Death of Loved Ones

In my third year as Empress Dowager, my greatest fear is not the court officials, nor the brushes held by the court historians.

It is the moments when I wake from a dream in the dead of night and instinctively call out the name of Xie Wuyang.

As the palace lanterns flicker to life, I am reminded that three years ago, I was the one who personally wrote the secret order sending him to his death at Yanhui Ridge.

On the final day of the divorce cooling-off period, I waited for Yuan Shiyu at the Civil Affairs Bureau for three hours.

The person who eventually arrived wasn’t him; instead, it was a hospital representative delivering a critical condition notice and a last letter.

Everyone thought he had finally agreed to let me go. Only I knew that the first sentence of that letter read: Wantang, I’m sorry, I really can’t make it this time.

For four years, Emperor Pei Guannan has refused to fill his harem, and the court blames the man at his side.

Xie Yuanzhen has shared his hardships for fifteen years, asking for neither power nor reward.

But loyalty cannot give the dynasty an heir, and love cannot silence the ministers.

To protect the emperor’s name, Yuanzhen leaves the palace to serve the people.

Across snowbound roads and the endless rain of Nanyue, the words they cannot say become letters—and a promise to live to eighty.

In the year of famine, disaster fell upon our entire village.

My little brother was so hungry he no longer had the strength to cry, yet his small belly was swollen tight and shiny.

Mother held him in her arms and sat on the threshold, motionless, like a clay idol that had lost its soul.

In the pot was Guanyin clay boiled in clear water. Eating it made your stomach swell, and then you couldn’t pass it.

“Girl…” Father finally spoke. “Don’t blame your mother and me for being cruel… In the palace, in the palace there’ll at least be a mouthful of food.”

When the human trafficker came in, he brought with him a gust of dry, cold wind.

“She’s decent-looking enough, just a bit too thin and weak.

“Three pecks of millet. Not a grain more.”

I saw Father’s hand trembling violently as he pressed his handprint onto that sheet of paper.

Three pecks of golden-yellow millet were poured into the only broken grain jar in our home, making a soft rustling sound.

It was such a beautiful sound-the most beautiful sound I had ever heard.

My little brother would probably live through this winter.

There is a palace rule in the Great Sheng Dynasty: regardless of rank or status, whoever gives birth to a child must raise that child.

Mother was the most insignificant Cairen in the harem.

Ever since I was born, I lived with her in the neglected Chengze Hall.

When I was eight, the Imperial Physician diagnosed Mother with a severe illness and said she did not have long to live.

That day, Mother jumped into the Taiye Pond and saved the drowning Third Prince.

She saved the Third Prince’s life, but lost her own in the waters of Taiye Pond.

Rumors spread throughout the palace. Everyone said, “The Third Prince stepped on Cui Cairen’s head, pushing her underwater so he could climb ashore.”

They fanned the flames, but I knew in my heart that Mother did it on purpose.

She used her own life to ensure that, after her death, I could be taken in by the Third Prince’s birth mother, Consort Qi.

Mother was so foolish.

She thought she had paved a path for me.

She forgot.

A child without a mother leads a bitter life.

We had been together for three years, yet my girlfriend still couldn’t forget her first love.

There was a locked room in her house-a promise she had kept for him.

As long as he returned, there would always be a place for him in her home.

For his sake, she abandoned me time and time again.

The final time, I left nothing but a single breakup text and vanished without a trace.

Yet, she acted as if she had gone mad, searching the entire world for me.

Eventually, in a cemetery, she finally discovered the truth behind everything.

With bloodshot eyes, she pointed at the person in the black-and-white photograph-someone who bore an eighty percent resemblance to her-and interrogated me.

“Shen Yu, tell me-” “Every time you looked at me, who exactly were you thinking of?”

On a night of torrential rain, I ordered my girlfriend’s favorite milk tea and river snail rice noodles while she pulled an all-nighter.

However, even though the app showed the delivery had arrived at her location, my girlfriend still hadn’t marked it as received.

Just as I was about to call and check on her, the delivery rider sent me a photo through the app.

“Hey man, this is the right place, isn’t it?”

“That guy trying to pry the door open… that isn’t you, is it?”

On the day my husband ascended to immortality, a shaft of divine light struck me in the eyes.

From that moment on, I was blind.

The light coursed through my body day after day.

The pain left me unable to hold my chopsticks or even walk.

Every breath felt like needles piercing me.

Only later did I learn the truth.

My husband’s junior martial sister resented me for being his mortal love trial, so she had decided to teach me a lesson.

My husband knew exactly what she had done, yet he gathered her into his arms and sighed indulgently.

“How could you be so willful?”

“You must never do this again.”

“And in three years, you will lift the spell from her.”

His junior sister threw herself happily into his embrace and declared that he was the best senior brother in the world.

My heart felt carved apart, but my eyes were so dry I could not shed a single tear.

Once, I had still held out hope for my husband.

I had thought he did not know.

It turned out he knew everything.

He had simply chosen her and abandoned me.

Later, I ascended too.

On my first day in the immortal realm, I borrowed the power of the welcoming light and destroyed his junior sister’s eyes.

On the night before the college entrance exam, I was raped.

Two murderers broke into our home and brutalized me right in front of my grandmother.

Then, they strangled her to death right before my eyes.

I barely escaped with my life, but I went from being a star student destined for Tsinghua and Peking Universities to a useless cripple, paralyzed from the neck down and unable even to use the bathroom on my own.

Fortunately, I have been reborn.

I have returned to the very moment the killers knocked on the door.

Five years ago, I left Qi Tan in a fit of pique.

Later, after he won the Best Actor award, he stood at the Hundred Stars Awards Ceremony holding my photograph, pleading for help to find me. “My lover has been missing for a month,” he said. “Please, help me find her.”

But the news of my gruesome death had already broken countless times back in 2018. Qi Tan, however, had suffered a trauma-induced bout of amnesia, forgetting everything that happened after I died.

On the day his manager announced that Qi Tan was retiring from the industry indefinitely, the news of his suicide exploded across the headlines.