Female Protagonist

During the autumn hunt, my fiancé’s precious first love deliberately shot an arrow through my hair.

The ladies around us went white with shock.

But her eyes reddened, and she shrank behind my fiancé.

“My arrow went astray.

I didn’t mean to hurt her.

But she stood in front of my quarry and wouldn’t move.

Surely she bears some of the blame?”

My fiancé shielded her and shouted at me: “Weapons don’t have eyes.

If you can’t dodge them on a hunting ground, that’s your own incompetence.”

I merely murmured assent.

Then I raised my bow.

Three arrows whistled from it at once.

They pierced the left sides of the pair’s chests and the venomous snake behind them.

The two collapsed into pools of blood, their faces paper-white.

I picked up the snake and gave them a cold smile.

“Why didn’t you dodge?

Didn’t feel like it?”

My mother taught me never to trust a man’s affection.

When a marquis’s family chose me to marry their reckless third son, I saw my chance to rise.

He already kept a pregnant mistress, but I had no intention of fighting her for his love.

I would save her, secure my place, and make myself indispensable.

In a house full of secrets, every crisis could become a rung on my ladder.

After a fight with my husband, I went to my boyfriend for comfort.

Then we got caught.

My boyfriend stepped in front of me and told my husband, “The one she doesn’t love is the other man!”

I said, “Keep your voice down!

Is this something to be proud of?”

Ten years after I became Xiaotian, the Celestial Hound, I finally took human form.

As a woman.

Yang Jian went silent.

All three of his eyes blinked for ages.

He still couldn’t work it out.

His best buddy was definitely male.

I was the late emperor’s younger sister, the reigning emperor’s own aunt, and the only Grand Princess of Great Jin.

On my sixtieth birthday, my husband’s supposedly dead first wife appeared at my door with the daughter she had borne late in life.

“The first wife is the lawful wife; her successor must take a concubine’s place.

But Your Highness is far too exalted for me to ask that of you.

I am willing to become a concubine myself.

I ask only that you show mercy and allow Mian to be entered in her father’s clan register, so that father and daughter may be reunited.”

Only then did I learn that the husband who had shown me such love and devotion had been keeping her in another household for forty years.

After they discovered I was not their real daughter, they began withholding everything—my food, my clothes, even the charcoal for my fire.

My betrothal to the Pei family became the only thing I could rely on.

But Pei Xuan’s moods were impossible to predict.

A single word from me would often anger him enough to send a letter breaking off our engagement.

I spent my days in fear and my nights in worry.

At last, I fell gravely ill.

When I woke, the lady of the household stood before me.

“A captain serving under my uncle commands a hundred men.”

“His birth is humble, but he is young and brave.

He has distinguished himself in battle again and again.”

Holding the letter of repudiation, she looked pained.

“The Peis may be an excellent family, but your present standing makes you an unsuitable match.

You live in constant fear.”

“What are wealth and glory worth beside your life?”

“We were mother and daughter once.

I truly want to find you a good husband.”

I pressed a hand to my chest and nodded through my tears.

“I understand, my lady.”

“I will marry him.”

When I was still a little fox, the crown prince rescued me from a trap.

He took me home and raised me for nine years.

Then, at fifteen, he fell in love with a girl.

The imperial family said her birth was beneath him.

So I found him a divine herb that could summon the image of a phoenix in the sky.

On their wedding day, I happily went off to the feast to sneak a bite of pork knuckle.

Before I could get any, he came to feed me a bowl of meat broth, just as he always did.

I drank it and passed out as though drunk.

When I woke, my inner core was gone.

I sacrificed three tails just to cling to life.

Taking human form, I returned to his side.

And saw my inner core hanging around the neck of his beloved wife.

Pei Xu was the Chancellor’s son.

On a wager, he disguised himself as a poor young man and set out to win me over.

Instead, he fell deeply in love with me and swore he would marry no one else.

When his sister learned of it, she had my younger brother and sister killed, then sold me to a brothel to put an end to my presumptuous dreams.

Years later, she was to marry the young marquis.

But on their wedding day, he never came to fetch his bride.

Dressed in his wedding robes, he was at a brothel, spending a fortune on me.

My youngest sister had been flirting with three men.

Unfortunately, she had used my name and our middle sister’s.

All three came to ask for her hand.

To smooth things over, our parents suggested that we each marry one of them.

My other sister wavered.

I refused.

There was nothing wrong with me.

Why should I marry a man who had loved my sister?

Didn’t I deserve a love untainted by all this?

I looked up at my youngest sister, who kept avoiding my eyes, and said evenly: “First, tell me exactly what happened between you and those three men.”

In my previous life, before my elder sister entered the palace to become empress, she bent her head to tell me, “Ah Ting, when I’m gone, you must take care of yourself.”

I promised her through my tears.

Five years later, the empress fell out of favor.

Her enemies had her raped, and that night she hanged herself.

The emperor decreed that the deposed empress of the Meng family was without virtue.

No one in the capital was permitted to wear mourning white.

I went to beg forgiveness on behalf of the Meng family.

Struck by my beauty, His Majesty took me into the palace, where I became the most favored woman in his harem.

The day I dragged him into the flames to die with me, he closed his hands around my throat in a rage.

“I have treated your family well!

For your sake, I even overlooked that defiled, deposed empress!”

I let the fire climb over me as though I could feel nothing.

“I didn’t.”

When I woke again, it was the day my sister entered the palace.

She stroked my head, then turned toward the palace that devoured people.

I stripped off my fine clothes and jewelry, then turned toward the bloodshed of an army camp.

Let us see whether that imperial bastard would still dare call her “deposed empress” when I surrounded his palace with my army.