Schemes And Conspiracies

Three months after marrying into the Marquis Manor, I became pregnant.

A maid brought me a bowl of medicinal soup, claiming it was a gift from the Empress Dowager to help stabilize my pregnancy.

I took the bowl but didn’t dare to drink it.

In my previous life, not long after I drank it, I fell into a coma.

When I finally woke, I was trapped in a sea of flames, and both mother and child perished.

At that moment, the maid urged me, “Please drink it quickly, Madam. Refusing a gift from the Empress Dowager is a punishable offense.”

Twenty years into Wen Lishu’s widowhood, her bedridden mother-in-law reveals a secret: her husband faked his death and eloped with her sister.

Even the children Lishu raised supposedly belong to that treacherous pair.

The old woman expects despair, but Lishu calmly offers another spoonful of medicine.

Her husband really is dead—and his ashes have been in his mother’s medicine all along.

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.

A gripping tale of betrayal, revenge, murder mystery, hidden identities, an original wife’s counterattack, and one woman’s awakening.

Qin Jiajia, granddaughter of the renowned painter Qin Mo, loses her womb and then her life in a fire after being betrayed by her husband, Zhong Mingjiang, and his mistress, Luo Xia.

But soon afterward, an anonymous text appears on Luo Xia’s phone.

“A life for a life. Your reckoning is here. Are you ready?”

On his way home from work, Zhong Mingjiang encounters something equally horrifying: photographs of Qin Jiajia’s charred, mutilated body suddenly appear inside his car, along with a blood-soaked uterus on the passenger seat.

Every chilling incident leads back to Qin Jiajia’s death.

Trapped in boundless terror, the cheating husband and his mistress cry out for help, but no one answers….

While everyone else was fighting for the Emperor’s favor, I built an intelligence station in the cold palace.

Until the day he died, the Emperor never knew that the woman stirring up the hidden currents of his harem was someone whose name he could not even remember.

I died in Yongxiang Alley during my third winter there.

Not truly died-only the kind of death where your name is crossed out in vermilion ink on the registry.

They said Noble Lady Li, who had once worked in the imperial garden and was later favored by His Majesty for her beauty, had gone mad.

Because on the late Empress’s memorial day, I let my hair hang loose, went barefoot, and sang a rousing rendition of “Liangzhou Ci.”

In truth, I was not mad. I had simply calculated that the Chief Eunuch of the Directorate of Ceremonial would pass through the imperial garden that day.

Madness was the best pass in the cold palace, and the best armor.

On the day I moved into the West Third Institute, only one lame old eunuch came to lead the way.

The weeds in the courtyard rose past my knees, and the moss on the well curb was as thick as a velvet blanket.

My roommate, Attendant Li, had been thrown in here three years ago after offending the Imperial Consort.

When she saw me arrive, she did not even lift her eyelids. She only kept rubbing a length of hemp rope in her hands, its edges worn fuzzy.

I set my only bundle down on the crumbling earthen kang.

Inside were two sets of worn palace clothes, a bald writing brush, and half a ream of yellow paper.

The paper pasted over the window lattice had a hole in it the size of a fist. The north wind poured in with a howl, carrying the faint sound of pipes and flutes from far away.

I stared at that hole, but in my heart, a sliver of light slipped through.

In a madwoman’s world, there were the fewest rules.

Here, perhaps, I could live.

Not long after I married the crown prince, he was deposed.

We spent ten years imprisoned together in a derelict garden.

I tilled the soil and planted vegetables, doing everything I could to stay alive.

Half out of his mind, he kicked my vegetables to pieces, muttering, “Thank goodness it isn’t Qianyi locked up in here.”

Qianyi was the cousin who had come to live with my family.

She was now Prince Cheng’s consort.

I had never known the deposed crown prince had feelings for her.

His ravings made a mockery of the ten years I had spent at his side.

Later, Prince Cheng ascended the throne and issued two decrees.

One sentenced the deposed crown prince to death by poisoned wine.

The other sent me to cultivate the Way in a Taoist temple.

I became Master Taihui of Purple Cloud Temple.

Less than two years later, I became the new emperor’s Consort Yu.

People sneered at my wiles, saying I had bewitched the emperor so thoroughly that he neglected even his lawful wife.

My cousin demanded bitterly to know why I had stolen her husband, why I had not followed the deposed crown prince to the grave.

The new emperor hated me too.

He hated me because, years before, I had seen him wounded and left him there to attend the consort selection.

His grave injuries had failed to heal.

He had lost his chance and spent years scheming before he finally won the throne.

Yet later, when a deadly poison left me confined to my sickbed, he cast aside his entire harem and used blood drawn from his own heart to save me.

As I lay dying, he held me and wept in anguish.

“As long as you live, I’ll agree to anything.”

“I’ll make you empress.”

“I’ll let your parents come back to the capital.”

“Your brother, your sister-in-law, your nephew—all of them.”

“Only live.”

Tears blurred my sight.

I did not even have the strength to cry.

Too late.

Why couldn’t he have granted my wish sooner?

Why had he made my whole life so miserable?

Then I was given another life.

Mother told me joyfully that the empress had specifically summoned me to the consort-selection banquet.

I looked at my cousin, who could hardly contain her eagerness, then lowered my eyes and said softly, “I don’t want to go.”

A group of tourists travels to an island for a vacation, only to be forced into a deadly game with enormous rewards and their lives at stake. Over the days that follow, one special contest will be held each day, and the event will be chosen by a randomly selected Featured Player. At least one person will be eliminated in every contest. There is only one way to end this brutal game early: identify the Mastermind hiding among them.

Chen Nuo is terminally ill and had planned to end his life during the trip. But once he is drawn into the game, desperation rekindles his will to survive, and he joins the other contestants in one unexpected, heart-stopping contest after another. As the number of survivors plummets, the game’s rules grow increasingly cruel, laying bare the best and worst of human nature in a struggle between life and death. They have three Mastermind votes. Can they unmask the Mastermind? And what astonishing secret lies behind The Missing Game?

After my sister fell into the water, she seemed to become a different person.

She stopped chasing after the heir to Prince Qin. Instead, time and again, she pushed me in front of him.

With grief in her eyes and stubborn resolve in her voice, she said, “You have always been the one in his heart. I won’t stand between you anymore.”

At the same moment, lines of text appeared in the air before me.

“I know it hurts to give the man you love to someone else with your own hands, but this is the only way to make the male lead recognize his feelings sooner and spare you all that suffering.”

“People only treasure what they can’t have. Now that you’ve pushed your sister at Qin Yi, he’ll get bored with her and lose interest.”

“Once Qin Yi realizes you’ve truly given up on him, he’ll grovel and beg you to take him back.”

“Our Eldest Miss deserves the best. Change the male lead! Qin Yi has liked someone else, so he’s already tainted. Let him marry the supporting female character. Once he discovers how vicious the sister really is, he’ll regret everything—but by then, you’ll already have found someone better. Turn this angst story into a revenge fantasy!”

Tears shimmered in my sister’s eyes as she faced Qin Yi with absolute determination. “Don’t worry. I won’t pester you again. You and my sister are the perfect match.”

I hid my shock and looked at Qin Yi.

Only to find him staring at the words in the air too, momentarily lost in thought.

My father’s favored concubine trained my younger sister in all the arts of the pleasure quarters, convinced it would help her secure a man’s heart.

When I came of age, she proposed that Yuniang marry alongside me as an accompanying concubine.

There was only one flaw in her plan.

As the Qiao family’s legitimate eldest daughter and future head, I was never marrying out—I would take a husband into my own household.

I was born cold-blooded.

When my mother died, I stood by her bedside without shedding a single tear.

In the front courtyard, lanterns and streamers were being hung to celebrate my father’s concubine’s birthday.

“Yuntan,” my mother said, “you are just like your father.”

A dying person always carries a certain air of decay.

She stared up at the canopy of her bed and sighed again.

“It is better to be like him… the heartless… always live longer…”

“Do not be like me, trapped in the word ‘love’ for a lifetime. It was a mistake…”

My mother was a loser her entire life.

I never expected that years later, the most reputable and upright gentleman in the capital, Xie Yijue, the Heir to Duke Zhenguo, would come to my door to ask for my hand in marriage.

He had one condition: He wanted to take my younger half-sister, Ji Zhi, into his household alongside me.