Manipulative Characters

You are a village girl from the mountains.

By a twist of fate, you save the Crown Prince from an assassination, and you leverage that debt to demand he marry you.

But he disdains your plain looks and gently refuses many times.

You settle for the next best thing and ask him to appoint you as an official.

Since you were five, you’ve decided you will rise above your station in this life.

If you become a consort, you’ll be like Wu Zetian.

If you become an official, you’ll be like Sima Yi.

One year into her marriage, Xie Wu refuses when her husband asks to take Lin Manrou as his concubine. The feud that follows costs Xie Wu her unborn child, her reputation, and thirty years of freedom—only for her to learn that both women were pawns in her husband’s plan to marry the cousin he truly loved. Reborn on the day he makes the same request, Xie Wu says yes. This time, she will play the dutiful wife, give every rival exactly what she wants, and quietly turn the Marquis of Annan’s household into a board on which only she knows the next move.

My boyfriend was ruthless and vicious, with no end of evil deeds to his name.

And he had a childhood friend who was every bit as wicked.

Two of a kind, they joined forces and left the whole of Haicheng in turmoil.

I was his kindhearted girlfriend, destined to die young.

His wicked childhood friend had a first love too—a reserved, upright man with little time left to live.

After he and I died, the two villains would finally see the error of their ways, mourn us, comfort each other, and spend the rest of their lives fabulously wealthy.

When I became aware of the plot, I was gently trying to reason with my boyfriend.

“They helped you before.

Why do you have to destroy them completely?”

He lazily lifted his eyelids.

“Kindness is the most useless thing in the world.

And so are you, Ruoruo.”

I froze for a moment.

Then I lowered my eyes to the message I had just received.

[Want to set a time to look at burial plots together?]

My older sister was about to be married when a serial rapist attacked her.

In a single night, her reputation was destroyed and her engagement broken off.

Father fell ill with rage; Mother cried herself blind.

And the rapist?

He became the personal guard of a princess from a marquis’s household.

The gentle, kindhearted princess said, “Ah Qing isn’t bad at heart.

He only made a mistake because he briefly lost his way.”

Later, I killed the child she had struggled so hard to conceive.

My sister, now a prince’s wife, took her hand and said gently, “My little sister isn’t bad at heart.

It was only an accident that led her to do something wrong.”

But the princess’s face twisted with hatred, her eyes venomous.

All her former gentleness and kindness were gone.

The crown prince married me because I seemed content to ask for nothing.

He made me promise that when my elder sister changed her mind and returned, I would surrender my place as crown princess.

What did he know?

Asking for nothing could be the surest way to gain everything.

After the wedding, I wore myself out in his service, at court and within his household alike.

I even nearly “died” for him several times.

The day my sister returned, I kept our agreement: I took off the crown princess’s robes and handed over the phoenix seal.

He was the one who began to hesitate.

Three months after he dumped me without warning, I found my boyfriend again—with no memory of ever leaving me.

His eyes were clear, his mind stranded in the days when he had loved me most.

So I took him home.

I trapped him with the cheapest sweet nothings.

Then, just as he had once done to me, I turned his own tricks against him.

And drove him mad, one careful inch at a time.

I was the eldest daughter of the family-the one no one favored.

From childhood, I was taught to be composed and proper, to serve as an example for my younger siblings.

And yet my fiancé was stolen away by my seemingly innocent and adorable legitimate younger sister.

My younger brothers remembered none of the good I had done for them. They only resented me for disciplining them too strictly. Even my parents saw me as nothing more than a tool to polish the family name, wholeheartedly taking my legitimate younger sister’s side.

Faced with all this, I spread my hands and gave up. From then on, I refused to involve myself in anything happening in the manor.

I let them flounder through one petty mess after another, gradually falling apart until none of the old warmth remained. Even that innocent and adorable legitimate younger sister, once she lost my support, was no longer the treasure of their hearts.

I was the queen, confined to the ancestral temple for a grave crime.

The king despised me, and for fifteen years he never came to see me.

The world said I had lost my mind.

Then the diviners foretold that my child would bring the four corners of the realm to submission and become sovereign of all under Heaven.

Taken from me on the day he was born and raised by the king’s favorite consort, he had never even seen his mother’s face.

Day and night I prayed, waiting for him.

At last, he came.

The boy was grown now, his brow bearing all the cold majesty of an heir to the throne.

Calmly, he laid a dagger before me.

“Your son asks only one thing.

Grant it to me.”

Li Furong spends three years saving Xie Qingheng through exile, only to be dismissed before his powerful friends as nothing more than a loyal servant.

When the man who promised her a future breaks his word and forces her into a nameless place in his household, she turns every lesson in survival against him.

Trapped among noblewomen as dangerous as the men who command them, Furong must decide how much of herself she will sacrifice to win the one thing she has always wanted: a life that belongs to her.

Mother often taught me, “A principal wife must have the grace to accept others.”

I was born into a prestigious family as its eldest legitimate daughter. From the day I entered this world, it was destined that even if my future husband was not a prince, nobleman, general, or minister, he would at least be the eldest legitimate son of a family equal to mine in status.

A man destined to inherit his family’s legacy and become the head of his clan was, in all likelihood, never going to be monogamous.

And so, from my earliest childhood until the day I married, I heard the same lesson over and over again: “A principal wife must have the grace to accept others.”