Revenge

Sold for two jin of millet during a devastating famine, eight-year-old A-Xi enters Yichun House with only the fiercely loyal Zhao Si at her side.

Across years of loss, friendship, betrayal, and revenge, she watches women condemned by class and custom struggle to claim the one thing the world denies them: the right to choose their own lives.

When old dynasties and old cages finally begin to crumble, A-Xi must decide what freedom means—and whether returning home can ever restore what was taken from her.

I am a bastard born of a concubine, yet I carry a face that could topple a kingdom.

When I was nine, a local thug tried to snatch me to make me his bride.

Mother risked her life to save me.

The next day, she took me through the streets and alleys of the capital for three hours, until every passerby had memorized my face.

Then she carried me to the gates of the Marquis of Pingyang Manor, knelt, and cried out:

“I, Lady Liu, a humble concubine, bore this girl for the Marquis on the ninth day of the twelfth month nine years ago in Apricot Blossom Alley, west of the suburbs. The neighbors can all attest to it.

“I know my lowly station and dare not ask for a title. I can only trade my death for the Marquis to acknowledge this child and raise her within the household!”

With that, she slammed her head against the stone lion at the gate and breathed her last.

My mother exchanged her life for my place in the Marquis’s household.

And she let the entire capital know that I am a bastard born of a kept woman.

My mother had been a pawned wife, passed through many households and made to bear many sons.

When age took her beauty and she could no longer have children, she opened a wife-pawning house of her own and began selling other men’s wives.

One spring day, a carriage stopped outside our shop.

A handsome young scholar stood there with tears reddening his eyes.

“Mother,” he said, “I’ve come to take you home and give you a life of comfort.”

The newly appointed imperial scholar claimed he was one of the sons she had borne, and he had returned to repay the gift of life.

After I was exiled to the frontier, my fiancé took up with my younger half sister.

Everyone in the capital said she was my replacement.

Then she shattered a keepsake my late mother had left behind, and he stepped forward to protect her.

I drew my sword and pointed it at his throat.

If he loved her so much, he could die with her.

“Fine.

I’ll marry him.”

Everyone around me breathed a sigh of relief when I said it.

My elder sister most of all.

She didn’t want to marry him.

I didn’t mind.

Mostly because the Crown Prince was offering far too much to refuse.

Besides, he’d treated me rather well in my previous life.

Now that I’d been reborn, of course I would clear the thorns from his path.

I wanted to make his journey to my side a little easier.

In the third year of Jiang Yan’s affair, I met a fresh-faced college boy.

He wore a white T-shirt and faded jeans.

His brows held a rebellious slant, his thin lips were pressed together, and his fringe fell a little too long over his eyes.

He bore more than a passing resemblance to Jiang Yan when he was young.

My car had broken down halfway to my destination.

He haggled me up to five hundred yuan and promised he could fix it.

Halfway through the repair, he took a call.

It seemed to be the hospital chasing him for payment.

He held the phone in silence for a long time before pleading in a low voice, “I’m doing everything I can to raise the money.”

“I promise I’ll have it all by the day of the surgery.”

“Please.”

“Just give me a little more time, okay?”

Standing beside him, I suddenly remembered the day I first learned Jiang Yan had been unfaithful.

He had sat slumped on the sofa with his face in his hands.

“Xiuxiu, I swear I never meant for this to happen,” he rasped.

“But she looks so much like you did when you were young.”

“Do you understand?”

“Whenever I look at her, I remember how much you suffered back then—and how powerless I was to help you.”

“I have the means now.”

“I want to help her.”

“I want to give the younger you the care I couldn’t give you the first time.”

“Please don’t blame me.”

At that moment, I suddenly stopped blaming Jiang Yan.

Because at last, I understood him.

My husband is very rich, but I don’t love him.

In university, he once used every trick in the book to pursue my roommate Jiang Sizhu. He sent luxury gifts one after another, and even made a grand gesture by sending nine thousand roses downstairs from the girls’ dormitory. All the girls in our dorm benefited; we carried armloads of roses back to our rooms, as if we were moving a flower bed. Only Jiang Sizhu remained indifferent. She even warned Pei Lu not to come looking for her again.

“He’s very rich and not bad-looking. You really don’t want him?”

I had a face mask on and finally asked the question I could never understand.

With such a beautiful face, she spent every day hanging around that senior who worked odd jobs everywhere.

“No way, a stuffy old bore like him? If you’re so interested, go after him yourself,” Jiang Sizhu said with disdain.

I rested my chin on my hand, thought for a moment, then nodded.

“Fine.”

“I’ll go after him.”

Gu Xinlan always calls her maid Huaixia a sister, yet every claim of equality leaves Huaixia poorer, punished, or robbed of a future.

After dying of consumption when Gu Xinlan casts her out, Huaixia awakens years earlier with every betrayal still fresh in her mind.

This time, she turns her mistress’s hollow ideals against her, escapes the courtyard, and fights for the security her sick mother and young sister desperately need.

But Gu Xinlan refuses to release the servant she considers beneath her, dragging Huaixia into the Prince of Cheng’en’s residence and destroying another chance at freedom.

When Huaixia rises from maid to concubine, their supposed sisterhood becomes a deadly contest of envy, greed, and survival.

One woman believes equality is a favor she can grant and revoke; the other is determined to build a life no mistress can take away.

As old cruelties return in new disguises, a handful of silver and one act of kindness may decide who lives to see spring.

I am the vicious supporting character in a novel.

Yet I have been forced to watch one transmigrator after another take over my body, throw away all dignity, and grovel before a little beast already rotten to the core, all because they dreamed of saving him.

They called it redeeming the villain—showing him the warmth and beauty of the world.

Without exception, every one of them was betrayed once the little beast rose to power, and every one died without an intact corpse.

Now the cycle has begun again.

I expected another laughable attempt at redemption, but this time, before the villain could grow into his power, the new transmigrator drove a blade straight through his heart.

Blood flecked her face, making her smile look dark and uncanny.

“I’d already made a mortal enemy of him, so why not kill him and end the threat for good?”

“This redemption game is painfully dull.”

My legitimate elder sister and I joined the Wuji Sect on the same day, and our master taught her the Carefree Dao.

When it was my turn, Master gave me a sidelong glance and told me to seek my own Dao.

But I could not read, so I thought he wanted me to learn the way of theft.

Thirty years later, he emerged from seclusion, took one look at the boundless emptiness where our sect had once stood, and was struck dumb.

“Have the demons invaded?!”