Short story

On the night before she joins her boyfriend’s startup, Wen Xiyue receives a call from herself twelve years in the future.

He will become a billionaire, but she will spend those years running his errands and surrendering her own ambitions.

Her future self has one urgent warning: take the developer job instead.

This time, Xiyue chooses her own career—and refuses to let the man who wants her talent steal her future.

My childhood friend Jiang Yan thought I was too clingy, so he hypnotized me and deliberately made me pursue someone else.

He had no idea the hypnosis was fake—or that chasing Song Yaozhou would lead me to the person willing to be my knight and teach me to become my own.

I took my younger sister’s place and married the fiancé who had suddenly gone blind.

After the wedding, we got along surprisingly well.

He believed the woman beside him was my sister, and that was why he treated me with such tenderness and devotion.

If nothing changed, our life should have passed quietly and smoothly.

Then one day, the man everyone believed would be blind forever…

Could see again.

Qi He had spent three years trying to win me over, mistaking me for the heroine.

He sent me money, made transfers, and bought me a home.

I accepted it all without batting an eye.

I could hear his thoughts: Why hasn’t the romance progress gone up at all?

Am I not giving her enough?

I pretended I had no idea.

So he gave me more and more money.

Until one day, he finally realized he’d been pursuing the wrong woman.

The crown prince married me because I seemed content to ask for nothing.

He made me promise that when my elder sister changed her mind and returned, I would surrender my place as crown princess.

What did he know?

Asking for nothing could be the surest way to gain everything.

After the wedding, I wore myself out in his service, at court and within his household alike.

I even nearly “died” for him several times.

The day my sister returned, I kept our agreement: I took off the crown princess’s robes and handed over the phoenix seal.

He was the one who began to hesitate.

I could hear the Noble Consort’s thoughts.

Inside her head, she cursed the emperor: “That decrepit bastard!”

“He’s much better at lecturing me than he ever is in bed!”

I looked up in shock.

She was nestled sweetly in the emperor’s arms, feeding him a slice of pear.

Inside her head, she was still raging: “Would someone please poison him already?”

“I’m so damn tired of serving him…”

My husband was an emperor too powerless to rule.

Again and again, his ministers stopped him from deposing the empress, naming our son crown prince, or making me his empress.

After he died, the empress imprisoned me in the Cold Palace for twenty years, keeping my son alive only as long as I survived.

On the day death finally took me, a eunuch came to say that my son had been given poisoned wine as well.

History called me a temptress and a demon who ruined the realm, though I had spent my life urging mercy and never harmed a soul.

My husband and I once promised to find each other in another life.

Yet when that life came, I avoided the crown prince’s gaze and did everything I could not to be chosen—only to hear him tell his mother, “I choose Eldest Miss Song as my crown princess.”

Lu Yan pursued me for five years.

The day after I finally said yes, I came across a post written by his childhood sweetheart.

[My ten-year crush is finally over.]

[My childhood friend has a girlfriend now, but it isn’t me.]

[Our story was full of missed chances.

The closest we ever came was the kiss I stole.]

[Letting go of ten years of love feels strange.

Part of me can’t bear to, but part of me is happy for him.]

[If I’d been the one who gave him that piece of candy all those years ago, would I be the one he loved now?]

People in the comments lamented the heartache of her decade-long crush and admired her courage in loving someone for so long, yet still knowing when to let go.

Then Lu Yan replied, sending the post’s popularity soaring.

[Yes.]

I stared at that single word and slowly exhaled.

At last, I had a reason to break up with him.

Xu Man is forced into the Crown Princess Academy with only one goal: get her tuition back and save her ailing father.

When the academy uses rules and money to grind its noble students into submission, she joins forces with her classmates, exposes its corruption through a single ledger, brings the bride-training institution to a halt, and balances the books for women determined to win back their freedom.

For four years, Emperor Pei Guannan has refused to fill his harem, and the court blames the man at his side.

Xie Yuanzhen has shared his hardships for fifteen years, asking for neither power nor reward.

But loyalty cannot give the dynasty an heir, and love cannot silence the ministers.

To protect the emperor’s name, Yuanzhen leaves the palace to serve the people.

Across snowbound roads and the endless rain of Nanyue, the words they cannot say become letters—and a promise to live to eighty.