Strong Female Lead

Both the Crown Prince and the Grand General wished to marry me.

I hated the intrigue of the Eastern Palace, so I chose the Grand General who had sworn that I would be the only woman in his life.

Yet on our wedding night, his female deputy lured him out of the bridal chamber with a single flask of wine.

Still dressed in my wedding robes, I listened to their moans through the wall for half the night.

When the rain became a downpour, I threw on a cloak and knocked on the Eastern Palace gate under cover of darkness.

At the Crown Prince’s astonished expression, I gave a bitter smile.

“Your Highness.”

“Tell me—if a woman suddenly thinks of another man on her own wedding night…”

“Isn’t that ridiculous?”

I am a blood demon, and the young demon I raised with my own hands poisoned me and carved out my core.

She fell for a mortal man, stole another woman’s identity, and entered the imperial palace.

Then she reduced the emperor’s wife—the woman who had once shared all his hardships—to a beggar.

She thought that would make her the heroine of the story.

Demons do not usually pity humans.

But she dug out my ten-thousand-year demon core just to steal a man?!

I would feed it to a dog before I let her have it.

After Shen Linzhang fell from his horse and lost his memory, the House of Shen fell out of imperial favor.

Everyone avoided them as if they carried the plague.

Only I begged my father to let me marry into the Shen household at its most precarious hour.

Shen Linzhang had the mind of a child.

He understood nothing of worldly affairs; he knew only that I was his wife.

Three years later, the woman general who had guarded the frontier rode back to the capital.

The instant he saw her, Shen Linzhang was seized by a splitting headache.

A moment later, he abandoned me, vaulted onto a horse, and galloped after her.

When we met again, his eyes were clear.

He handed me a letter of divorce.

He said that I had been raised in the inner courtyard like a bird in a cage and had never seen how vast the world was.

He declared that the love of his life was a brilliant, valiant woman general like Feiying.

He spoke with easy arrogance, his chin held high.

Then I calmly accepted the letter.

This time, he was the one left speechless.

Lady Wang and I went into labor on the same day.

She bore a son, while I bore a daughter.

When I awoke, lines of floating comments suddenly appeared in the air.

[The supporting woman is going to die of rage when she finds out the emperor switched her son for some stray girl.]

[With a family like hers, do you think the emperor would ever have risked letting her get pregnant if it weren’t for our precious Lulu?]

[The emperor is willing to corrupt the imperial bloodline for Lulu. The god of pure love has fallen!]

The next moment, Pei Yangxi carried the baby girl to my bedside.

“Ah Ci, look how adorable our child is.”

I found an unconscious noblewoman by the river.

One bowl of lard rice a day, and she slowly nursed back to health.

Then one day, a great contingent of Tiger Guards came sweeping in full force to my butcher shop and knelt before the noblewoman: "We humbly request that our mistress return to the marquis's residence!"

The man leading them noticed me standing off to the side, trembling: "And who are you?"

I blurted out in a panic: "This commoner is the third butcher shop south of the city, pig slaugh-"

Before I could finish, the noblewoman clapped her hand over my mouth.

"This is my only daughter, the one I had fostered with my maiden family."

When seven-year-old Linzhi watches her licentiate father bring home Xingdi, a disgraced quanzao maid meant to cook by day and warm his bed at night, she sees two very different women discover that obedience will never protect them.

After lust, cruelty, and a child’s preventable death bind Xu Tingyu, Xingdi, and Linzhi together, they turn the rules of a patriarchal household against the man who owns their lives—and set an exquisitely patient revenge in motion.

But killing one tyrant cannot free women from a world built to strip them of property, names, and futures, so mother, aunt, and daughter must risk everything to claim a life their laws refuse to grant them.

Because I coveted the Crown Prince’s beauty, I snuck into the Eastern Palace and became a Dark Guard.

The Crown Prince was temperamental and unpredictable, so I only dared to drool over him in secret.

Until the day he was deposed and reduced to a commoner.

Taking advantage of the chaos, I locked him inside the dungeon I had painstakingly built.

“You wretched slave! Release me at once!”

The proud Crown Prince’s eyes reddened with fury, making him look even more enticing.

I slowly undid his belt and pinned him against the damp brick wall.

“Let you go? I can’t do that. But… having you? That I can do.”

I devoured the Crown Prince completely and forced him through one position after another.

Until later.

I caught a Dark Guard slipping into the dungeon and kneeling as he begged the Crown Prince to return to the palace.

And the man who, just last night, had refused to yield beneath me even if it killed him, curled his lips in a lazy smile.

“No hurry. The Crown Princess and I still have some candlelit reading to do tonight.”

…

The freshly printed copy of Dragon and Phoenix Harmonizing Eighteen Positions in my hand fell to the floor with a smack.

At Yuchi Wei’s wedding, I once fired an arrow that pierced through the bride’s red veil, killing her on the spot.

I did it because that woman was a spy.

In the aftermath, Yuchi Wei was moved to tears of gratitude. He promoted me to be his personal lieutenant.

Because of that proximity, he eventually discovered my secret-that I was a woman disguised as a man.

Five years later, on our wedding night, he walked into the room carrying a funerary urn he had cherished for years.

“I want you to experience the same thing I did back then,” he said. “To taste the bitterest pain at the moment of your greatest joy.”

Only then did I realize he had deeply loved that spy all along, and his heart had never changed.

He gouged out my eyes and crippled my hands so that I could never fire an arrow again.

Amidst a world of bloody light, I set the house ablaze, dragging him down to death with me.

When I opened my eyes again, I had returned to the day of Yuchi Wei’s wedding.

“General, do you think the woman who just stepped out of the bridal sedan could be that spy?” my subordinate whispered.

I stopped him, my expression indifferent.

“We are only here today to offer our congratulations. We will not discuss official business.”

By imperial decree, I was forced to marry into the Xiaoshan Earl’s Estate as the heir’s second wife.

I had heard that my future mother-in-law was cruel, my sisters-in-law were impossible, and my husband kept a pampered concubine so vicious and overbearing that she had driven his first wife to her death.

Every respectable family in the capital avoided the place like the plague.

Before I climbed into the bridal sedan, Mother clasped my hands with tears in her eyes.

“My daughter, you must be careful.”

“Don’t kill anyone in your husband’s family. Your father will have a hard time explaining it to His Majesty.”

My mother had been a pawned wife, passed through many households and made to bear many sons.

When age took her beauty and she could no longer have children, she opened a wife-pawning house of her own and began selling other men’s wives.

One spring day, a carriage stopped outside our shop.

A handsome young scholar stood there with tears reddening his eyes.

“Mother,” he said, “I’ve come to take you home and give you a life of comfort.”

The newly appointed imperial scholar claimed he was one of the sons she had borne, and he had returned to repay the gift of life.