Court Intrigue

When newly crowned Qin Bai casts Yun Qing aside for his first love, her formidable family stops holding his empire together.

As the frontier falters, the capital descends into chaos, and the treasury runs dry, the emperor discovers too late that the people he betrayed were the ones propping up his throne.

While the Yun family watches his favorites fail spectacularly, a battle-hardened prince with an old debt to Yun Qing quietly begins rewriting her future.

My father, the emperor, once traveled through Jiangnan in disguise and encountered a diviner.

The man exposed his identity at a glance and left him with a prophecy: ‘The one who will plunge my realm into chaos stands even now at Your Majesty’s side.’

Even after my father ordered him beaten to death, he refused to name the traitor.

And so my mother, the most favored consort in the Six Palaces, was given a bowl of arsenic by that brutal, suspicious emperor.

After her death, he ordered her hair draped over her face and her mouth stuffed with rice chaff, so that even her ghost would be too ashamed to face anyone and unable to speak.

All because she had been the only person beside him that day.

But there was one thing my father did not know.

At nine years old, hidden behind a curtain, I had heard everything too.

I spent seven years confined with the deposed crown prince, tasting poison for him and taking arrows meant for him.

Again and again, I barely escaped death.

Yet after he ascended the throne, he made his childhood sweetheart his empress.

I remained nothing more than a lowly palace maid.

Everyone knew he despised me.

But when I finally came of age and prepared to leave the palace, he seized my wrist and demanded, ‘Do you have a heart at all?’

Bai Qiqi once saved a woman from another time, only to watch that woman claim the achievements, husband, and son Qiqi had spent years protecting.

When her husband and six-year-old son dismiss her medicinal cooking and household work as worthless, Qiqi walks away from the Prince of Qi’s estate without looking back.

Inside the palace, her healing soups win the trust of the Empress Dowager and the imperial women, while the brilliant younger official Jiang Pu insists that the warmth he feels around her is love, not gratitude.

As Liu Yan’s reckless schemes endanger Qiqi’s child and shake the court, Qiqi must expose the men who steal women’s work—and decide whether she is ready to accept a gentler life of her own.

My eldest legitimate sister hanged herself the night before she was to marry into the Eastern Palace.

The Court of Judicial Review’s postmortem report recorded an impossible finding: she was a virgin, yet three months pregnant.

Her baffling death destroyed my family—my mother killed herself, my father went mad, and the once-glorious Pei estate became a house of ghosts overnight.

Ten years later, I became the Court’s only female coroner and pushed open the carved door of my sister’s long-sealed chamber.

There, buried in my memories of that night, I found a truth monstrous enough to overturn everything I believed.

Would living my life over again make it any better?

After I was reborn, I still chose the young general who had treated me with icy courtesy in my previous life, and rejected the devoted Tanhua scholar.

A road whose every pitfall I had already crossed ought to be easier the second time.

Across two lifetimes, I was already an eighty-year-old woman at heart.

I asked for no great romance, only a safe and steady life.

Xu Qiangyuan has spent her life defying the deadly fate only she can see.

When her once-devoted husband returns from war protecting a pregnant widow and chooses the woman’s lies over his wife, Qiangyuan decides she will not merely end her marriage—she will replace the emperor who refuses to grant the divorce.

With the Grand Princess and the formidable Xu clan at her side, Lady Rakshasa sets out to expose a spy, crush a tyrant, and build a realm where no woman must kneel.

Ten years into our marriage, my husband began lavishing attention on a Transmigrator outside our home.

While the two of them were in the throes of their affair, that Transmigrator, in all her ignorance, came to make a scene before me.

“As expected of a feudal relic trapped in the inner residence until death. You think everyone is like you, unable to live without a man. You underestimated me and belittled him. Apologize.”

I sat in my warm, cushioned sedan chair, my head propped lazily on one hand, without even lifting my eyes.

“Slap her mouth. Use the roughest bamboo paddle.”

This feudal relic might not have much else, but my rank was a little higher, and my methods a little harsher.

So when they beat her, they put a little more force into it.

When the palace announced that I was being elevated to Noble Consort, everyone in my family looked grim.

Everyone understood the principle that great merit can threaten the throne.

My father’s achievements were already so great that there was nothing left to reward him with.

This rank of Noble Consort was a naked warning.

If I wanted to keep my whole family safe, I had to hand the emperor a weakness of mine-something he could hold over me and use to put his mind at ease.

Father, Mother, your daughter is off to be arrogant by imperial command!

Starting today, I’m going to be the most outrageously overbearing little menace in the harem!

On the day the Crown Prince was deposed, I left the Eastern Palace with the palace servants, a bundle on my back.

When we reached a deserted place, the Crown Prince caught my hand. “Come with me. I can protect you.”

Tears shimmered in my eyes. “No. This servant will shave her head and become a nun, to pray for Your Highness’s blessings.”

With that, under his reluctant gaze, I walked into the nunnery.

Of course I couldn’t go with him. He was the male lead, and I was the vicious supporting villainess.

In the original plot, I was supposed to follow him and suffer every hardship at his side. But then he would fall in love with a time-traveling woman, reclaim the throne, and make her Empress.

As for me, I would have to fight that time-traveling woman in the palace, then die a miserable death in the end.

Ugh, please.

I did like the Crown Prince, but my motives weren’t exactly pure. More than anything, I wanted wealth and glory.

Since I already knew how it ended, there was no way I was going to suffer with him.

Luckily, I hadn’t awakened too late. I had already built up quite a fortune.

Five years later, after my first husband died and I was just preparing to marry my second, the Crown Prince appeared before me with a cold, shadowed face.

He gripped my hand with crushing force and said through gritted teeth, “Didn’t you say you were becoming a nun?”