Family

In 1993, twenty-two-year-old Huang Xincheng goes to prison after defending his pregnant girlfriend, Li Fang, from a drunken harasser.

Four years later, he comes home determined to rebuild his life and earn her family’s trust.

For a brief season, hard work gives him everything he has ever wanted: a wife, loving parents, and a child on the way.

Then one senseless act takes Li Fang from him, leaving him with a newborn son, two grieving elders, and a promise he will spend the rest of his life trying to keep.

When Meng Wei—the man whose kidney he destroyed in that first fight—returns to ruin his livelihood, Huang discovers that prison settled nothing.

Backed by a powerful clan, Meng Wei attacks every honest path Huang tries to take until the only door left open leads into the underworld.

Huang rises from mahjong-parlor manager to crime boss and real-estate tycoon, telling himself every compromise is for his family.

But as loyalty becomes murder and ambition becomes corruption, the good man Li Fang loved grows harder to recognize.

Over seventeen years of revenge, two men drag each other toward destruction.

One father’s dream of giving his son a spotless future is built upon crimes that refuse to stay buried.

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?”

My mother had been a pawned wife, passed through many households and made to bear many sons.

When age took her beauty and she could no longer have children, she opened a wife-pawning house of her own and began selling other men’s wives.

One spring day, a carriage stopped outside our shop.

A handsome young scholar stood there with tears reddening his eyes.

“Mother,” he said, “I’ve come to take you home and give you a life of comfort.”

The newly appointed imperial scholar claimed he was one of the sons she had borne, and he had returned to repay the gift of life.

The world is one giant slapdash production, and I somehow drift through it anyway.

My father is a financial tycoon, but I can barely handle addition and subtraction under ten. My mother is a gorgeous award-winning actress, while I look perfectly ordinary. My brother held his first solo art exhibition at four, while at five I was still toddling after him babbling nonsense.

Even our maid, Wang Ma, and our butler, Uncle Chen, turned out to be retired legends hiding in plain sight.

Thankfully, all of them adored me. I slowly made peace with being ordinary.

Then one day, a genius girl who had gone viral online showed up at our door and demanded that I give her back her place as the real daughter of the Su family.

Wonderful. The worry that had been hanging over me for years finally dropped dead.

In the year I was desperately poor, I deliberately fed two of my fingers into the factory machinery and had them crushed, all for the thirty thousand yuan my grandmother needed for surgery.

The factory manager frowned with such pain that he wanted to compensate me eighty thousand yuan. I was too guilty to take it, so I only asked for thirty thousand.

Years passed. My grandmother had been gone for many years.

Then I saw a trending news report: the factory from back then had been swallowed by a fire.

The factory manager had died of a heart attack. His wife had vanished.

Their twelve-year-old son had been sent to an orphanage.

Looking at those helpless, terrified eyes on the screen, I poured the medicine I had been about to swallow down the drain.

Then… let me live once more.

For that thirty thousand yuan from back then.

I am the pampered little fake heiress who was driven out to the countryside.

To go from the young lady of Marquis Manor to a carpenter’s eldest daughter-there is simply no living like this!

In order to return to the noble circles of Capital City, I set my sights on the scholar next door.

Standing on a ladder, I waved my handkerchief coquettishly over the wall.

“Hey~ I heard you’re my fiancé?”

The man chopping firewood with his upper body bare slowly turned to look at me.

In an indifferent voice, he said, “I am Lin Jiaoyue’s fiancé.”

For a year after I was brought back to the Prime Minister’s mansion, I grew used to admitting fault.

When Song Ruoyun fell at my side yet again, she filled her eyes with practiced tears and looked at me as if words failed her.

My mother, utterly disappointed, struck me without a second thought.

I realized I would never live to see the day they understood they had wronged me, so I chose to leave.

Braving the rain, I knelt before my aunt, who had never gotten along with my mother, and wept: ‘Please take me in, Aunt. Even as your maidservant, I would fare better than as my mother’s own daughter.’

Everyone said I was blessed by fate.

Born behind vermilion gates, I rested my head on jade and wrapped myself in brocade.

At three, I began my education, studying essays on how to govern the realm.

At five, I held an abacus, calculating the empire’s grain and coin.

At twelve, I debated the scholars in the clan school and, though I was a girl, took first place above them all.

At fifteen, during my coming-of-age banquet, warlords from three regions offered mountains and rivers as my betrothal gifts.

And yet, I chose the hardest road of all.

The day I eloped with a lowly soldier who guarded the city gate, the entire city laughed at me for debasing myself.

After one night of passion, I was stricken from the Yin Clan’s rolls, my spotless reputation ruined.

No one knew that the soldier was the last surviving bloodline of the imperial house.

They were fighting for the realm.

What I was fighting for was the right to take history’s iron brush in hand and rewrite the world with a name that could not be questioned.

Do you know what it feels like to be diagnosed with a terminal illness at such a young age?

After Jiang Can dies in a plane crash, her grandmother, He Xiuhua, refuses to let hope die with her. Unseen by the living, Jiang Can’s spirit watches as Grandma searches, grieves, and waits through years of scams, protests, and an ocean-spanning hunt—until enduring love finally brings a family home.