Female Protagonist

On the eve of my wedding, my elder sister handed me a cup of fruit wine and drugged me unconscious.

I awoke half-dressed beside my brother-in-law.

My reputation was ruined overnight.

My fiancé broke off our engagement before dawn.

My parents were bitterly disappointed in me.

They bundled me into a little sedan chair and hurried me off to become Liang Yanxiu’s concubine.

My sister later died of illness.

Liang Yanxiu never made me his lawful wife.

The world praised him for his undying devotion to my sister.

I spent my life neglected and scorned.

As I lay dying, I overheard my parents whispering with my nephew, who had just placed first in the imperial examinations.

“Your mother was gravely ill and feared there would be no one to care for you after she died, so she drugged your aunt’s wine. Looking back, it was the right decision.”

My nephew’s voice choked with tears.

“Now that I have taken first place, Mother can finally rest in peace.”

I died in disbelief, the last breath torn from my lungs.

When I opened my eyes again, I was back at the banquet on the eve of my wedding.

My sister stood before me, smiling as she offered me that cup of fruit wine.

Four years ago, Gu Jinzhi, the Crown Prince of the Beijing Circle, fell in love with me at first sight.

After three years of relentless pursuit, I finally gave in.

In the first year of our relationship, he started pestering me to get married.

I was hesitant, but I couldn’t withstand his endless coaxing.

In the end, I brought him home to meet my parents.

But that day, outside the private room, I heard one of his buddies ask him, “You’ve met her parents now. When’s the wedding?”

Gu Jinzhi clicked his tongue and said unhurriedly, “All of a sudden, I don’t want to get married that much anymore.”

Someone beside him jeered, “Oh, stop pretending. You spent three years chasing that untouchable ice queen. You’d really give her up?”

“Ice queen?”

I heard him let out a scoff.

“If you saw how her parents treat her, you’d feel the same way I do.”

“The same how?”

“That she’s nothing special after all.”

I was He Xingxiao’s kept canary. In bed, I slacked off with a terrible attitude.

After a while, I’d start whining that it hurt, that I was tired.

But when it came to shopping, I could speed-walk for miles, spending his money like my life depended on it.

Then one day, I saw a row of floating comments: [The vicious supporting female character’s good days are almost over. The beloved, universally adored heroine is about to meet the male lead.]

[She’ll scheme against the heroine again and again, and the male lead will gradually grow disgusted with her.]

[The male lead hasn’t even dumped her yet, but she’ll run off with his money and a fake rich heir. In the end, that fake rich heir will steal all her savings, harvest her kidney, and she’ll die miserably in a rental apartment.]

[She deserves it! Only a kind, non-materialistic good girl like the heroine deserves a tycoon’s love!]

I did not want to lose this job that paid three hundred thousand a month.

From then on, I stopped slacking.

In bed, I performed like I’d been injected with pure adrenaline, refusing to leave even the tiniest opening for the heroine.

He Xingxiao looked at me with a smile that wasn’t quite a smile.

“Are you trying to make me die in bed so you can inherit everything I own?”

I was pregnant.

But I only wanted the baby, not the baby’s father.

With my belly about to become impossible to hide, I simply blocked him.

The very next day, though, he showed up outside my apartment and stopped me at my door.

When I saw his gaze settle on the swell of my stomach, I played it cool.

“What are you staring at? I just gained weight.”

At that, he looked at me like I was an idiot.

“Don’t worry. I don’t need any child support, and I won’t use this baby as an excuse to bother you. All you need to do is disappear completely-”

Before I could finish, he cut me off. “No.” “I want this child too.”

On the day we got divorced, Song Zhiyuan and I nearly came to blows right there in the Civil Affairs Bureau. When the clerk asked for the reason behind the split, he had the audacity to claim he had seven girlfriends on the side. I laughed out of sheer frustration. Seven girlfriends? So you really don’t get a single day off all week, huh? I shot him a sideways glare. “Working seven days a week without a break-can your body even handle that?” Song Zhiyuan sneered. “You’re not my wife anymore. It’s none of your business whether I can handle it or not.” Beside us, the clerk actually gave him a thumbs-up. “A real man. Impressive!”

For three nights in a row, my maid said the same thing in her sleep:

“It seems one of the chickens in the backyard is missing.”

I simply assumed she was exhausted from her daily chores and thought nothing of it.

That was until we encountered a landslide on our way to the Capital. My maid was killed in the disaster, but I was rescued by soldiers who arrived just in time.

Trembling and lost, I sought out the commanding officer, intending to reveal my true identity as the daughter of the Provincial Commander.

He glanced at the maid’s clothes I was wearing and suddenly asked:

“Are the hens still brooding lately?”

Criminal investigations, soul-ferrying powers, a formidable partnership, and a slow-burn romance.

Everyone knew that Ren Fengjue, the Young Marquis of Renxuan Marquis Manor, was an exceptionally capable man. At a young age, he was already a high-ranking court official and one of the Emperor’s most trusted favorites.

With an illustrious background, striking looks, and both brains and brawn, he seemed to move through life without ever meeting an obstacle he could not overcome.

That changed the day a woman claiming to be his fiancée appeared at his door and opened with a sentence that left him stunned.

Xia Ximo: “Write me a letter of annulment.”

Ren Fengjue: “???”

At first, Lord Ren was buried in official duties and had no interest in romance. If she wanted out of the engagement, so be it. He had never intended to marry in the first place.

Later, after one twist after another, the way he looked at his fiancée changed completely.

Ren Fengjue: “I have already petitioned the Emperor for a marriage decree. If we annul the engagement now, it would count as defying an imperial edict, a crime punishable by the execution of nine generations.”

Xia Ximo: “???”

Every day, Noble Lady Zhao Wan forgets one more memory of the emperor who once promised never to fail her.

When she remembers only the gentle husband of her youth, the white-haired ruler who betrayed her must watch her defend the man he used to be.

But as a palace purge restores the truth, love, ambition, and wounds too deep to forgive drive their reunion toward a final tragedy.

While everyone else was fighting for the Emperor’s favor, I built an intelligence station in the cold palace.

Until the day he died, the Emperor never knew that the woman stirring up the hidden currents of his harem was someone whose name he could not even remember.

I died in Yongxiang Alley during my third winter there.

Not truly died-only the kind of death where your name is crossed out in vermilion ink on the registry.

They said Noble Lady Li, who had once worked in the imperial garden and was later favored by His Majesty for her beauty, had gone mad.

Because on the late Empress’s memorial day, I let my hair hang loose, went barefoot, and sang a rousing rendition of “Liangzhou Ci.”

In truth, I was not mad. I had simply calculated that the Chief Eunuch of the Directorate of Ceremonial would pass through the imperial garden that day.

Madness was the best pass in the cold palace, and the best armor.

On the day I moved into the West Third Institute, only one lame old eunuch came to lead the way.

The weeds in the courtyard rose past my knees, and the moss on the well curb was as thick as a velvet blanket.

My roommate, Attendant Li, had been thrown in here three years ago after offending the Imperial Consort.

When she saw me arrive, she did not even lift her eyelids. She only kept rubbing a length of hemp rope in her hands, its edges worn fuzzy.

I set my only bundle down on the crumbling earthen kang.

Inside were two sets of worn palace clothes, a bald writing brush, and half a ream of yellow paper.

The paper pasted over the window lattice had a hole in it the size of a fist. The north wind poured in with a howl, carrying the faint sound of pipes and flutes from far away.

I stared at that hole, but in my heart, a sliver of light slipped through.

In a madwoman’s world, there were the fewest rules.

Here, perhaps, I could live.

In the second year after my husband took a mistress, I heard a voice:

“A man who won’t behave? Break his legs, and won’t he behave then?”

I had spent two years in the Buddhist shrine, chanting sutras day after day, trying to cleanse myself of my sins.

But I could never understand what my sins were.

Everyone in the Ling Family blamed me for being unable to keep my husband.

Being childless was a sin. Being jealous was a sin.

That voice had to be guidance from heaven.

At last, I understood. If his legs were broken, he would no longer be able to leave.

So when Ling Xu came to the Buddhist shrine once again to ask whether I agreed to let his mistress enter the household,

I snapped the candle off the candlestick and drove the copper spike into his leg.