Friendship

I was a midwife.

Up in the hills, I found a pregnant woman.

She claimed to be the wife of the Marquis of Yongning.

She begged me to save her, promising to repay me a hundredfold.

I said nothing and quietly took her home.

To everyone else, she was my cousin, a rich merchant’s concubine who had come to me for shelter.

Because I had just returned from the Yongning estate.

Where I had delivered the marchioness’s baby.

In our village, a child who dies before his parents cannot be given a funeral—unless he dies in an unclean place.

When my drowned best friend is laid in the mourning hall, a seven-day vigil turns my guilt into terror, and the truth behind the hauntings proves more horrifying than any ghost.

In the year when I was at my most spineless, the Noble Consort called me oversensitive.

That very night, I took a rope to her bedchamber, intending to hang myself beside her bed.

Fortunately, she found me in time and rescued me in tears.

Later, a beauty newly arrived at the palace called me as stupid as a pig.

I said nothing.

I simply took out my rope.

The Noble Consort said nothing either.

She just kept slapping her.

“Even I daren’t scold her.

Who do you think you are?”

The women in the detention center didn’t much like me.

Among all those streetwise girls, I was the only one who wore glasses.

When they finally asked what I’d done, I told them: I’d stolen five thousand yuan from my parents to go to Peking University.

They laughed and called me an unlucky kid.

The day I got out, my parents didn’t come.

A battered van did.

Blondie rolled down the window and told me to get in.

She was taking me to the station.

Lin Wanrou was twenty-four this year, an old maiden who still had not married.

Madam Lin’s standards for a son-in-law had fallen from imperial kin to any promising young talent with ambition.

She refused to believe that, with the Grand General’s influence, she could not raise up one dragon among men as her son-in-law.

Lin Wanrou did not want to marry. She would rather stay at home for the rest of her life.

The man I secretly loved was the legitimate princess’s fiancé.

I was the unfavored Seventh Princess, and the fiancé bestowed upon me was a drunken libertine who gambled, kept concubines, and maintained a mistress outside his estate.

But that was all right.

My best friend had the ultimate cheat code.

When I was fifteen, my royal father chose me from among his many daughters.

I was Xizhou’s brightest pearl, yet he sent me by carriage across the Gobi, the desert, and the grasslands.

I was to travel to the distant Central Plains and marry their Crown Prince.

The Crown Prince had his moonlight and his childhood sweetheart.

But the bright moon must sink, and green plums must ripen.

In the end, only the pearl’s light endures.

My best friend and I transmigrated together.

She became a princess consort, while I became… a lynx.

“Save me, save me, save me…” I begged.

“Hang in there!” my best friend said. “I’ll fight for custody!”

Then I demonstrated that I could use a toilet all by myself, and Her Majesty the Empress chose me instead.

Later, when my best friend’s husband rebelled and nearly got her killed, it was her turn to beg, “Save me, save me, save me…”

So I-I sprang up and sank my teeth into the villain’s thigh.

On Mars, every breath costs money, wanting is treated like a moral failure, and Chen Xiaoba has spent her life longing for one impossible luxury: savory flatbread from Earth.

After that longing costs her job and home, a reunion with her childhood friend Ah Zhi leads them to Black Rose Street, where Earth’s discarded scraps can still be traded for hope.

Together they build a food stall, save for passage to Earth, and discover that the road to freedom may demand far more than money.

In a world designed to make the poor stop dreaming, Xiaoba must decide whether a seemingly wasted journey can still be a life worth choosing.

The first time criminal investigator Lou Xiao met Qiao Xia was at a wedding that had descended into total chaos. Years later, the two reunited on a blind date. From testing each other and misunderstanding each other to slowly drawing closer, one clumsy but sincere, the other clearheaded and independent, they learned, little by little, amid entanglements with people from the past, the pressure of work, and sudden danger, to put their love into words and to make room for each other in their future.