Schemes And Conspiracies

My father, the emperor, once traveled through Jiangnan in disguise and encountered a diviner.

The man exposed his identity at a glance and left him with a prophecy: ‘The one who will plunge my realm into chaos stands even now at Your Majesty’s side.’

Even after my father ordered him beaten to death, he refused to name the traitor.

And so my mother, the most favored consort in the Six Palaces, was given a bowl of arsenic by that brutal, suspicious emperor.

After her death, he ordered her hair draped over her face and her mouth stuffed with rice chaff, so that even her ghost would be too ashamed to face anyone and unable to speak.

All because she had been the only person beside him that day.

But there was one thing my father did not know.

At nine years old, hidden behind a curtain, I had heard everything too.

When I was eight, a lame Daoist wandered into our village.

Mother took pity on him and poured him a cup of water.

He declared that of the three of us siblings, one would become the supreme sovereign, one would become the mother of the realm, and one would stand in a doorway and sell her smiles.

My elder brother had studied since childhood, so naturally he was destined to become the supreme sovereign.

My little sister was beautiful, so naturally she would become the mother of the realm.

And naturally, the one fated to sell her smiles from a doorway had to be me.

Chapter 0

I am a Noble Consort, and I can hear the Emperor’s thoughts.

In my previous life, I followed those thoughts and fulfilled his every wish.

I thought I would climb the ranks and maybe even snag the seat of Empress for myself.

In the end, the Emperor turned out to be the worst kind of bastard.

He rejected every kindness offered to him and insisted on courting disaster, falling in love with a Fisher Girl outside the palace.

Against all opposition, he made her Empress.

And because he feared I would harm his Empress, he had me sentenced to death in advance.

After being reborn and hearing the Emperor’s thoughts again,

I leaked the information to my sworn enemies.

[His Majesty breaks out in hives whenever he eats lychees.]

[His Majesty plans to punish your family.]

[His Majesty cannot stop praising your younger sister.]

Consort An and Consort Shu were stunned.

“Sister, what should I do? Please, Sister, hurry and think of something!”

My mother-in-law brought home a child whose features looked just like my dead husband’s.

She called it fate.

My husband had been reincarnated and returned to repay my kindness.

So I rallied the full strength of our clan to make the boy heir to the marquisate.

But once he had risen to power and made a name for himself, he locked me in a woodshed in the rear courtyard and left me to die.

Then my supposedly dead husband came to my grave with his wife.

“Our son saw you to your end, at least.

That makes your life worthwhile.”

Now that I had been reborn, they could play their parts onstage, and I would applaud from below.

I would help them put on a tragedy of blood ties severed and a family destroyed.

I was never born to be harmless.

At three, I stabbed the young master next door in the eye with a hairpin, simply because he had peeped at my mother while she was bathing.

At five, I set fire to a theater, merely because I saw the troupe buying and selling children.

At ten, I secretly brought people with me and crippled the censor’s grandson.

Who told him to harass my elder sister in the street?

There were countless incidents like these… Later, I married a good man.

Everyone in his family was kind and decent, and I nearly died of boredom in the inner household.

When I was reborn on the day the Emperor granted marriages to my elder sister and me, I decisively swapped marriages with her.

In my previous life, less than two years after my sister married into the Duke’s Mansion, she passed away like a withered flower.

My sister had been reborn too.

With tears in her eyes, she said, “Second Sister, the Duke’s Mansion is a death trap! You can’t marry into it!” I was thrilled. “But… Sister, I was born a bad seed.”

Sold into a marquis’s estate at seven, Fugui survives by becoming a living screen, a beautiful servant trained to endure heat, cold, and pain without moving.

When another screen maid is condemned to serve as beauty paper merely for attracting the heir’s gaze, Fugui realizes she will be next.

To avenge the woman who raised her and escape a household that treats servants as objects, she turns the nobles’ forbidden desires, jealousies, and schemes against them.

My father was the richest man in Great Zhou, and I was his only daughter.

To protect me, he arranged for me to marry into Marquis Manor with an enormous dowry.

On the day of my engagement, I had a dream.

I dreamed that Marquis Manor looked down on me for being born to a merchant family, while the Young Marquis doted wholeheartedly on his talented cousin.

After my father died, my dowry was swallowed up completely.

To make his cousin his legitimate wife, the Young Marquis bribed the midwife to murder me while I was in childbirth.

When I woke from the dream, the Young Marquis walked into my family’s jewelry shop with his cousin in tow.

“Since you’re going to marry into Marquis Manor, you ought to shed that stink of money. Marquis Manor can’t afford that kind of embarrassment.

“Give this shop to my cousin. Consider it a greeting gift from you, her future sister-in-law.”

I looked at his smug, superior face and let out a cold laugh.

Then I turned and ordered the steward to throw him out.

“What kind of down-and-out household starts eyeing a wife’s dowry before she’s even married in?

“Your highborn Marquis Manor has worse manners than a farming family!”

After Southern Xu fell, sixteen-year-old Princess Xihe fled through a land at war with the young heir to the throne, only to be delivered into a Northern Qian military camp.

An enemy general fell in love with her, believing her to be an ordinary girl, while she watched those dearest to her die before her eyes.

Hatred for a fallen nation and vengeance for her family drove her onto a road paved with thorns.

Years later, she became empress of Northern Qian and laid her plans one careful step at a time amid court intrigue and bloodshed.

Even when she had been wounded beyond bearing, someone still broke through every obstacle to reach her – but she would have to choose between her own love and hatred, and the lives of all beneath heaven.

After my rebirth, that wayward young man whose fleeting impulse for fun had destroyed my family had already turned over a new leaf and redeemed himself. He was engaged to his childhood sweetheart and had become a young entrepreneur admired by all.

So I did everything in my power to marry him.

The first thing Lu Xiangzhi did after becoming the top scorer in the imperial examination was divorce his wife.

“The Shen family woman is virtuous enough, but far too dull.”

He married a woman from a brothel, while I remarried a spoiled heir.

Lu Xiangzhi believed I had only married that ignorant, good-for-nothing dandy out of spite.

He thought a Shen family woman valued wifely virtue above all else, while that dandy was too unruly to be managed.

It would not be long, he assumed, before the man grew tired of a dull woman like me.

He waited half a year, yet never heard that I had been cast aside.

When Lu Xiangzhi finally could not resist coming to see me, I was holding a discipline ruler and tapping my dandy husband’s head with it, rather helplessly saying, “The teacher explained it three times. You still don’t understand?”

My dandy husband wrapped an arm around my waist and grinned like a shameless rogue.

“I don’t. I want a kiss.”