Survival

A girl came to Drunken Fragrance Pavilion and insisted on becoming a prostitute.

She went on about the romance and glamour of Shanghai’s ten-mile foreign concession, saying this was such a romantic era.

Then let her have a good look at what romance meant in this man-eating age.

My sister went to Yunnan to teach as a volunteer, but shortly after, she vanished.

All she left behind was a bizarre post on her social media feed:

“Black dogs grow white scales, the Flesh Well blinks with a thousand eyes, and humanity cannot escape Ailao Mountain!”

After failing to reach her privately, I turned to the police for help, but they refused to open a case.

Left with no other choice, I had to travel to Yunnan alone.

At that time, I had no idea that the terrifying truth buried deep beneath the surface had already begun to emerge…

On the night of my wedding, the Queen ordered her guards to pin me down and force those Glass Slippers back onto my bleeding feet. She said that if the shoes were not sated by my blood before the thirteenth bell toll of midnight, she would carve out my heart to feed the mirror. The entire hall waited for me to become a Princess Consort, but only the groom, Su Zhichuan, leaned in and whispered into my ear, his voice trembling and hoarse. He said, “Don’t believe in fairy tales. Kill me before dawn, or you’ll be the one who dies.”

In the wake of a violent storm, a beautiful woman suddenly appeared out of thin air on the Deck of a deep-sea fishing vessel manned entirely by men. When the ship finally returned to shore, only a single madman remained on board.

After overwork kills her in modern China, Zhang Yinhe is reborn as an abandoned infant in an ancient dynasty—and learns before she can even speak that freedom will never be given to her.

Sold into slavery, exchanged for profit, and repeatedly treated as someone else’s property, she survives every household, prison convoy, raider camp, and pleasure house with sharp instincts, shameless nerve, and the hard-earned skills of a former office worker.

Her fight for independence entangles her with Gu Zheng, a disgraced young master hiding a general’s true identity, and Anyang Ge, the quiet herdsman who once offered her a gentler life, but neither affection nor safety can tempt her back into a cage.

Armed with a false beard, a belt of pearls, and knowledge from a later age, Zhang Yinhe crosses war-torn borders in search of drought-resistant seeds and a future built on her own terms—even if Gu Zheng must first learn that love begins with an equal choice.