Clever Protagonist

When Xie Yan was diagnosed with stomach cancer, I was abroad, clearing my head.

He was calling for the hundredth time when my secretary-a man standing six-foot-two-finally picked up the phone.

“Where are you? Who is that with you?” I heard his voice crack over the line, sounding like he was on the verge of a total breakdown.

I couldn’t help but let out a mocking sneer. “Didn’t we agree to stay out of each other’s business? Why are you acting like such a sore loser now?”

My father’s favored concubine trained my younger sister in all the arts of the pleasure quarters, convinced it would help her secure a man’s heart.

When I came of age, she proposed that Yuniang marry alongside me as an accompanying concubine.

There was only one flaw in her plan.

As the Qiao family’s legitimate eldest daughter and future head, I was never marrying out—I would take a husband into my own household.

On his deathbed, the late emperor entrusted me with his heir—and had me bound and dragged back overnight to assist the new emperor.

Isolated and alone, the new emperor glared through bloodshot eyes, snapping at anyone who came near like a wolf cub.

“Better that I betray the world than let the world betray me!”

My eyes lit up.

The new emperor, later: “On second thought, the world hasn’t wronged me quite that badly.”

My younger sister was blessed with heaven-defying luck, while I was a walking disaster.

Only later did I learn that she had bonded with a system.

She could choose one person to suffer misfortune and turn that misfortune into luck for herself.

I was the unlucky person she chose.

Then I bonded with a system too.

Mine had only one function: rewrite.

My sister remained lucky, but the people paying the price became my father, my mother, my brother, her boyfriend…

And she successfully turned herself into a jinx despised by everyone equally.

Luo Yufu sacrifices her chastity to save Crown Prince Xiao Jinhe, only to dream of the future he will force upon her: a loveless marriage, betrayal, and death beneath a rain of arrows.

When she wakes before their engagement is sealed, she refuses to repeat that doomed fate.

But escaping the Crown Prince means untangling the Empress’s schemes, her sister’s hatred, a hidden conspiracy inside her own family, and Wanyan Shu—the ruthless hostage prince who once killed her in that dream, yet now seems determined to stand at her side.

This time, Luo Yufu will not wait for destiny to choose her ending.

After a brilliant student leaps to his death during the high school entrance examination, Officer Zhong closes the case as a tragic suicide.

One month later, his own son vanishes, and every clue points to the dead boy’s father—a gifted mathematician and convicted rapist.

A strange number sequence becomes the key to a staged kidnapping, a buried miscarriage of justice, and a dying son’s final attempt to turn his father’s greatest weakness into armor.

Song Yayue has spent fifteen years trapped behind a talisman-enforced silence, so no one suspects that the supposedly mute, illiterate bride is a born chatterbox.

On her wedding night, she catches her husband in bed with the Crown Princess—and nearly exposes herself to the blind Crown Prince who guides her through the dark.

But He Zhiyu is no more blind than Yayue is mute, and the two betrayed spouses strike a bargain: she will become his eyes and ears, and he will keep her alive.

As an adulterous affair unravels into a royal conspiracy, Yayue discovers that the deadliest weapon in the palace may be the voice she has been forbidden to use.

At my daughter’s birthday banquet, the longevity lock in its brocade box had been replaced with a decapitated snake.

As every noblewoman in the courtyard screamed in terror, my husband’s former beloved reddened her eyes, hugged her son, and apologized.

“He is only a child.

He did not mean to curse the young lady with an early death by bringing her a headless snake.”

Beneath her lowered gaze was a taunt.

She was waiting for me to fly into a rage and ruin my own daughter’s celebration.

I merely gave a quiet hum.

At once, a servant swung a cudgel into the back of her knee.

She dropped to the ground before me, smashing her forehead against the flagstones.

Blood streamed down her face.

She looked utterly wretched.

I tapped the lid of my teacup without even looking up.

“Drag her out and kill her.”

“The child may not know better, but is the adult dead too?”

Li Furong spends three years saving Xie Qingheng through exile, only to be dismissed before his powerful friends as nothing more than a loyal servant.

When the man who promised her a future breaks his word and forces her into a nameless place in his household, she turns every lesson in survival against him.

Trapped among noblewomen as dangerous as the men who command them, Furong must decide how much of herself she will sacrifice to win the one thing she has always wanted: a life that belongs to her.

After my husband leaves on a business trip, my best friend moves in so I won’t be lonely.

Then I hear the stray cat’s thoughts and realize it is my husband, plotting with my friend to kill me for my inheritance and insurance payout.

He thinks I will never discover the truth.

So I decide to take him to the vet and have him neutered first.