Strong Female Lead

Meng Fanyu carried himself with effortless distinction.

I thought that even if we eventually broke up, having him as my first love would leave me with no regrets.

So I pursued him with everything I had.

Eventually, I won him over, and he laid down three rules: we would date, never marry, and break up when we graduated.

For three years, we loved each other with abandon.

On graduation day, I was the one who ended it, but he went back on our agreement.

Our conversation fell apart, and Meng Fanyu lowered his proud head with a bitter laugh.

He told me I had better pray we never met again.

From then on, I did everything I could to avoid him.

But with the slightest turn of fate, the world can become very small, and two people who once belonged to each other are bound to meet again.

Everyone in the capital envies He Jingyao, the only wife of the powerful Chief Minister Shen. Yet she alone knows that her distant husband has filled a treasured sandalwood box with love letters to her elder sister.

When death sends Jingyao back to the day Shen Yanchu first proposed, she returns his betrothal jade and refuses to repeat their loveless marriage. But Shen has also returned with memories of their first life—and this time, he begs her not to leave him.

Caught between a calculating sister who sees marriage as a political bargain and a remorseful man who understood his heart too late, Jingyao walks away from the capital. In the freedom of Quliang City, she finally meets the love that had been waiting for her all along.

The day Father strangled Mama to death, a fox spirit took over her body.

I caught her just as she was digging out Father’s heart.

She fumbled around trying to hide it, then deliberately let her fox muzzle show.

“I killed him, not your mother. Your mother was a good woman.”

“Oh,” I said, bringing over a clay pot.

“Wouldn’t that heart taste better stewed?”

My mother taught me that a concubine could only live well by pleasing her husband until he cast aside his wife for her.

But I discovered that the lawful wife was beautiful, kind, and—most importantly—rich.

So I switched sides without hesitation and asked, “Madam, may I work for you instead?”

My mother’s new husband’s son called me a gold-digging freeloader, said my mother had seduced his father, and declared us both shameless sluts.

I cornered him against the wall and attacked his lips with my tongue.

“That’s right! My mom seduced your dad, and now I want to seduce you!”

The school heartthrob claimed I had a crush on him, mocked me for dreaming above my station, then photocopied my secret diary and scattered the pages all over campus.

I pasted his face over a photo of the hottest host at a male revue, then grabbed his ass in front of the entire school.

“Are you jealous because I didn’t book you last weekend?”

When my homeroom teacher said I was a troublemaker and threatened to punish me, I tied him up instead.

“When a student misbehaves, her teacher is to blame—so please accept your punishment, sir!”

My mother was the ubiquitous housekeeper Mrs. Wang from domineering-CEO romance novels.

After graduating from college, I inherited the family profession and became Mrs. Wang 2.0.

When the CEO’s first love faked a fall, I slid a cushion under her to keep her safe.

When Madam was too depressed to eat, I cheered her up with warm words and good food.

When the CEO scolded his first love, I comforted her too.

I lived by the housekeeper’s creed my mother had taught me: every visitor is a guest, and a good worker always sees what needs doing.

In the end, Madam and the first love came to blows over me.

“You can have my man—we can negotiate; try taking my housekeeper, and you’re dead!”

I am the vicious supporting character in a novel.

Yet I have been forced to watch one transmigrator after another take over my body, throw away all dignity, and grovel before a little beast already rotten to the core, all because they dreamed of saving him.

They called it redeeming the villain—showing him the warmth and beauty of the world.

Without exception, every one of them was betrayed once the little beast rose to power, and every one died without an intact corpse.

Now the cycle has begun again.

I expected another laughable attempt at redemption, but this time, before the villain could grow into his power, the new transmigrator drove a blade straight through his heart.

Blood flecked her face, making her smile look dark and uncanny.

“I’d already made a mortal enemy of him, so why not kill him and end the threat for good?”

“This redemption game is painfully dull.”

When the marquis’s household finally brought me home, I was already twenty years old—old enough that women my age had children, while I remained unwed.

Only after entering the estate did I learn that I had been promised in marriage before I was born, but the false heiress raised in my place had already married my betrothed.

She and the ducal heir were deeply in love, with both a son and a daughter, and theirs was celebrated throughout the capital as a perfect match.

When she faced me, guilt overwhelmed her so completely that she could not speak through her tears.

Mother held her close and comforted her, while the ducal heir vowed that she would be the only woman in his life.

I stood straight and composed, pretending none of it mattered.

Hidden inside my sleeve, however, my fingers clutched my skirt so tightly that they ached to the bone.

That night, Mother took my hand and sighed, urging me to accept that everything was already settled and let it go.

She promised to find me a better marriage and said she had already considered several fine young gentlemen.

I stared at the osmanthus tree perfuming the courtyard and found myself thinking instead of the pigs back home, with no one left to tend them.

“Mother,” I said, “I don’t want a marriage. Please let me go home.”

Bai Zhi is only an herb-gathering mortal until the spoiled disciple Cui Fuling burns her family alive and an immortal sect dismisses their deaths as the loss of mere insects.

Forced into the very sect that protects her enemy, Bai Zhi awakens a sealed Chaos Spiritual Root and endures every humiliation while secretly sharpening her sword.

When she returns as Xie Zhi, lost daughter of the legendary cultivator Xie Lan, a stolen poisoned herb and a forbidden master-disciple romance become the weapons that bring Spirit Sword Sect to its knees.

But revenge is only the first step, for ascension reveals that her missing parents—and enemies from an even greater world—are still waiting above.

When I was eleven, my stepmother pushed me into a river, and after being passed from hand to hand, I ended up in the pleasure quarter.

Five years later, on an ordinary morning, I painted my brows, opened her door with a smile, and said, “I’m back. I missed you.”

Not long afterward, my stepmother’s body was found in an old well.