Tragic Past

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.

Everyone in the capital knows that every beauty who disappears into Minister Luo’s rear courtyard carries him one step higher in office.

Born mute—or so the household believes—his ninth daughter survives by making herself small and useful to the family’s favored eldest daughter.

As sisters are sold, married, and sacrificed for the ambitions of men, Ah Jiu realizes that obedience will never buy her freedom.

To escape the Luo estate alive, she must wager the one thing society says determines a woman’s future: her face.

A courtesan cast out to die is rescued by a penniless scholar, only to lose him to the schemes of his former betrothed.

Returning to the pleasure house under her old name, Xiangsi trades everything she has left for revenge—but the cruel nobleman who claims to love her will not let either her body or her memories escape him.

A diary chronicling the last two months of my life…

Maybe I was simply born unworthy of love. Why else would everyone who loved me leave?

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.

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.

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?”

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?

After starting high school, I was taken in by the Xu Family.

The Xu family had a golden boy, Xu Ge, whom I secretly admired for three whole years.

But in Xu Ge’s heart, there was a perfect white moonlight.

The day his white moonlight went abroad, he sat red-eyed in a dim bar corridor for an entire night.

That night, the rain was pouring.

I left my only umbrella at the corner, then quietly slipped away.

Many years later, Xu Ge and I crossed paths again at a gathering.

I was there to pick up a friend who was dead drunk.

Through the smoky haze, a man in a gray hoodie nonchalantly pushed open the door, still surrounded by a flock of girls.

I watched for a moment, pretended not to recognize him, lowered my gaze, and left. Outside, the rain was pouring, and I stood at the door fretting.

Just then, an umbrella was handed to me from behind.

The hand holding it had a pale, strong wrist.

The man in the hoodie spoke softly: “Ruan He. “This umbrella of yours-you left it with me all those years ago.”

I was in the middle of feeding the pigs in my village when I suddenly saw a Danmaku.

[Is this bystander the villain’s younger sister?]

[She still thinks she’s an orphan. She has no idea that the villainous Chancellor is actually the brother she got separated from back then.]

[It’s a pity the villain lost to the male lead. He’s about to hang himself.]

[The villain only became an official to find his sister in the first place. If they could just meet once, maybe he wouldn’t have to die.]

What?!

I immediately sold my pigs to scrape together some travel money and rushed to the Capital overnight.

I knocked on the gates of the Prime Minister’s Mansion.

A pale man draped in a heavy cloak stood at the entrance, his gaze deep and haunting.

I lunged forward and threw my arms around his legs, wailing, “Brother! Wang Ergou from the village is trying to force me to marry him!”