2026

On the day I was deposed and consigned to the Cold Palace, Yan Yuheng came personally to see me off.

Before the palace gates were locked, he asked whether I hated him.

I touched the old gold hairpin hidden in my sleeve and smiled. For three years as Empress, I learned to speak like her, to carry myself like her, and to love him the way she once had.

But even as I was dying, he never understood: I was never like Shen Zhaotang. I had only acted too well.

Three years after Lin Wan’s death, I found the record of her seven years of love for me tucked away in an old cardboard box.

The last page still carried the smell of medicine, where she asked if, in the next life, I could be the one to love her first. That night, I finally understood that the cruelest thing I had ever done was to let someone waste away to death without ever once looking back at her.

I’m a rookie Ghost Agent for the Netherworld.

To crush my KPIs and earn a promotion, I started staking out my targets three days before their scheduled deaths.

My first subject was an elderly woman.

Out of nowhere, she turned to me and asked, “Am I about to die?”

Two years into our marriage, I finally became pregnant.

But then my husband brought home an eight-year-old girl.

That girl called him “Dad.”

The summer I turned ten, my younger sister went missing.

She vanished on her way to deliver lunch to our parents.

There were no security cameras, and no one had seen her.

Because I was the one who was supposed to have gone, my mother never spoke another word to me again.

Fifteen years later, I became a police officer. I retraced the path my sister took that day, over and over again.

The past began to resurface in my mind, piece by piece.

Slowly, I pieced together a heartbreaking truth.

The whole Immortal Sect was waiting for my archrival and me to perish together, but we secretly got married first.

On the Evil-Slaying Platform, I was ordered to kill Dong Linyuan. The moment the tip of my sword pierced through his heart, a spray of blood simultaneously erupted from my own chest.

The entire Immortal Sect was waiting to see us die together, but they didn’t know that at the stroke of midnight last night, he and I had just formed a Life-Binding Pact in the Ancestor Hall. If even one of us dies today, Yin Zhixiao will be able to ascend to immortality by stepping over the corpses of the entire Immortal Sect.

The night Grandma draped the red cloak over my shoulders, there was still unwashed blood tucked beneath her fingernails.

She told me to take a cake to the Cabin in the Woods to visit “sick Grandma,” yet I had seen her with my own eyes returning from that very cabin only last night.

I stayed by his side from his impoverished youth until he held the world in his palm.

Yet, I was forced to watch as he elevated my half-sister to the status of equal wife and executed my entire family.

I met a miserable end. Given a second chance at life, I watch as his back bows in defeat, his body trembling with regret.

I burn our marriage contract. I wish him a meteoric rise and a boundless future.

A boundless future, without me.

The celebrity Zhu Yuan is dead. I still hate her. She always made me feel as wretched and hidden as a rat scurrying across the street.

And yet, I found her third gift. It was a plain music box sitting in the hospital corridor.

I casually handed it to the child in the neighboring bed.

She was dying, too.

On the day my lady and I fled, I went east while she went west.

Dressed in her clothes and carrying her token, I drew the pursuers away for her.

At death’s door, I was rescued. My lady’s betrothed mistook me for her.

Badly wounded and stripped of my memories, I was cherished by him and carefully nursed. He even married me.

Five years later, he brought back a battered woman. It was my lady. Convinced that I had deceived him, Qi Yu hated me to the bone and sent me to my death with a cup of poison.

When I opened my eyes again, I was back on the day I lured the enemy away for her.

I returned her clothes and token, then smiled and told her: “Go east. And don’t look back.”