2026

I fled to Linjiang with my five-year-old sister.

We were close to starving when we met the kindhearted Steward Zhou.

“My mistress has been bedridden for a long time,” he told me.

“She wishes to adopt a daughter, someone to ease the loneliness of having no children.”

“Both your birth charts are compatible with hers.

One of you can be the young lady, but the other must be a maid.”

“Well, child?

Which will you choose?”

In my third year trapped inside a novel, the emperor learned to watch livestreams—and struck up an online flirtation with a thirst-trap streamer.

He even promised her: “Come over to this world, and you can be my empress!”

“Remember, bring your body.

No possessing someone else’s.”

I took one look at her username, “Will Fly Anywhere in the Country,” and spent the night packing my escape bag.

People from the modern world were crawling with viruses.

One sneeze could wipe out the whole palace.

And this woman was a prostitute!

The day they took my mother away, I clung to her and wouldn’t let go.

My little brother blocked the car too, demanding fifty thousand yuan.

That was about the going rate for a wife in our village.

But she was my mother.

You couldn’t sell your mother.

No dutiful daughter would do that.

Sure enough, someone in the car shoved me aside and roared, “To hell with your dad!

We can’t stay here!”

Then they drove off.

I’d never been to school.

I didn’t understand things.

But one sentence stuck in my head: “He can’t stay here.”

My cousin got drunk and raped my little sister.

“I’ll take her as a concubine, then,” he said, as though it hardly mattered.

Grandmother said, “With that ugly face of hers, my precious grandson is the one being wronged.”

Mother murmured, “Amitabha.

Perhaps this is a blessing in disguise.”

I took a willow switch and whipped my cousin without mercy.

Then I told them all, “Under the laws of this dynasty, the punishment for raping a girl under twelve is death.”

My mother loved my father all her life.

Only on her deathbed did she let go.

“Ah Yao,” she told me, “whether a husband and wife love each other doesn’t really matter.

Treating each other with respect is the best ending you can hope for.”

Looking at her withered face, I wept and told her I would remember.

If I married, a quiet life of mutual affection and respect would be enough.

But when I had made all my preparations and traveled to Jiangnan to be married, I found things rather different from what I had imagined.

My fiancé complained, “Ah Yao!

Don’t you like what I’m wearing today?

Why won’t you look at me a little longer?”

“Ah Yao, Ah Yao!

Tell her I’m your husband!

She mustn’t throw any more handkerchiefs at me.”

This fiancé of mine seemed nothing like the man my father had described.

Just as I was wondering whether to break off our engagement… My father arrived.

The moment he came through the door, he cried anxiously, “Ah Yao, you’ve got the wrong man!”

It turned out he had misremembered the address.

The fiancé I had been exchanging letters with for three months was the wrong one.

He hurried me off to meet my actual fiancé at his home.

I had barely taken my seat when the man who had been my mistaken fiancé walked in.

“Ah Yao!”

he asked in delighted surprise.

“What are you doing here?”

And my actual fiancé asked hesitantly, “Uncle, do you know my fiancée?”

Jiang Yue was the stand-in my family had chosen to bear my misfortunes.

She ate and slept beside me, raised as though she were the marquis’s second legitimate daughter.

She won Grandmother’s favor and Father’s affection, and she and my fiancé fell in love.

Only when she urged Pei Yu to push me into the fire did I learn that she was the cherished daughter of Father’s mistress.

I had been the one bearing her misfortunes all along.

She took my place, inherited my mother’s dowry, and married into the Duke of Yan’s household.

When I opened my eyes again, I had returned to the day she was first brought to our estate.

She took my hand and promised to protect me.

I was undergoing my lightning tribulation, on the verge of ascending.

A young herbal apprentice came up the mountain to gather herbs and was struck by the tribulation lightning.

Our fates became entangled, and I granted him three wishes.

Anything was possible, provided it defied neither Heaven’s law nor human morality.

His eyes shone.

“Lady Fox Immortal, my first wish is to take you as my wife.”

I agreed.

As we bowed to Heaven and Earth, we both vowed to have only each other for the rest of our lives—to be kind to one another, to weather hardship together, and never to part.

Only later did I learn that mortals could make empty promises.

Once we spirits swore a vow, however, we had to keep it to the end.

Late at night, a crow outside my window spat out a human eyeball right in front of me.

I jumped up to call the police, terrified, but all I got was a busy signal.

I went to get the phone belonging to the obsessive, boyish-looking performer I managed.

He suddenly stood up and stared straight at me.

One hand pointed toward the window.

I looked.

The crows filling the sky were all crashing into our glass.

Their dead bodies covered the window, blood and feathers smeared across it.

I grabbed his phone.

This time the call connected, but what came from the other end was a crow’s piercing screech!

By the time the palace found me, I was already three months pregnant.

Even so, the man who called himself my imperial father issued a decree arranging my marriage.

And just like that, I went from an orphan with neither father nor mother to a princess, sent away to buy peace with a marriage.

The whole capital knows Zhao Qingzhi as a jealous woman.

Only young General Pei dares to marry her, declaring that a man who can catch tigers and kill bandits has no reason to fear a fiery wife.

After the wedding, he proudly tells his friends he has tamed her.

But one friend knows the truth: the maid Zhao Qingzhi had beaten was her father’s illegitimate daughter, and the story behind her jealousy is far more painful than the rumors suggest.

Humiliated by the correction, the young general decides to prove who rules his household.

The next day, he brings that very maid home.