Modern Day

On Qixi Festival, the Chinese Valentine’s Day, my husband turned out to have another woman.

He not only paid me two hundred thousand yuan a month, but also asked me to look after her during her pregnancy.

What could I possibly say?

Tears of joy streamed helplessly down my face.

I packed overnight and moved straight into their little love nest.

Before stepping through the door, I raised my price at the last minute. “Three hundred thousand.”

Xu Chen gritted his teeth. “Deal.”

After my boyfriend dumped me, he planned to go to Tsinghua University with the beautiful top student and live happily ever after.

But when the National College Entrance Examination ended, I was the only student from our school admitted to Tsinghua, and I took the stage as the student representative.

The two of them could only watch from below.

Song Qi drew a dare: check his phone.

Of everyone in his contacts, who had he told “I love you” the most?

The class beauty: three times.

Me: 972 times.

The jeering around us died at once.

The class beauty burst into tears.

In front of everyone, Song Qi deleted my contact information, then smiled as he coaxed her.

“That’s worth crying over?”

“You know I only dated her for three months to keep up an act.”

“Nothing I said to her was real.”

Those nine hundred-odd declarations had all come from one drunken night.

Song Qi had crouched by the roadside, impossible for anyone to pull away, his head bowed as he sent me the same three words over and over.

“Once I send you ‘I love you’ 999 times, the bet is off.”

“Then we’ll be together for real, okay?”

In my fourth year as Song Jingyuan’s kept woman, he tired of me and asked to break up.

I had meant to cry, make a scene, and threaten to kill myself to keep him, putting on the same devoted performance that had pleased him countless times before.

But the floating comments before my eyes said he meant it this time.

He had fallen for someone else, and this truly would be the last time we ever met.

I fell silent at once.

While tears slipped down my face, I hooked a bill from the floor with my little finger, rolled it into my palm, and tucked it deeper into my sleeve.

With my mission to win over the male lead on the verge of failure, I broke down sobbing.

I cried so hard I practically gave my system a CPU ache: “Quit your damn crying. I’ll just kill him.”

Later, the male lead asked why I no longer loved him.

My system wailed in exasperation: “Doesn’t he have a wife of his own?”

“Tell him to get lost!”

Yun Chu is a hungry young succubus whose fiancé despises her true form and rations the affection she needs to survive.

After she falls from a cruise ship, she wakes on a private island in the care of Song Xuye, a fierce, sun-browned recluse whose secret merman tail makes him her perfect match.

What begins as a shameless plan to seduce, abduct, and keep him as her personal food supply becomes something far more dangerous when jealousy, trafficking, and a rigged race expose how cruelly their world treats nonhuman beings.

Only when Song Xuye risks everything to defend a captive succubus does Yun Chu realize that the hunger pulling her toward him has become love.

I was the heroine of a sweet-wife story: delicate, soft, and made to be swept off my feet.

All I had to do was behave and let one man after another dote on me.

My stepbrother was walking toward me with a glass of milk when a system appeared.

It told me that, according to the plot, I was supposed to develop a sex addiction that very day. From then on, the slightest contact with a man would leave me unbearably aroused, and it would only get worse.

That sounded pretty good to me.

I drained the milk in one gulp.

My stepbrother smiled.

I smiled too.

The system gave an even more wicked little chuckle.

“Except I just changed it into an addiction to studying.”

My family was on the verge of bankruptcy, so to stage a comeback, my father cheerfully decided to marry off his daughter.

There was just one problem: I was a lesbian, and my prospective husband was gay—a forced match in every sense of the word.

Before our first dinner at the Liu estate, Dad reminded me again and again, “The Liu family is run by their eldest daughter now that she’s back from abroad. Be on your best behavior and make a good impression on your future sister-in-law.”

I nodded without paying much attention—then caught sight of the woman coming down the stairs, and my vision went black.

Wasn’t she the little canary I had kept overseas five years ago?

I was my birth parents’ third child.

While my birth mother was pregnant with me, the village fortune-teller swore I would be a boy.

They could hardly wait.

They hid from place to place throughout the pregnancy and finally brought me into the world in the bitter cold of the twelfth lunar month—

a girl.

After her father vanishes, Zhu Ling abandons corporate life to inherit Lingling Jade Shop—and the forbidden power of her bloodline.

When a wealthy lecturer asks why eight relatives occupy a mansion with only seven bedrooms, Zhu Ling discovers that one family member is an illusion and every survivor is hiding a piece of a woman’s murder.

Trapped by a vengeful spirit during a winter storm, she must uncover the silent conspiracy before the mansion becomes a grave for the guilty and the innocent alike.