2026

On the day the Su Clan was raided and seized, Father dressed me in a magnificent gown and threw me in front of the soldiers.

“She is Su Yueying, the Eldest Young Miss of the Su Clan.”

Everyone said Father was a loyal servant.

When I saw him again, Father had become the New Emperor’s most trusted Divine Martial Great General.

Su Yueying had become Empress, the New Emperor’s one and only for the rest of his life.

And I was a courtesan in a brothel, a woman anyone could have.

To buy back my freedom, Mother dragged her gravely ill body to beg Father for help.

The gatekeepers beat her to death with two strikes of their staves.

I begged Su Yueying to let Mother be buried.

But she said, “There are plenty of untouched entertainers in the pleasure houses. If you had held fast to your principles, I might still have helped you. But you chose to debase yourself. I will not help someone like that.”

That very night, someone hacked off my limbs and sank me into the river.

When I opened my eyes again, I had returned to the day the Su Clan was raided.

This time, let Su Yueying go to the brothel herself and hold fast to her precious principles.

I am a woman of boundless kindness.

So when Song Lin’an told me that the only woman he had ever loved was my elder half sister, I sent him straight to the grave without hesitation.

“My sister is dead, and since your devotion runs so deep, you should join her. No need to thank me. Nothing delights me more than helping true lovers fulfill their wishes.”

When I opened my eyes again, I was back on the day of our betrothal.

Song Lin’an glared at me and humiliated me before everyone. “The Song family will only welcome a truly virtuous woman. We will never let a vicious shrew through our doors!”

He broke off the match and made me the laughingstock of the capital.

He also branded me a vicious woman.

Song Lin’an schemed his way into marrying my elder half sister instead.

No one wanted me after that.

On the day they returned to visit her family, Song Lin’an sneered at me. “Everyone knows what you really are now. Let us see who else you can ruin!”

I only smiled.

The fool had no idea that in our previous life, I had lived to eighty while he had dropped dead at twenty.

I knew far too many things he did not.

Liang Yu had always thought the first time they met was at an amusement park. But in fact, it was not.

Those days were marked by endless rain, and even her memories carried a damp, overcast gloom.

That morning, her older sister developed a fever again. She lay in bed, sleeping through the entire day until night fell.

Twenty years into Wen Lishu’s widowhood, her bedridden mother-in-law reveals a secret: her husband faked his death and eloped with her sister.

Even the children Lishu raised supposedly belong to that treacherous pair.

The old woman expects despair, but Lishu calmly offers another spoonful of medicine.

Her husband really is dead—and his ashes have been in his mother’s medicine all along.

In 2016, my younger sister fell into an abandoned mine shaft during a class outing.

It took three days to find her.

But there was something inexplicable about her death.

Her water bottle was still full, yet the autopsy concluded that she had died of thirst.

The sight of her body destroyed my parents. One died; the other lost his mind.

Our once-happy family was torn apart.

Ten years later, I earned a doctorate in criminal psychology.

I returned to that abandoned mine shaft and reconstructed the events of that day over and over again…

And uncovered a horrifying truth that overturned everything I thought I knew.

In my last life, Xie Wujiu stormed the capital, and blood ran like rivers before the palace gates. In this life, before he could fall into darkness, I forced him into a private school and made him recite The Analects every day.

Only later did I understand: asking a starving person to speak of benevolence and righteousness can itself be cruel.

I got close to the Crown Prince so I could kill him.

I confessed everything in a dark, dank dungeon.

At fourteen, naive Ah Yuan enters the imperial palace beside her fearless friend Xiaochun, believing the two of them can survive anything together.

But as Xiaochun rises through the emperor’s favor, the women around them are drawn into a harem where affection is political currency and every child can become a weapon.

Ah Yuan survives by holding fast to kindness, even as loyalty turns into leverage, ambition demands blood, and the people she loves make choices she cannot undo.

Across a lifetime shaped by palace secrets, she bears witness to the cost of clinging to power—and to the quiet courage it takes to walk away.

In the fifth year since he took me for himself, the powerful young heir finally grew tired of me.

He handed me a bank card with a lazy smile. “Your childhood sweetheart isn’t actually dead.”

“Go find him.”

I stared at the address in my hand for a long time—so long that he lost patience, hauled me out of bed, and drawled, “I’ll give you a ride. Move your things out after today.”

He had just pulled on his coat and started looking for his car keys when his phone rang.

On the other end, his childhood friend was sobbing anxiously. “If you break up with her, what’s going to happen to Xu Xinghe and me?”

Disfigured by Zhao Ruo and abandoned by every adult who should have protected her, Shen Ting spends years remaking herself as the irresistible Shen Man.

With the bully’s childhood sweetheart falling into her carefully laid trap, she strips the Zhao family of its power one secret at a time—and reserves her cruelest punishment for last.