Character Growth

When General Lin Zhao returns from the northern frontier with a beautiful, unconventional young woman, Cheng Qingqing fears she is about to lose the husband she has loved since childhood.

Then Xu Liuzhao tells her an impossible truth: their world is a book, and Qingqing is its doomed heroine—a treasured canary destined to be abused, blamed, and caged by three powerful men.

Xu Liuzhao came to save her.

To survive, Qingqing must unlearn everything she was taught about love, obedience, and a woman’s place—and discover how far she is willing to go to claim her freedom.

Qiao Xiaohe knows from the beginning that Jiang Haozhi is a wealthy heir pretending to be a poor delivery worker.

Lonely and exhausted by debt, she accepts his false romance because even borrowed companionship feels like a gift.

But when the truth comes out, Haozhi discovers that his game became real for him long before Xiaohe was ready to choose herself.

Walking away gives her the chance to build a life where happiness is something she creates, not something she begs another person to provide.

When the marquis’s household finally brought me home, I was already twenty years old—old enough that women my age had children, while I remained unwed.

Only after entering the estate did I learn that I had been promised in marriage before I was born, but the false heiress raised in my place had already married my betrothed.

She and the ducal heir were deeply in love, with both a son and a daughter, and theirs was celebrated throughout the capital as a perfect match.

When she faced me, guilt overwhelmed her so completely that she could not speak through her tears.

Mother held her close and comforted her, while the ducal heir vowed that she would be the only woman in his life.

I stood straight and composed, pretending none of it mattered.

Hidden inside my sleeve, however, my fingers clutched my skirt so tightly that they ached to the bone.

That night, Mother took my hand and sighed, urging me to accept that everything was already settled and let it go.

She promised to find me a better marriage and said she had already considered several fine young gentlemen.

I stared at the osmanthus tree perfuming the courtyard and found myself thinking instead of the pigs back home, with no one left to tend them.

“Mother,” I said, “I don’t want a marriage. Please let me go home.”

I was my birth parents’ third child.

While my birth mother was pregnant with me, the village fortune-teller swore I would be a boy.

They could hardly wait.

They hid from place to place throughout the pregnancy and finally brought me into the world in the bitter cold of the twelfth lunar month—

a girl.

I was the heroine of a sweet-wife story: delicate, soft, and made to be swept off my feet.

All I had to do was behave and let one man after another dote on me.

My stepbrother was walking toward me with a glass of milk when a system appeared.

It told me that, according to the plot, I was supposed to develop a sex addiction that very day. From then on, the slightest contact with a man would leave me unbearably aroused, and it would only get worse.

That sounded pretty good to me.

I drained the milk in one gulp.

My stepbrother smiled.

I smiled too.

The system gave an even more wicked little chuckle.

“Except I just changed it into an addiction to studying.”

After my boyfriend dumped me, he planned to go to Tsinghua University with the beautiful top student and live happily ever after.

But when the National College Entrance Examination ended, I was the only student from our school admitted to Tsinghua, and I took the stage as the student representative.

The two of them could only watch from below.

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?

Everyone envied me for being born into the splendor of the Prime Minister’s Mansion.

But in the Prime Minister’s Mansion, there were four daughters like me.

The beauty I took such pride in was hardly worth mentioning before my eldest sister’s effortless grace.

The schemes I had painstakingly built were no match for Fourth Sister, who could overturn the clouds and summon the rain with the slightest lift of her hand.

I watched in satisfaction as my eldest sister entered the palace as an imperial consort, only to be promised by my father, in the blink of an eye, to a boorish man who had nothing but an empty noble title.

Only then did I understand.

From the day my eldest sister entered the palace, my marriage had become nothing more than a stepping stone to support her.

The poisoned, honeyed words of the women in the inner residence, and the impatience and contempt in my husband’s eyes.

Every single day reminded me of my failure.

But I refused to admit defeat.

If blood ties could not be severed, then I would bow even lower.

As long as the bloodline of the Kong Clan remained, I could still stir this dead game back to life.

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.

In my last life, I saved He Yan, the young master of a marquis manor.

He took me as his wife, and for a time, our marriage was the talk of Shangjing.

But I had been born and raised in the countryside.

My manners were crude, and my reputation gradually soured.

He Yan, too, slowly grew distant from me.

I wept day after day, and before I even reached thirty, I died in misery.

Given a second chance, I swore I would never live that way again.

Only, after eating wild greens for three days straight, I realized I simply could not let go of the marquis manor’s soy-braised pork knuckle, sticky rice chicken, crab roe lion’s head meatballs, scallion-fried lamb…