Short story

My celebrated fiancé casts me aside for the brilliant female thief who became his partner in solving the capital’s most sensational cases.

Branded a discarded woman, I am forced by imperial decree to marry Li Fu, an unlettered general whose rough manners could not be further from the refined husband I once imagined.

Yet beneath his beard and battle scars lies a loyalty steadier than any storybook romance, while I discover that managing a difficult household may demand more courage than grieving a broken engagement.

When the applause fades and ordinary life begins, both Gu Huaichuan and I learn which kind of love can truly survive beyond the stage.

On the day Ran Ling returned to the capital in triumph, his long-lost first love was brought back to him.

She had once cast aside reputation and status to elope with him, and he had once taken a sword for her.

Everyone said the star-crossed lovers of their youth would finally get the happy ending they had been denied.

But I wasn’t worried, because my mother had transmigrated into this novel—and I was a devoted mama’s girl.

It didn’t matter what anyone schemed against me; I was the hollow rose my mother had raised.

The general saved a woman.

Then he asked me to surrender my place as his lawful wife.

I held the divorce paper and laughed coldly.

“Gu Nianwu, success has gone to your head.”

You may command a thousand troops, but I command ten thousand ghosts.

Without me, where would all your glorious victories have come from?

In my second year as empress, I fell ill and was left barren. From then on, I could no longer bear children.

The emperor turned his favor to Consort Zhen and spent ten years doting on her through seven pregnancies.

Then the imperial physician knelt before the emperor and said Consort Zhen did not have long to live.

The moment I fell ill in this life, I already knew the day Consort Zhen would die.

After all, in my previous life, the one who died was me.

An accident while tasting medicine for the Noble Consort left me disfigured.

She arranged for me to marry the Fifth Prince, who had been stripped of his rank and reduced to a commoner.

The Fifth Prince did not like me.

He despised my ugliness and the shame it brought him. He never acknowledged me as his wife.

I knew better than to press myself on him, so I stayed out of his sight as much as possible.

Other people treated my disfigurement as an insult to him.

But I could not think of myself as something filthy.

Later, after painstaking effort, the Fifth Prince regained his rank and gradually won the emperor’s favor.

Everyone came to congratulate him.

Even my parents arrived with my younger sister, hoping to secure her a place among his women.

“Aqiao, you can’t possibly attend to His Highness looking like that.”

“If someone is going to benefit, it might as well be one of our own family.”

“His Highness likes your sister, too. Look for yourself if you don’t believe us.”

The Fifth Prince really did like her.

He allowed her to stay by his side, grinding ink, cleaning his inkstone, and keeping him company in his study.

Whenever he brought gifts home, there was always something for her.

He even let her choose first from the gifts bestowed by the palace.

Everyone said she was certain to become his secondary consort one day.

She thought so, too.

Yet he never formally took her as a concubine.

I no longer wanted to wait, either. I asked for a divorce.

For a moment, the Fifth Prince looked distracted. Then he asked quietly:

“Are you serious?”

After dying under mysterious circumstances, fearless general Shi Songyue awakens as a ghost bound to Jiang Yinxue, the sharp-tongued imperial censor who was once her sworn enemy.

She assumes she can drain his yang essence and torment him at will, until she discovers he stole her body, traded away his lifespan to summon her soul, and spent years hiding a love neither of them dared confess.

As fragments of memory expose her former fiancé Shen Feng as her murderer, Songyue must choose between clinging to Jiang Yinxue at the cost of his life and leaving him behind forever.

Yet fate offers the quarrelsome lovers one more chance—if they can stop wounding each other long enough to seize it.

My funeral was held with the highest honors.

After all, I was Zhao Xun’s first wife. For four years I had reigned as empress, mother to the nation, carrying out every duty without a single misstep.

Even after he began doting on Consort Chen and fell out with the Empress Dowager over her, I was the one who mediated between them.

When Consort Chen fell ill, he stayed at her bedside for three days without changing his clothes or taking so much as a sip of water.

When my turn came, there was no grief on his face. He merely held my slowly cooling hand and sat there for a long while.

“If there is another life, I will make you my empress again.”

Another life truly came.

Zhao Xun had not yet met the love of his life. He had agreed to let the Empress choose a virtuous young noblewoman to be his princess consort.

The Empress pointed to me.

Then, just as he looked my way, her fingertip shifted an inch and settled on someone else.

“On second thought, let us choose Second Miss Li.”

Shen Zhuozhuo is the hidden second beauty of a merchant family. After a depraved young marquis abducts and brutalizes her elder sister, then wipes out the Shen household for daring to demand justice, Zhuozhuo survives with one purpose: revenge. Assuming the identity of a scholar’s dead sister, she enters the imperial palace and draws the emperor close, turning her beauty, patience, and even her own body into weapons. To destroy the Marquis of Cheng’en and the Empress Dowager who shields him, she baits each enemy into a trap more dangerous than the last. But when calculated affection meets the emperor’s unexpected sincerity, Zhuozhuo must decide whether vengeance has left any room for a future.

Five years after her elder sister fails to produce an heir, concubine-born Song Yao is forced into the palace as the Song clan’s replacement pawn. With her mother and ailing brother held hostage, she turns the family’s coercion into a weapon, pledging herself to a ruthless emperor while plotting to dismantle the clan that murdered her brothers. In a harem ruled by rival families, every act of devotion is a gambit—and Song Yao intends to survive long enough to claim the board.

At ten, Li Shuquan’s family brings home her frail elder sister and renames her Xiaoman, ordering her to yield everything—from her name to her future.

Years later, when both sisters fall into a lake during a matchmaking meeting, Xiaoman wakes to a physician’s diagnosis of memory loss.

The Grand Princess takes her hand and declares herself Xiaoman’s mother.

With one quiet word—Mama—Xiaoman chooses the family that chooses her and begins to reclaim a life long sacrificed to someone else’s happiness.