Revenge

I am the real heiress who was deliberately switched at birth by a nanny.

Raised among the worst people at the very bottom of society, I grew up seeing nearly every shade of darkness this world had to offer.

After I returned to my biological family, everyone expected me to give way to the fake heiress and stop competing with her for their affection.

What they did not know was that shallow affection could never satisfy my ambition.

I had failed my mission.

With the rebel cornered and a blade held to each of our throats—mine and the heroine’s—the man I had been sent to win over had to make a choice.

Of course, I was the one he abandoned.

I was a condemned slave, due to be beheaded in the autumn.

To buy myself a little more time, I decided to get pregnant.

I set my sights on the cold, aloof jailer.

With my slender waist and full hips, I tried every trick I knew to seduce him.

At first he scorned me.

Once he’d had a taste, he came back night after night, unwilling to let me go.

The day a physician confirmed my pregnancy, a curtained sedan chair was carried into the dungeon.

As they helped me inside, I still had no idea what was happening.

“What is this for?”

The warden beamed at me.

“Miss Liu, you’re carrying His Grace’s child.

They’ve come to take you home to a life of comfort.”

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.

They called me a witch who bewitched men’s minds, and put me to the sword.

Later, they tried everything they could to bring me back to life.

It turned out that the prodigy I had supposedly bewitched had gone mad.

He meant to slaughter the whole world and send it to the grave with me.

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.

Because of her physical development, Li Zhuguang was maliciously humiliated and secretly photographed by her classmate Zhang Kang.

Luo Xing, once her only friend, also turned her back on her amid the rumors.

To strike back, Li Zhuguang deliberately got close to Song Wangshu, the top student Luo Xing had a crush on, using Zhang Kang’s jealousy to force him to expose himself.

She then returned the evidence of the secret recordings to each of the victims.

After Zhang Kang was expelled, the off-campus landlord retaliated by planting a pinhole camera in her room.

With help from Luo Xing, Song Wangshu, her teachers, and her classmates, Li Zhuguang finally dragged the malice lurking in the shadows out into the sunlight-and learned to trust the people around her again.

My younger sister and I were twins—the legendary Yin-Yang twins.

The uglier I became, the prettier she grew.

The worse my grades were, the better hers became.

The weaker my body was, the healthier she grew.

One waned as the other waxed, like two ends of a scale.

So our parents decided to sacrifice me and pour everything they had into raising one perfect daughter.

The Cui family precepts held that a daughter of the Cui clan married no merchant and became no concubine.

So when the edict naming me a Noble Consort arrived, the great aristocratic families all assumed that the new emperor meant to humiliate our house.

And yet I did not hesitate to break with my family and entered the palace in that small sedan chair.

Because I had already died twice.

This was the third life I had been given.

I stayed by his side from his impoverished youth until he held the world in his palm.

Yet, I was forced to watch as he elevated my half-sister to the status of equal wife and executed my entire family.

I met a miserable end. Given a second chance at life, I watch as his back bows in defeat, his body trembling with regret.

I burn our marriage contract. I wish him a meteoric rise and a boundless future.

A boundless future, without me.