Healing

For three years after I entered the Eastern Palace as a concubine, I had never even seen the Crown Prince.

I took it in stride. After all, I was face-blind.

If I mistook someone else for the Crown Prince and committed a capital offense, I would rather have no favor at all.

But after so long without his favor, even my food, clothing, and daily expenses became a problem.

To live a little better, I simply found three lovers to support me.

Zhang San worked in the Imperial Kitchen and could always bring me plenty of delicious food.

Li Si guarded the Garment Bureau and often sent me beautiful clothes.

As for Wang Wu, he was a skilled craftsman in the workshops. Every time we met, he gave me some clever new toy.

Lately, though, all three of them seemed short on money.

So I began thinking that I should try to please the Crown Prince and ask for some rewards to help support them.

I was a male celebrity drowning in scandals.

Online, people said I had schemed my way to the top. They said my private life was filthy and promiscuous.

My family said I was jealous of the adopted son they had taken in, that I had racked my brains trying to ruin him.

My friends said I was two-faced and treacherous, not someone worth getting close to.

Even my fiancé believed I could never compare to my younger brother, who was generous, graceful, kind, and innocent.

If that was how it was, then I would leave your world behind.

I was never meant to be defined or controlled by anyone.

I’m the daughter of the heroine in an angsty novel.

When I was four, I finally understood those strange bullet comments:

[The heroine is still desperately staying up late, working to make money and support her daughter. She has no idea she already has cancer. If this drags on, her child is going to lose her mother!]

[If either the male lead or the female lead had just spoken up, there wouldn’t have been a “running away while pregnant” plot at all.]

[Their daughter is the real pitiful one. Her mother dies when she’s only six. The male lead never even learns the heroine died after giving birth to his daughter, and he spends the rest of his life alone.]

[And the most miserable one is our Xiao Bao. She obviously has a rich dad, yet she still gets sent to the orphanage…]

Mom was going to die?

I stared at my gentle, beautiful mother in shock. No way!

They may not speak up, but I do!

On a warm afternoon, outside an office building, I spotted a man in a sharp suit and threw my arms around his leg.

“Dad, send money! I need to save Mom!”

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.

She Has Been in the Wind for Two Years

Synopsis: Two years after my wife passed away, I still received messages from her every day and ate the dinners she had “arranged” for me.

I thought she had never truly left-until one late night, when I followed a text begging for help back home and realized I had been living all along inside the Fengli she left behind for me.

I was the freest child in the village.

All the other kids envied me because no one ever told me what to do.

But the truth was, my parents had divorced, and neither of them wanted me.

That was why they left eight-year-old me all alone in a mud-brick house up in the mountains.

During the day, it was all right.

But at night, the mountain wind howled, and the drunk old bachelor would reach his hand in through the crack in the window. “Jingjing, are you scared all by yourself? Uncle Dog will keep you company!”

Before my fiancé, Cui Ning, left for his long journey, he gave me a harsh scolding.

It was because I wanted to borrow thirty-three taels of silver from him to buy back my mother’s keepsake, a paulownia qin.

He accepted my promissory note and recorded the debt in his ledger, yet he refused to give me the money.

“Xiaoyu, you don’t even know how to play the instrument. What’s the point of buying it?” He added, “Besides, thirty-three taels is enough to buy two of you.”

This winter, I had spent my days on the pleasure boats, combing the hair of the older sisters and doing their laundry, only to painstakingly save up a single tael.

But the instrument shop couldn’t wait any longer.

They said someone else had their eye on the instrument and it would be sold the day after tomorrow.

When I returned to the Cui Family home wiping away my tears, Matchmaker Liu saw my red eyes and tried to persuade me again with a kindly expression.

“The Shen family is sincere about their proposal. Don’t even mention mountains of gold or silver-you only need to ask.” She continued, “They said that even if you wanted the stars or the moon from the sky, they would pluck them down for you.”

I thought about what Cui Ning had said-that thirty-three taels was a massive sum of money, enough to buy two of me.

Afraid that the Shen family would be unwilling, I dried my tears and asked cautiously: “I don’t want the stars, and I don’t want the moon.”

“I want a paulownia qin. It costs thirty-three taels of silver.”

I never expected that I would accidentally end up becoming colleagues with my ex-husband. After all, it had only been three months since we finally ended our miserable three-year marriage-a marriage that was nothing but mutual torture.

Seven years after my body was stolen from me, I finally succeeded in taking it back.

By then, “she” had already used my body to get married and become pregnant.

Without hesitation, I filed for divorce and terminated the pregnancy.

The news of my sudden divorce shot to the top of the trending searches, but I couldn’t have cared less.

My only priority was finding my lover, the man who had been left battered and broken in my absence.