Schemes And Conspiracies

Before we married, I already knew my husband had a concubine he doted on.

It did not matter.

I was marrying into a great house to become its mistress.

Naturally, I could afford to be generous.

After the wedding, I put the marquis’s household in perfect order, and my reputation as a virtuous wife spread throughout the capital.

Whether that concubine had a brain in her head, I could not say.

She actually let people know that the marquis and I had never consummated our marriage.

She meant to humiliate me, to make me a laughingstock.

What she never imagined was that her little stunt would force my mother-in-law to send the marquis knocking on my door late one night.

Everyone in my family was a villain.

In my last life, my father was impeached by Xie Linyuan, the emperor’s brother-in-law.

So Father drugged him and hired several men to ruin his chastity.

After Xie Linyuan rose to power, he had my entire family arrested and our estate confiscated.

In this life, I was determined to be a good person.

I reached Xie Linyuan in time to save him after he was drugged.

He reclined against the bed, his face flushed, but his tongue remained as sharp as ever.

“What shameless temptress is this?

How dare you resort to such vile tricks to harm me?”

My fault.

I had been in such a hurry to save him that I had not even dressed properly.

I said awkwardly, “Well, Lord Xie… should I fetch a girl from next door to cure you?”

“A virgin courtesan would do too?”

At fourteen, naive Ah Yuan enters the imperial palace beside her fearless friend Xiaochun, believing the two of them can survive anything together.

But as Xiaochun rises through the emperor’s favor, the women around them are drawn into a harem where affection is political currency and every child can become a weapon.

Ah Yuan survives by holding fast to kindness, even as loyalty turns into leverage, ambition demands blood, and the people she loves make choices she cannot undo.

Across a lifetime shaped by palace secrets, she bears witness to the cost of clinging to power—and to the quiet courage it takes to walk away.

Born in a brothel and raised as its future commodity, Liu Yuan’er watches her mother work herself raw to buy them both a life of freedom.

The day before they can leave, the daughter of Grand Tutor Song has her mother beaten to death—and Yuan’er learns that the powerful man behind the murder is her own father.

With no law willing to touch the Song clan, Yuan’er enters the imperial palace under a borrowed identity.

Every favor, poison, pregnancy, and betrayal becomes a move in her revenge, while Prince Su watches from the shadows and offers the one blade sharp enough to cut down the empire’s most untouchable family.

Yuan’er was named for a kite meant to fly free.

To avenge her mother, she may have to trade that freedom for a cage of gold.

My father was an imperial censor, and nothing mattered to him more than his reputation.

He had fathered me on a prostitute.

Mother and I were the greatest stains on his life, and he would have liked nothing better than to be rid of us.

After Yun Xiu survives a staged drowning, she claims she has returned from a disastrous first life.

Armed with memories of the future, she steals her concubine-born sister Yun Xia’s fiancé, certain that Wen Changfeng is destined to become prime minister.

Yun Xia yields without protest—but only because she has spent years building a fortune and plotting revenge for the mother Yun Xiu left to drown.

While Yun Xiu chases status and love for a second time, Yun Xia quietly guides every ambition toward ruin.

Some sins cannot be atoned for in a single lifetime.

After Wei Xuan and I had tormented each other for most of our lives, he finally grew tired.

On his deathbed, he refused even to see me.

He had our children deliver his last words instead.

“In my next life, I would rather be your brother for a lifetime than spend half a life as your resentful husband, with both of us losing the ones we truly love.”

Sure enough, the moment he returned to the past, he rushed to free his childhood sweetheart from prison and showered her with tenderness.

Then he forced his mother to take me as a goddaughter.

Smiling, I accepted the jade pendant and bowed with perfect obedience.

“May all be well with you, Elder Brother.”

His hand faltered, then dropped stiffly to his side.

Before long, we were each betrothed to someone else.

He remained in the capital.

I was bound for Lin’an.

Yet on the day my boat departed, he tore off his wedding robes, leaped into the river with no thought for his life, and clung desperately to the gunwale, begging me to stay.

My eldest sister hated what she called pampered wives more than anything.

At a palace banquet, she sneered at the empress.

“A true strong female lead would have seized the throne and made herself empress regnant long ago.

Strip away the fine words, and the empress is still just a pampered wife who climbed to power through a man, isn’t she?”

One remark from her condemned the entire Song family.

On the day our estate was confiscated, Prince Chen offered my eldest sister a hand.

If she would only beg for mercy, every woman of the Song household could be spared enslavement.

Instead, she lifted her chin and declared, “Even if every woman in my family is made a slave, I will never beg a man for pity like some pampered wife!”

Prince Chen stormed away in fury, and our entire family was exiled into bondage.

On the road north, my second brother risked his life and led men to free us.

My sister only scoffed.

“Only pampered wives need men to save them!”

She deliberately raised the alarm, and my brother died beneath a storm of arrows.

Yet that very display of “independence” caught the eye of a prince from an enemy kingdom.

When he wanted to take me as a concubine, I had no choice but to agree if I wanted to live.

My sister said, “I’m marrying him for love.

If you become his concubine, you’re nothing but a pampered wife fighting another woman for a man’s favor!”

She ordered me to kill myself.

I had endured enough.

I lunged at her, determined that we would die together.

When I opened my eyes again, I had returned to the day the Song estate was seized.

Prince Chen was holding out his hand to my sister.

She looked at him with disdain.

“I will never be a pampered wife who depends on a man!”

As disappointment crossed his face, I reached out and caught hold of his belt.

“She doesn’t know a good thing when she sees it, Your Highness.

Perhaps you might take a look at me instead.”

On his deathbed, the late emperor entrusted me with his heir—and had me bound and dragged back overnight to assist the new emperor.

Isolated and alone, the new emperor glared through bloodshot eyes, snapping at anyone who came near like a wolf cub.

“Better that I betray the world than let the world betray me!”

My eyes lit up.

The new emperor, later: “On second thought, the world hasn’t wronged me quite that badly.”

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.