Short story

At a palace banquet, my elder sister accidentally inhaled an aphrodisiac and ended up alone in a room with the heir of the Xie family.

But she was already the Crown Princess, and if the secret got out, the consequences would be catastrophic.

To protect her reputation, the young lord publicly took responsibility and claimed that I had been the woman who spent that night with him.

After I married into the marquis’s household, he remained unfailingly polite but distant, as cold as frost behind a screen.

So determined was he to sleep in separate rooms that he even ruined his own reputation, pretending to be drunk and lamenting before others that he suffered from an unspeakable condition and could not perform as a man.

To preserve the family’s dignity, my mother-in-law simply announced that I was the infertile one.

My sister tormented herself day and night, convinced that she had ruined my life.

I alone breathed a secret sigh of relief, stroked my steadily rounding belly, and made an announcement at the family banquet.

“A miracle from heaven! My husband is going to have an heir!”

On the first day after my wealthy birth family found me, my biological parents gave me a warning.

“Now that you’re back, don’t go thinking you can compete with Nian for anything.”

I surveyed the family’s opening show of hostility, smiled, and pulled out an employment contract.

“I think you two have misunderstood something: a parent-child relationship is a legal fact.”

“But asking me to play the sweet, obedient daughter while serving as your adopted daughter’s stepping stone would qualify as premium emotional labor.”

“It’ll cost extra.”

I was venting during a livestream.

“What kind of problem makes my roommate shower seven times in one night?”

The chat immediately filled with viewers complaining about their own nightmare roommates.

Only one person gave me a serious answer.

[Your roommate showers so much because she’s a monkey.]

On the day Mother was buried, Father gave me three copper coins.

He sent me all the way to West Street for candied hawthorns, but when I returned, he was gone.

Two days later, I found him at the lantern festival with a beautiful lady and another little girl in his arms.

The candied hawthorns he claimed to want were still wrapped in my hand.

Rather than waste them, I offered them to a pale, handsome prince who refused to drink his bitter medicine.

That small gift changed both our lives—and gave two abandoned hearts a home.

Zhang Cheng only pretends to adore the aloof heir Xiao Yanyu so she can keep living at his family’s residence while saving to bring her mother and siblings to the capital.

When a passion parasite forces them into intimacy and a Heart-Severing Pill erases her memories, Xiao Yanyu must cast aside his pride and seduce the oblivious constable all over again.

Before love can triumph, Zhang Cheng must decide whether the man she thought despised her is worth risking the independent future she built for her family.

When Princess Huaying catches a lowly musician wearing her ceremonial robes, mysterious floating comments reveal that she is meant to be the vicious supporting villainess in someone else’s triumphant love story.

Refusing the fate of disgrace, exile, and death assigned to her, Huaying turns every trap against the scheming Prince of Qi and follows a buried imperial secret to the heart of a decades-old succession struggle.

Yet when rebellion finally erupts, Huaying discovers that her cleverest ally may be her formidable mother—and that surviving the story requires more than defeating its supposed heroine.

I was my birth parents’ third child.

While my birth mother was pregnant with me, the village fortune-teller swore I would be a boy.

They could hardly wait.

They hid from place to place throughout the pregnancy and finally brought me into the world in the bitter cold of the twelfth lunar month—

a girl.

After a blackout leaves Qin Shuyi with swollen lips and three female roommates as suspects, her search for the mystery kisser forces her to confront a tangle of hidden crushes—and the girl who has loved her all along.

I told Jin Ran I was breaking up with him because I liked old men—rich, independent, quick to die, and generous with their estates—and asked whether he could offer me that.

Years later, I went on a third-rate prank show and was told to call my first love in front of a live audience.

I called Jin Ran. “Let’s get back together.”

After a long silence, his deep voice came through the phone.

“I’m twenty-seven. I’m not dying anytime soon.”

Three months after he dumped me without warning, I found my boyfriend again—with no memory of ever leaving me.

His eyes were clear, his mind stranded in the days when he had loved me most.

So I took him home.

I trapped him with the cheapest sweet nothings.

Then, just as he had once done to me, I turned his own tricks against him.

And drove him mad, one careful inch at a time.