one.

I had no straw rain cape, only a bamboo hat.

My clothes were soaked through.

“Grandfather, aren’t you always saying how much you care for me?

Why don’t you get down and let the donkey carry the luggage?”

He glanced at the enormous bundle on my back, narrowed his eyes slightly, and stroked his beard with an inscrutable smile.

“Grandfather, does the old donkey matter more than your granddaughter?”

I gave its rump a light tap.

It lifted a hind leg to kick me, and I dodged aside.

Through the misty rain, Vermilion Bird Bridge looked exactly the same, as though Grandfather and I had never been away for six years.

Something caught his attention.

He scratched the donkey’s neck, and off it bolted as though it had lost its mind.

I stood frozen on the bridge, at a loss.

Even a donkey mattered more than I did.

Ah, well… I shifted the bundle to my other shoulder.

Just then, a sedan chair was set down before me, an utterly ordinary little blue one.

The curtain slowly lifted.

The man inside scarcely seemed to have changed in six years.

White as snow upon the mountain, bright as the moon among the clouds.

That was what the emperor had said of him before the assembled court when he took first place in the imperial examinations at twenty.

“Wen Sheng…” Song Jin spoke my name softly.

His brows were like distant mountains, and his eyes always held a veil of mist, leaving his thoughts impossible to read.

He was the youngest official of the second rank in Great Wei, the Censor-in-Chief whom His Majesty trusted most, and the upright official the common people praised.

To me, though, he was only a part of my past I could not speak of.

Only the past.

That was all!

Dad brought home a golden retriever especially to keep Mom from getting lonely.

I turned around and sold it to a dog dealer to be bred for twelve litters in a row, until giving birth left it paralyzed.

Because in my last life, Mom had given that dog everything.

She took it everywhere and even held it while she slept.

In just two months, she seemed to age fifty years.

Then she died right in front of me.

The doctor called it sudden-onset premature aging.

Less than a month after we buried Mom, Dad moved her best friend into our house.

The woman who should have been lying in intensive care waiting to die had suddenly recovered.

Wearing Mom’s necklace and sleeping in Mom’s bed, she stroked my head and said, “Niannian, I’m your mommy now.”

Only later did I learn the truth.

Her soul was living inside the golden retriever Dad had brought home.

She was bound to a Life-Swapping System.

All she had to do was stay close to Mom in that dog’s body for forty-nine days straight, and she could steal Mom’s health and lifespan little by little.

When I opened my eyes again, I was back on the day the golden retriever arrived.

I looked down at it and smiled sweetly.

Send them to prison?

I didn’t have enough evidence.

But it was only a female dog in heat.

Sending it off to have eight or ten litters was perfectly reasonable, wasn’t it?

I’m obsessed with my big sister.

I’ve spent twenty years as her devoted servant, practically born into the job.

Nobody knows how to take care of her better than I do, and I’m immensely proud of that.

So when I learned she was going to marry Jiang Xubai, I promptly made a move on his little brother, Jiang Muye.

Dad exploded on the spot and threatened to break my legs.

I protested, “If my sister can marry into their family, why can’t I?”

Dad answered with a sweeping slap: “Because your sister is a girl, and you—are a boy!”

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 was trafficked to a mountain village for a ghost marriage.

But they don’t know I’ve lived for three hundred years and am the Dragon King’s Wife.

In the dead of night, I soothe the Black Dragon coiled around my waist.

“Alright, alright. They’re just little kids of sixty or seventy. What are you getting mad at them for?”

I was drunk.

Out of habit, I sent my ex-husband my location.

“Come get me.”

He replied at once.

“Remember?

We’re divorced.”

“You were the one who asked for it.”

“What, you still want to order me around like a dog?”

I was about to reply when comments started scrolling past: “Is the supporting girl nuts?

Why interrupt the male lead’s date now?”

“If it weren’t for her, he would’ve kissed the female lead already!”

“AAAAAAH, I HATE HER!”

I hurriedly texted him, “Wrong person.”

Ten minutes later, he arrived.

With a woman I’d never seen before.

While staying at my brother’s place, I discovered he was keeping a man prisoner.

Terrified, I fed the man every day.

Then he licked my hand, and I couldn’t take it anymore.

I called my brother on video to demand an explanation.

“Can’t you let your prisoner go?

This is a crime!

You’ve driven him mad!”

My brother, away on business, shrieked.

“Wait.

I moved ages ago.

Didn’t I tell you?”

“Sis, I think you’ve broken into someone else’s home.”

My very first day in the palace scared the hell out of me.

Did everyone here have a thing for pigs?

The emperor was fat enough to be sent to slaughter, yet these women were desperately in love with him, practically beating each other bloody for a chance to sleep with him.

Afraid he might eat me in the middle of the night, I pleaded illness to avoid his attentions.

That was how I met the other women in the palace who stayed out of the competition.

They didn’t like the emperor.

Their hearts belonged to the Third Prince, whom they praised as a gentleman without equal.

Then I spotted an alien at a palace banquet, and they insisted he was the Third Prince.

The guy’s face was an equilateral triangle.

Certainly no one else like him in the world.

I’d planned to keep my head down in the palace for the rest of my life.

But one day, as I strolled by the lotus pond, the emperor smiled at me with his fat pig face.

“I’m the Third Prince.

May I ask which palace you belong to, my lady?”

Your Majesty, do you take me for an idiot?

Wan Youling is a washed-up celebrity mocked across the internet for having no class.

Pressed for money, she joins a livestreamed wilderness survival show in the Ailao Mountains.

When a boastful rival claims to know the range better than anyone, Youling calmly says she is a native—and no one believes her.

Twenty minutes into the mountains, the cameras capture impossible creatures bowing to her, and the cast realizes she may have been telling the truth.

Pei Yizhi was the boy my father had taken in to raise as my future husband.

But after he placed first in the imperial examinations, he married a princess.

I should have stormed up to their gates on their wedding day.

Then the princess’s vicious servants would have beaten me out into the street, where I would die a miserable death.

This time, though, I didn’t.