Unrequited Love

Yan Yuan, a carefree stone spirit, has always known her master sees only another woman’s face in hers.

So when his long-lost love returns, she gladly walks away with Xu Bai—the immortal who has eaten every poison she ever made and loved her long before she understood what love meant.

But after one reckless dose of Truthwine and a deadly battle strip away every excuse, Yan Yuan must decide whose heart has truly been hers all along.

In my senior year of high school, the school beauty, Song Shuyao, once came to me to borrow money for medical treatment and asked me not to tell anyone.

As it turned out, she used it to get an abortion. She hemorrhaged and died on the operating table of a shady little clinic.

Years later, Lu Jingnian-the untouchable top student everyone had once admired from afar-pursued me obsessively and proposed to me.

Then, when I was eight months pregnant, he locked me in a basement in the suburbs.

He cut open my belly while I was still alive and said, “This is what you owe Yaoyao and our child.”

Only then did I learn that before Song Shuyao died, she had held his hand and told him not to blame me.

But he was convinced I had deliberately killed the woman he loved and their child.

That day, I died under Lu Jingnian’s butcher knife, my eyes wide open in hatred.

Then, carrying a hatred vast enough to drown the heavens, I returned to the day Song Shuyao came to borrow money from me.

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.”

I was the daughter of Princess Changning and a peasant from the countryside.

When I was seven, the Empress Dowager bestowed a name on me.

She said my very birth was a grievous wrong, and named me Luoyuan.

For years I lived in the palace, fearful and ashamed, keeping both myself and my heart imprisoned.

But someone told me I should be a bird with its wings spread against the sky, free to soar.

And so, in the end, I found the courage to be brave—for myself, and for him.

Chun Tang and I were both senior maids in Grand Madam’s household.

Chun Tang was dazzling and seductive, while I was delicate and mild.

When we turned fifteen, Grand Madam decided that one of us would become a bedchamber maid to her eldest grandson, Pei Yi.

Chun Tang volunteered for the position.

I was promised instead to Steward Jiang of the Pei household.

Everything should have gone smoothly.

But just before the arrangements were to be finalized, Chun Tang ran away.

The day before she fled, I heard her muttering strange things to empty air.

“Once I’m gone, Grand Madam will probably give Xia Zhi to Pei Yi.”

“That girl is dull-faced and deathly boring.”

“Put the two of us side by side, and Pei Yi is bound to remember how much better I was!”

“People treasure what they can’t have.”

“When I come back, he’ll crawl through hell trying to win me over.”

“Once he promises to make me his lawful wife, my mission will be complete!”

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.

I fell in love with my rival—and my roommate.

The good news: she was a woman.

The bad news: she was straight.

On the surface, Pei Ruoqing and I couldn’t stand each other.

In secret, I was practically begging, “Big Sister, slap me.”

We stayed tangled up like that until our five-year college reunion.

After the reunion, I used my drunkenness as an excuse to climb into her car.

When I saw that our old class president was still hopelessly in love with her, I deliberately picked a fight.

She shot back coldly, “He likes me.

Does that really make you so jealous?”

Before I could answer, an out-of-control truck came hurtling toward us.

I threw myself over her without thinking—and died protecting her.

When I opened my eyes again, I was back on freshman move-in day, staring straight at Pei Ruoqing as she pushed open our dorm-room door.

The boy I’d secretly loved was expelled from school for protecting his childhood sweetheart.

Years later, I became the most famous talent manager in the industry and ran into him waiting tables at a restaurant.

He had long since forgotten me, but I still wanted to give him a chance. I asked him, “Xie Xingyun, do you want to be an actor?”

He came with me.

It took me three years to transform him from a waiter carrying plates into the entertainment industry’s hottest new star.

Then the childhood sweetheart he’d protected all those years ago came looking for him.

I spent ten years loving my childhood friend, and he spent the same ten years finding me unbearable.

Then one day, I finally had my way with him—and left two hundred yuan behind.

Humiliated beyond measure, my childhood friend hunted for me everywhere.

But I made sure he never found me.

I hid from him for three years, until my father died and left me with no family.

His parents told me, “From now on, our home is your home, and that boy is your big brother.”

I looked at the face that went mad with shame and fury the moment he saw me, and called out brightly, “Hello, Big Brother!”

Lin Wanrou was twenty-four this year, an old maiden who still had not married.

Madam Lin’s standards for a son-in-law had fallen from imperial kin to any promising young talent with ambition.

She refused to believe that, with the Grand General’s influence, she could not raise up one dragon among men as her son-in-law.

Lin Wanrou did not want to marry. She would rather stay at home for the rest of her life.