Revenge

By day, Song Wenxi is presented as a chaste Daoist nun; by night, Yuzhen Convent sells her to powerful men.

After her abused younger sister dies, Wenxi refuses to accept the same fate and uses a pregnancy to enter the household of Gu Zhun, heir to the Prince of Pingnan.

Inside the princely estate, she discovers that noble wives, concubines, and prostitutes are all trapped by the same brutal order.

To avenge the dead and free the women still imprisoned at Yuzhen Convent, Wenxi turns the desires of the men around her into weapons and sets out to make sure the long night finally ends.

My father was once the best-known peddler on Qingyun Street.

He walked from lane to lane selling everything from thread to malt candy.

Then he became addicted to opium.

He sold Mother back to a brothel and stuffed my little sister and me into the baskets on his carrying pole.

The last time he shouldered that pole, the rest of our lives swung from either end.

In my last life, I saved He Yan, the young master of a marquis manor.

He took me as his wife, and for a time, our marriage was the talk of Shangjing.

But I had been born and raised in the countryside.

My manners were crude, and my reputation gradually soured.

He Yan, too, slowly grew distant from me.

I wept day after day, and before I even reached thirty, I died in misery.

Given a second chance, I swore I would never live that way again.

Only, after eating wild greens for three days straight, I realized I simply could not let go of the marquis manor’s soy-braised pork knuckle, sticky rice chicken, crab roe lion’s head meatballs, scallion-fried lamb…

The day I went to visit Duan Yujing on set, he openly skipped work to meet a popular young actress at a hotel.

When the intimate photos reached me, everyone on set watched my expression with nervous care.

I hardly cared. My attention had already been captured by a young man in the corner who looked somewhat like Duan Yujing.

Lunch was being served, and the cook gave him an extra lion’s-head meatball.

His eyes curved as he smiled with unguarded delight.

I studied him. “Who is he?”

By the tenth year of failing to find a human skin, I was ready to flay even the old yellow dog at the temple.

Then I met a beautiful concubine who had been thrown out of the marquis’s estate.

She knelt beside my white bones and burned paper money at the altar.

“The Immortal Lady likes the skin of beauties, and I hate this pretty face of mine. Let’s trade.”

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.

My sister was a goldsmith who entered the palace to deliver jewelry, only to be knocked unconscious by Consort Yi.

Consort Yi had quarreled with the emperor, so she stole my sister’s clothes and exit token and slipped out of the palace for fun.

Furious and frantic, the emperor cut my innocent sister down with a single stroke, then rode out to find the woman he loved.

In the end, my sister’s body was thrown into a mass grave.

The emperor and Consort Yi returned sweetly together on the same horse, and their reunion became a celebrated romance.

Half a year later, I became one of the emperor’s beauties.

After all, I am not human—I am a marten.

If a fox spirit can bewitch a ruler, so can a marten.

On the day of my daughter’s sixth birthday, she fell into a lake, and the soul of a transmigrated woman took possession of her body.

She was not the first transmigrator I had encountered.

I expected another loud, shallow creature like Consort Chao, but this one proved entirely different.

As she stood on a spy and scolded me for being weak and softhearted, I discreetly wiped the blood from my hands and sighed.

Facing the Buddha, I said only, “Amitabha.”

On the day the Su Clan was raided and seized, Father dressed me in a magnificent gown and threw me in front of the soldiers.

“She is Su Yueying, the Eldest Young Miss of the Su Clan.”

Everyone said Father was a loyal servant.

When I saw him again, Father had become the New Emperor’s most trusted Divine Martial Great General.

Su Yueying had become Empress, the New Emperor’s one and only for the rest of his life.

And I was a courtesan in a brothel, a woman anyone could have.

To buy back my freedom, Mother dragged her gravely ill body to beg Father for help.

The gatekeepers beat her to death with two strikes of their staves.

I begged Su Yueying to let Mother be buried.

But she said, “There are plenty of untouched entertainers in the pleasure houses. If you had held fast to your principles, I might still have helped you. But you chose to debase yourself. I will not help someone like that.”

That very night, someone hacked off my limbs and sank me into the river.

When I opened my eyes again, I had returned to the day the Su Clan was raided.

This time, let Su Yueying go to the brothel herself and hold fast to her precious principles.

I am a woman of boundless kindness.

So when Song Lin’an told me that the only woman he had ever loved was my elder half sister, I sent him straight to the grave without hesitation.

“My sister is dead, and since your devotion runs so deep, you should join her. No need to thank me. Nothing delights me more than helping true lovers fulfill their wishes.”

When I opened my eyes again, I was back on the day of our betrothal.

Song Lin’an glared at me and humiliated me before everyone. “The Song family will only welcome a truly virtuous woman. We will never let a vicious shrew through our doors!”

He broke off the match and made me the laughingstock of the capital.

He also branded me a vicious woman.

Song Lin’an schemed his way into marrying my elder half sister instead.

No one wanted me after that.

On the day they returned to visit her family, Song Lin’an sneered at me. “Everyone knows what you really are now. Let us see who else you can ruin!”

I only smiled.

The fool had no idea that in our previous life, I had lived to eighty while he had dropped dead at twenty.

I knew far too many things he did not.