Tragic Past

My senior brother was both pitiful and broke.

His sect had been destroyed, his master captured, and his junior brothers and sisters were missing.

As for him, he carried a battered sword on his back and would go hungry for three days after every meal.

Even so, he still kept me by his side and bought me big steamed buns to eat.

“Once you remember your parents’ names, make sure you pay me back!”

“Mm-hmm!”

I prayed in secret that I must have been born into a wealthy family, so I could properly repay Senior Brother.

But before I could regain my memories, Senior Brother lost me again.

All he left behind was a bag of steamed buns and a letter.

[Dongze will execute my master at the Four Regions Assembly. I have to go save him.

[After I leave, eat the buns sparingly. You don’t have to pay me back anymore.]

I sobbed until my heart felt torn apart, clutching the letter as I chased after him.

But in my carelessness, I missed my footing, rolled down a hillside, and struck my head.

And then I remembered.

I was originally from Dongze.

And the Dongze Sect Leader who was going to execute Senior Brother’s master was none other than my father.

In the year of severe famine, Mother took me to Prince Zhong’s Mansion, a place so distantly related it could hardly be called kin, to seek charity.

We came back with eighty taels of silver and a cart of grain, which we shared with the villagers.

In exchange, the whole village was abuzz with rumors.

The villagers gossiped that she had traded her chastity for grain. After my father divorced her, she hanged herself with a hemp rope, swaying there with her eyes open.

Later, after Prince Zhong’s Mansion fell, the Little Commandery Princess from the mansion, who had once given me a Golden Phoenix, was kidnapped and sold into the brothels.

I pretended to redeem her, then robbed her of her last few pieces of silver.

People-aren’t they all like that?

Ren Suixi sells herself into a wife-leasing contract to save her wounded husband, only to be claimed months later as the chancellor’s long-lost daughter.

Her return pulls her into a web of family devotion, imperial cruelty, war, and sacrifices made by men and women with nowhere else to turn.

As dynasties and households collapse around her, Suixi must decide what home, kinship, and a life of her own truly mean.

He Qiong was hailed as the strongest Demon King the demon realm had seen in a thousand years, and every demon expected him to lead them in an assault on the Nine Heavens.

Unfortunately, before that grand ambition could be realized, a beautiful young phoenix lured him into the Celestial Emperor’s ambush and his soul was destroyed.

I fought desperately to seize one fragment of his soul, then hid across the mortal realm like a hunted dog and nourished him with my heart’s blood for five hundred years until I finally brought him back.

Surely hardship revealed true devotion, and after everything I had sacrificed to save him, He Qiong would finally understand who truly loved him and who deserved to stand at his side.

I thought his return would begin a tale of the Demon King bathing the Nine Heavens in blood, but instead it became a tortured romance between him and the Goddess of the Nine Heavens-the little phoenix who had stabbed him in the back a thousand years ago killed herself for love afterward, and the moment he learned the truth, he forgave every betrayal.

Fine, they could keep their tragic, undying love; I knew when I had lost, and I wanted no part of it.

But the love belonged to them while the suffering belonged to me, because just before I left, He Qiong held the phoenix’s last soul fragment and said, “Du Nan, your heart’s blood brought me back after five hundred years, so you can bring her back too, can’t you?”

I was born only five minutes before my little sister.

Yet she was prettier than me, fairer than me, smarter than me.

The only thing I had ever beaten her at was being healthy.

I could roll around in the mud throwing a tantrum and still not get sick.

My sister, though, was allergic to pollen in spring, mosquito bites in summer, and cold air in autumn and winter.

When I was nine, all I did was pet a stray cat.

My sister said she felt so awful she could not breathe.

That day, Mom beat me half to death.

With red-rimmed eyes, she asked me, “Were you trying to kill your sister?”

“If she dies, you’ll be the only child in this family!”

So later, Mom sent me to live in a nursing home.

She said it very seriously: “This way, your sister will be the only child in the family.”

Four years ago, Gu Jinzhi, the Crown Prince of the Beijing Circle, fell in love with me at first sight.

After three years of relentless pursuit, I finally gave in.

In the first year of our relationship, he started pestering me to get married.

I was hesitant, but I couldn’t withstand his endless coaxing.

In the end, I brought him home to meet my parents.

But that day, outside the private room, I heard one of his buddies ask him, “You’ve met her parents now. When’s the wedding?”

Gu Jinzhi clicked his tongue and said unhurriedly, “All of a sudden, I don’t want to get married that much anymore.”

Someone beside him jeered, “Oh, stop pretending. You spent three years chasing that untouchable ice queen. You’d really give her up?”

“Ice queen?”

I heard him let out a scoff.

“If you saw how her parents treat her, you’d feel the same way I do.”

“The same how?”

“That she’s nothing special after all.”

Switched at birth to repay her father’s debt, Li Yuanxi endures ten brutal years at the northern frontier while another girl grows up as a noble heiress.

When she returns to the capital, her family sends her to die in a political marriage and deceives her betrothed, Fu Qingchuan, into marrying the favored daughter instead.

After Yuanxi’s death, Qingchuan turns his grief into a patient revenge, using love, ambition, and an old imperial conspiracy to destroy everyone who betrayed her.

Yet even when justice is done, the ghost beside him knows that nothing can cross the distance between the living and the dead.

After a brilliant student leaps to his death during the high school entrance examination, Officer Zhong closes the case as a tragic suicide.

One month later, his own son vanishes, and every clue points to the dead boy’s father—a gifted mathematician and convicted rapist.

A strange number sequence becomes the key to a staged kidnapping, a buried miscarriage of justice, and a dying son’s final attempt to turn his father’s greatest weakness into armor.

While packing my mom’s things, a receipt suddenly slipped out of an old cardboard box.

It read: April 8, 2006. Aigo MP3 player returned and refunded. Goods and payment settled in full. Total: 498 yuan.

I felt as if I’d been plunged into an ice cellar.

The MP3 player I had thought had been lost for twenty years, the MP3 player that became the trigger every time my mom and I fought, had appeared out of nowhere, just like that.

Clutching the receipt, I asked her numbly, “Back then… did you return that MP3 player?”

Every day, Noble Lady Zhao Wan forgets one more memory of the emperor who once promised never to fail her.

When she remembers only the gentle husband of her youth, the white-haired ruler who betrayed her must watch her defend the man he used to be.

But as a palace purge restores the truth, love, ambition, and wounds too deep to forgive drive their reunion toward a final tragedy.