Complex Family Relationships

I heard the daughter of Tailor Han in the east of town had become an official’s concubine.

Some said she was off to a life of comfort.

Others said she was off to suffer.

I was that daughter of the Han family.

I was a terrible stickler for the truth.

When my husband returned from war, he brought a woman home.

The moment she saw me, she dropped to her knees and declared that she wanted to marry the marquis, even if she could only be his concubine.

I said nothing at the time.

But after tossing and turning until midnight, I could bear it no longer and knocked on her door.

My husband wasn’t the marquis.

The marquis in this household was my widowed father-in-law; my husband was only his third son, born to a concubine.

Her dimming eyes suddenly lit up at the word widowed.

“Fine.

I’ll marry him.”

Everyone around me breathed a sigh of relief when I said it.

My elder sister most of all.

She didn’t want to marry him.

I didn’t mind.

Mostly because the Crown Prince was offering far too much to refuse.

Besides, he’d treated me rather well in my previous life.

Now that I’d been reborn, of course I would clear the thorns from his path.

I wanted to make his journey to my side a little easier.

Everyone in my family was a villain.

In my last life, my father was impeached by Xie Linyuan, the emperor’s brother-in-law.

So Father drugged him and hired several men to ruin his chastity.

After Xie Linyuan rose to power, he had my entire family arrested and our estate confiscated.

In this life, I was determined to be a good person.

I reached Xie Linyuan in time to save him after he was drugged.

He reclined against the bed, his face flushed, but his tongue remained as sharp as ever.

“What shameless temptress is this?

How dare you resort to such vile tricks to harm me?”

My fault.

I had been in such a hurry to save him that I had not even dressed properly.

I said awkwardly, “Well, Lord Xie… should I fetch a girl from next door to cure you?”

“A virgin courtesan would do too?”

I married well.

My husband’s family was one of the most prominent in the area.

My hopelessly devoted husband did whatever I asked, and although my mother-in-law wasn’t entirely happy with me, she was an upright woman who never picked on me.

Then one day, my father-in-law’s two-faced stepsister came back from abroad and made my mother-in-law’s life a living hell.

That was when I stepped in.

I was the only child in our village with no siblings.

My classmates envied me.

“Your parents must spoil you rotten.”

What they did not know was that my status as an only child had been stolen.

Mom had a Leather Handbook that recorded every woman Dad kept on the side.

One of them, Aunt Wei, was marked in particular.

In Mom’s delicate handwriting, she had written: This is the little toy I’m leaving you. Enjoy this life to your heart’s content, my daughter.

After Mom died, that woman buzzed into my life like a fly.

And I swatted her straight down into hell.

As a child, Li Sujun saved an immortal lord who promised to answer whenever she lit the Heaven-Seeking Incense.

She called for him three times.

He never came.

Years later, Sujun has become a healer—and the same immortal lord lies powerless at her door after failing his tribulation.

He insists she is the trial of love he must overcome.

She thinks he should look closer at his own mistakes.

But the dog, cat, and little snake in her home are not what they seem, and the path Sujun abandoned is already winding back toward her.

To understand what Zhao Yunzhi truly lost for her, she must face the family that discarded her, the sect that used him, and the difference between love as possession and love as freedom.

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.

When I was twenty-five, I had a child with one of the most powerful heirs in Beijing’s elite circle.

There was no future for two people as unequal as us, so I took the money and opportunities the He family offered and broke up with him.

Then, five years later, during a break on set.

A little boy who looked strikingly like He Jinnan came looking for me.

He pursed his lips, aggrieved yet stubbornly proud.

“My dad is He Jinnan,” he said.

“And you’re my mom.”

I looked at him and gave a faint hum of acknowledgment.

He hurriedly pulled a thick wad of cash from his backpack.

His eyes were full of pleading.

“Can I hire you for one day to come to my parent-teacher meeting?”