Possessive Characters

My elder sister loved sweets.

Every year, when lychee paste was sent from home, the first box was always hers.

As a child, I was greedy and stole a taste.

Mother frowned and said,

“Your sister is frail. Let her have it.”

Later, I kept giving way and giving way, until even my marriage was pushed behind hers.

When the Crown Prince came to consider a match, my elder sister disliked all the rules of the Eastern Palace and turned around to choose an Idle Prince instead.

So everyone’s eyes fell on me.

The Crown Prince said gently,

“The Second Young Lady will do as well.”

I married him.

After our wedding, he treated me well enough. It was just that every year, when lychee paste was presented as tribute, he would first send someone to deliver it to my sister’s residence.

I asked him about it once.

He smiled.

“Your sister loves this.”

“You’ve always been sensible. You won’t mind.”

Until, on his deathbed, he clutched my hand and suddenly called out my sister’s childhood name.

When I opened my eyes again, I had returned to the day the Crown Prince came to consider a match.

Mother pushed me forward.

I took one step back and said softly,

“This subject’s daughter already has someone in her heart. I fear I am not blessed enough to enter the Eastern Palace.”

I run a brothel staffed by men.

But my courtesans don’t cater to men with a taste for other men.

They serve women with perfectly ordinary needs.

I named the place the Hundred Stallions House.

I don’t actually have a hundred male courtesans, of course, but I do have quite a few.

Gentle, aloof, strapping, dangerously obsessive—we have every type imaginable.

Our clients range from widowed officials’ wives to farm women who have lost their husbands, and even wandering swordswomen.

Now and then, a noble young lady sneaks out to satisfy her curiosity.

All in all, business is booming.

But there are complications.

Take that judicial officer from the Capital Prefecture, for example.

He has tried every trick in the book to shut down my Hundred Stallions House.

So when the opportunity presented itself, I drugged him.

Then I locked him in the woodshed out back.

Lu Jia wakes inside a novel as a beautiful orphan doomed to die after drugging her adoptive brother, Lu Fang.

Desperate to survive both the gentle Lu Fang and his ruthless alternate personality, she accepts an arranged marriage and escapes to quiet Spring Mountain Temple.

There she meets Ye Yi, a tenderhearted traveler who promises her a life beyond the Lu family’s walls.

As Lu Fang’s forbidden feelings surface, Lu Jia clings to the freedom and future she has chosen, while her brother must decide whether love means possession or letting her go.

Before I was born, my father dreamed of a phoenix.

The very next moment, my mother went into labor.

Father therefore decided I had been born to a magnificent destiny.

And since good fortune ought to stay in the family, I would simply have to find myself a live-in son-in-law.

I was the lowly maidservant Xiao Yu found too filthy to even spare a glance.

But on the day he realized I had feelings for Xie Lin’an, Xiao Yu abandoned his heavily pregnant favored consort.

He seized me by the throat, his voice cold enough to chill the bone.

“Mutual affection, is it? You think you and Xie Lin’an can run off and live happily together? Keep dreaming!”

I was the widow everyone despised.

One summer night, I went out intending to seduce Censor Zhang, only to be stopped by the Crown Prince.

He bent to my ear and murmured, ‘Aunt, am I not good enough for you?’

Oh, he was good.

Just rather exhausting.

Zhang Cheng only pretends to adore the aloof heir Xiao Yanyu so she can keep living at his family’s residence while saving to bring her mother and siblings to the capital.

When a passion parasite forces them into intimacy and a Heart-Severing Pill erases her memories, Xiao Yanyu must cast aside his pride and seduce the oblivious constable all over again.

Before love can triumph, Zhang Cheng must decide whether the man she thought despised her is worth risking the independent future she built for her family.

In the eighteenth year after I transmigrated, I finally became a proper maidservant.

When Old Madam and Second Master quarreled, I was the one who stepped in to smooth things over.

I knelt on the floor, clinging to Second Master’s leg, and begged him not to say things in anger.

Second Master pinched my chin and sneered. “I know Third Brother has his eye on you. But I insist on making you my concubine. Even if he finds out, what of it?”

Of course Third Master would not do anything to Second Master.

He would only kill me without a word.

I belonged to Third Master. He would rather have me dead than defiled.

In their eyes, I was a maidservant, a plaything to be fought over and snatched around.

For the ten years my parents were away at war, I was fostered on a country estate and grew up rough around the edges.

I was nothing like the gentle, refined Shen Miaoyi, who had grown up beside them.

She was the daughter of their fallen comrades and had followed my parents to the frontier from the age of six.

“Miaoyi may not be our daughter by blood, but she is dearer to us than one.”

I resented her for stealing my parents.

I resented her for keeping them to herself for ten years without sparing me even one.

So, for once, I fought back and stole her marriage to the Young Prince.

But after Shen Miaoyi married another man, her life turned miserable.

The Young Prince felt guilty and secretly helped her.

A rift opened between us.

I fought back one more time and refused to speak to him until the day I died.

Kneeling beside my bed, he said he regretted it.

“Ningshu, please don’t leave me alone.”

“Once you recover, we can go back to the way we were and ride side by side again…”

I did not want that life anymore.

When I opened my eyes again, I was back on the day my parents were arranging a marriage for Shen Miaoyi.

This time, I spoke first.

“The Young Prince likes powder blue. Sister Miaoyi would look perfect in it.”

I was born face-blind, yet the crown prince of Beijing’s elite circle had always stood by me.

Until one day, when I overheard him talking about me with his friends.

“A whole month, and she still hasn’t noticed. Shen Jin, you’ve really got talent.”

“But your girlfriend looks like she’s close to figuring it out. Shouldn’t we switch back?”

In the corner, the man called Shen Jin pinched a cigarette between his fingers and shook his head.

“I’m afraid that won’t work. Yin-yin is still waiting for me to come home for dinner.”

I stood in the doorway and sighed, disappointed that I wouldn’t be getting someone new after all.

I had already grown tired of sleeping with both of them.