Beautiful Female Lead

I ended up sleeping with the deaf-mute college boy my husband and I had been sponsoring.

While my husband brought his secretary home and took her to bed, I was in the next room, tangled up endlessly with the boy he had sponsored.

He bit his lip, trying to hold back, his face flushed, his eyes hazy.

He typed on his phone and played it aloud through text-to-speech: “Stop! Please don’t touch me there!”

Neither of us expected the volume to be so loud that my husband in the next room heard it.

I was a flower Shen Yan had planted.

He tended me lovingly for years, and I finally took human form the year he killed the emperor and claimed the throne.

One night, I slipped into his bedchamber and lay down beside him, only for him to seize me by the throat.

I looked at him pitifully.

“But this is how I always used to sleep.”

I was the Noble Consort.

An assassin struck at a palace banquet, and the Empress took a sword for me.

The Emperor was stunned.

“I’m right here!

Why are you saving her?”

The Empress collapsed into my arms, blood spilling from the corner of her mouth.

“Her crying is unbearable.

I don’t want to deal with her nonsense.”

But I’d trained in martial arts since I was little.

I could look after myself.

The crying was just to win favor.

Well, this was a mess…

Maybe I should ask Dad’s five hundred thousand soldiers what to do?

I was born rotten. I wanted a better life, so I would do whatever it took.

When I was eight, I waited until my father was drunk, then pushed him into the river and drowned him. After that, I took his corpse to the gates of the marquis estate and sold myself to bury my father, earning my way into the household.

When I was thirteen, I staged a beating so severe that the stewarding matron nearly killed me. The young lady happened to pass by and saved me, and I became her personal maid.

I thought that if I followed the young lady when she married, I might become the Young Lord’s bedchamber maid and finally live comfortably.

Who could have known that the young lady had fallen into a secret affair with a penniless scholar? With a silver tongue and pretty lies, the scholar coaxed her into eloping with him, dragging me along as well.

As I watched the lecherous way the scholar’s eyes swept over me, I let out a deep sigh. I truly did not want to kill anyone. So why did they never let me live a good life?

I am an old palace maid.

I have spent thirty-five full years in this deep palace.

The Chinese parasol tree before Qingliang Hall flourishes year after year, while I grow older with each passing year.

In this lifetime, I have seen the young and inexperienced Consort Zhen pass away, the Consort Yu in the prime of her beauty pass away, and even the white-haired Empress pass away.

They all died in the bloom of youth, crushed beneath the weight of imperial power.

Within these deep palace walls, how many beautiful women’s skeletons lie buried?

In the fifth year of our marriage, I got pregnant, and Fu Chi wept with joy.

Everyone said I was lucky, that I had married an up-and-coming tycoon like Fu Chi.

But no one ever mentioned the actress he was keeping on the side.

It was as if everyone had forgotten that I, too, was the girl he had confessed to at seventeen, his eyes red-rimmed with emotion.

Behind his back, one of his friends warned him, “You’re being such a bastard. Aren’t you afraid Xu Man will divorce you?”

Fu Chi had nothing to fear. He only gave a lazy smile and said, “She won’t.”

Later, without making a scene or saying a word, I aborted the child.

When the news got out, Fu Chi flew back from London overnight.

I was so fond of writhing around in the shadows that the System made me a snake spirit.

A snake spirit in Journey to the West.

I stared at Tang Sanzang being lowered into a cooking pot.

Words failed me.

To stay alive, I had no choice but to become his disciple.

Sun Wukong: “Huh?

We’ve already survived fifty-four of the eighty-one trials, and you’re joining us now?”

Me: “Fate works in mysterious ways.”

During the palace coup, I saved more than forty members of the Jiang household.

Afterward, the emperor asked what reward I wished for.

I knelt before him.

“This commoner wishes to enter the palace.”

The moment I spoke, the bright fire in the eyes of the Jiang family’s second son, standing beside His Majesty, died to ash.

My father was an imperial censor, and nothing mattered to him more than his reputation.

He had fathered me on a prostitute.

Mother and I were the greatest stains on his life, and he would have liked nothing better than to be rid of us.

He Qiong was hailed as the strongest Demon King the demon realm had seen in a thousand years, and every demon expected him to lead them in an assault on the Nine Heavens.

Unfortunately, before that grand ambition could be realized, a beautiful young phoenix lured him into the Celestial Emperor’s ambush and his soul was destroyed.

I fought desperately to seize one fragment of his soul, then hid across the mortal realm like a hunted dog and nourished him with my heart’s blood for five hundred years until I finally brought him back.

Surely hardship revealed true devotion, and after everything I had sacrificed to save him, He Qiong would finally understand who truly loved him and who deserved to stand at his side.

I thought his return would begin a tale of the Demon King bathing the Nine Heavens in blood, but instead it became a tortured romance between him and the Goddess of the Nine Heavens-the little phoenix who had stabbed him in the back a thousand years ago killed herself for love afterward, and the moment he learned the truth, he forgave every betrayal.

Fine, they could keep their tragic, undying love; I knew when I had lost, and I wanted no part of it.

But the love belonged to them while the suffering belonged to me, because just before I left, He Qiong held the phoenix’s last soul fragment and said, “Du Nan, your heart’s blood brought me back after five hundred years, so you can bring her back too, can’t you?”