Happy Ending

My cousin was so determined to stay with her bleached-blond bad boy that her parents locked her at home and refused to let her out.

I saw the light: all I had to do was fall for a blond, and I could become a shut-in with a perfectly legitimate excuse.

So I went home and told my stepbrother, “Wenzhou, I’ve fallen for a guy with blond hair.”

Jiang Wenzhou smiled and poured me a cup of hot water. “Was it cold out today? Drink this and warm up.”

Disappointed by his lack of reaction, I took a sip and stubbornly continued with my lines.

“Don’t look down on him. He’s not like other blonds—”

The next second, I lost consciousness.

When I woke again, a gleaming silver chain had appeared around my ankle.

Still as gentle as ever, Jiang Wenzhou stroked the chain.

“Tong Jia, you have no idea how awful men out there can be. Until you forget him, I’m not letting you leave this room.”

I froze for a moment, then resolutely lay back down.

“I’ll never forget him, even if it kills me!”

My possessiveness has always been off the charts.

Luckily, my boyfriend is the obedient type—his phone open to me anytime, reporting in around the clock, and keeping two meters away from every passing dog.

But a voice calling itself “the System” appears in my head: the male lead doesn’t love me, and I’m just a control-freak extra who should leave.

I brush it off—until Xie Ji really starts acting strange, and I find a diary entry that chills my blood.

My possessiveness evaporates in an instant, and I run away that very night.

Three days later, the System comes online, sobbing: the female lead who tried to help me escape has been kidnapped by the man I once thought I knew.

Me: ?

When newly crowned Qin Bai casts Yun Qing aside for his first love, her formidable family stops holding his empire together.

As the frontier falters, the capital descends into chaos, and the treasury runs dry, the emperor discovers too late that the people he betrayed were the ones propping up his throne.

While the Yun family watches his favorites fail spectacularly, a battle-hardened prince with an old debt to Yun Qing quietly begins rewriting her future.

I told Jin Ran I was breaking up with him because I liked old men—rich, independent, quick to die, and generous with their estates—and asked whether he could offer me that.

Years later, I went on a third-rate prank show and was told to call my first love in front of a live audience.

I called Jin Ran. “Let’s get back together.”

After a long silence, his deep voice came through the phone.

“I’m twenty-seven. I’m not dying anytime soon.”

I spent seven years confined with the deposed crown prince, tasting poison for him and taking arrows meant for him.

Again and again, I barely escaped death.

Yet after he ascended the throne, he made his childhood sweetheart his empress.

I remained nothing more than a lowly palace maid.

Everyone knew he despised me.

But when I finally came of age and prepared to leave the palace, he seized my wrist and demanded, ‘Do you have a heart at all?’

My mother’s new husband’s son called me a gold-digging freeloader, said my mother had seduced his father, and declared us both shameless sluts.

I cornered him against the wall and attacked his lips with my tongue.

“That’s right! My mom seduced your dad, and now I want to seduce you!”

The school heartthrob claimed I had a crush on him, mocked me for dreaming above my station, then photocopied my secret diary and scattered the pages all over campus.

I pasted his face over a photo of the hottest host at a male revue, then grabbed his ass in front of the entire school.

“Are you jealous because I didn’t book you last weekend?”

When my homeroom teacher said I was a troublemaker and threatened to punish me, I tied him up instead.

“When a student misbehaves, her teacher is to blame—so please accept your punishment, sir!”

Shi Wei is a lowly maid who wants nothing more than to finish her contract and leave Prince Jin’s Estate in peace.

Young Prince Jing Ting refuses to release the quiet woman who has taken hold of his heart, even when pride, rank, and an arranged marriage stand between them.

Forced into his household as a concubine, Shi Wei slowly discovers tenderness beneath his fierce possessiveness, while his gentle wife Tong Liu becomes an unexpected friend.

When motherhood finally gives Shi Wei the courage to voice every buried grievance, Jing Ting must learn that love requires more than protection—it also requires listening and change.

After a blackout leaves Qin Shuyi with swollen lips and three female roommates as suspects, her search for the mystery kisser forces her to confront a tangle of hidden crushes—and the girl who has loved her all along.

Bai Qiqi once saved a woman from another time, only to watch that woman claim the achievements, husband, and son Qiqi had spent years protecting.

When her husband and six-year-old son dismiss her medicinal cooking and household work as worthless, Qiqi walks away from the Prince of Qi’s estate without looking back.

Inside the palace, her healing soups win the trust of the Empress Dowager and the imperial women, while the brilliant younger official Jiang Pu insists that the warmth he feels around her is love, not gratitude.

As Liu Yan’s reckless schemes endanger Qiqi’s child and shake the court, Qiqi must expose the men who steal women’s work—and decide whether she is ready to accept a gentler life of her own.

I imprisoned the peerless genius I had secretly loved for years.

After an accident left her blind, I covered her eyes with a silk ribbon.

Now she glares in my direction and angrily condemns my despicable methods.

She asks what I want from her.

I tell her I want her to cooperate with her treatment and recover in peace.

I will heal her eyes.

And later, I really do.

I promise to return her to her old life, only for her to fly into a rage.

“What? You’ve only kept me prisoner for a few days! Are you stringing me along? How dare you leave me hanging like this!”

“You’d better pray I never find you. If I do, I’ll show you exactly what it feels like to be left hanging!”

Too guilty to acknowledge the threat, I send her away that very night.

I think everything will finally return to normal—until she actually finds me.

The silk ribbon that once covered her eyes is now cinched around my wrists, hoisting me high above the floor.

Forced onto the tips of my toes, I have nowhere to hide beneath her unwavering gaze…