Prostitutes

I transmigrated.

Straight into a run-down brothel.

The lowest, dirtiest corner of Tongzhi Alley.

When I first arrived, my immediate thought was to kill the madam.

Then escape with my life.

But I soon realized the hard part wasn’t killing the madam.

The real challenge was figuring out how to stay alive after I did.

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.

When I was eleven, my stepmother pushed me into a river, and after being passed from hand to hand, I ended up in the pleasure quarter.

Five years later, on an ordinary morning, I painted my brows, opened her door with a smile, and said, “I’m back. I missed you.”

Not long afterward, my stepmother’s body was found in an old well.

Chapter 0

The storm had passed.

Uncle Xiong rolled off me, sated, pillowing his head on my arm as the tip of his nose nuzzled into the hollow of my neck.

“I know every girl at Golden Sand Beach has a story, Shaluo. I want to hear yours.”

“Sure. Do you want the long version or the short one?”

“The long one.”

The long version wasn’t that long, either.

During the first year of our marriage, at my birthday banquet, a songstress appeared wearing a silk dress identical to mine.

My husband’s expression turned ice-cold. “Someone, strip that dress off her.”

He was clearly defending my honor, yet I felt not a single spark of warmth in my heart.

For I knew that he was also the man who had once spent a fortune on that very songstress and made a pact to elope with her.

My mother, a concubine, wanted me to marry honorably: “A woman must be a proper wife.”

I made vague noises of agreement, but inwardly I didn’t take it to heart.

Being a proper wife to a peddler or servant meant poverty and beatings from the man.

Being a proper wife in a wealthy household meant constant scheming and exhausting yourself managing the family.

So as soon as my mother passed on, I went to Yujing Tower and registered as a prostitute.

Sixty taels of silver a night, absolutely no haggling.

It has been three years since I transmigrated into this brothel.

I have mastered the arts of seduction, and no one knows better than I how to make a man lose his very soul in ecstasy.

But then, I overheard a group of new girls gossiping.

“It’s hilarious. Our Flower Queen really thinks she’s living in ancient times.”

“A refined Female Doctor, tricked into working as a whore for three years. These rich people really know how to have a good time.”

“Do you think she’d go insane if she found out this was all orchestrated by her ‘Young Marquis’?”

“Shh! Every actor who comes in here has signed a life-and-death waiver. Who would dare let her know?”

I froze in place, as if plunged into a pit of ice.

Could it be that these three years of transmigration were nothing more than a scam?

Before I could regain my composure, the Young Marquis’s cold voice suddenly rang out from behind me.

“Fudong, what are you doing here?”

When I was thirteen, I traded myself for a bowl of chicken soup. From that moment on, I knew I was born for this life. I used it to trade for one head after another.

A girl came to Drunken Fragrance Pavilion and insisted on becoming a prostitute.

She went on about the romance and glamour of Shanghai’s ten-mile foreign concession, saying this was such a romantic era.

Then let her have a good look at what romance meant in this man-eating age.

Huang Hongyu learned young that survival meant becoming whatever powerful men wanted to see.

When the ruthless Cheng Hao takes her as his mistress, she turns dependence into an education in money, power, and human weakness.

As her businesses grow and her past closes in, Hongyu must decide whether love can exist inside a bargain built on violence.

Years later, the secret Cheng leaves behind reveals that the woman he could never keep had become the legend he always knew she would be.