All Novel

I am the wealthiest imperial merchant in Huizhou.

On the day of my coming-of-age ceremony, a man came to claim me as his bride, saying, “Miss Jin, I’m afraid you cannot safeguard your vast fortune alone.”

Before I could answer, dozens of neighbors charged out brandishing clubs.

“You think you can force a Huizhou girl into marriage? Dream on!”

Sold for two jin of millet during a devastating famine, eight-year-old A-Xi enters Yichun House with only the fiercely loyal Zhao Si at her side.

Across years of loss, friendship, betrayal, and revenge, she watches women condemned by class and custom struggle to claim the one thing the world denies them: the right to choose their own lives.

When old dynasties and old cages finally begin to crumble, A-Xi must decide what freedom means—and whether returning home can ever restore what was taken from her.

A gripping tale of betrayal, revenge, murder mystery, hidden identities, an original wife’s counterattack, and one woman’s awakening.

Qin Jiajia, granddaughter of the renowned painter Qin Mo, loses her womb and then her life in a fire after being betrayed by her husband, Zhong Mingjiang, and his mistress, Luo Xia.

But soon afterward, an anonymous text appears on Luo Xia’s phone.

“A life for a life. Your reckoning is here. Are you ready?”

On his way home from work, Zhong Mingjiang encounters something equally horrifying: photographs of Qin Jiajia’s charred, mutilated body suddenly appear inside his car, along with a blood-soaked uterus on the passenger seat.

Every chilling incident leads back to Qin Jiajia’s death.

Trapped in boundless terror, the cheating husband and his mistress cry out for help, but no one answers….

I am the future Crown Princess.

One day, a woman who has traveled a thousand miles in search of her husband stops my carriage in the middle of the street.

She produces the Crown Prince’s personal jade pendant and declares that he married her while living among the common folk.

Unfortunately for her, she does not understand that making me Crown Princess is the Emperor’s way of proclaiming his favor before the realm.

This is not a position she can take.

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!”

Dad bought a new electric scooter.

My brother climbed onto the back seat, and my sister was lifted onto the footboard.

I ran behind them, grinning so hard my teeth showed.

Dad went around and around, but never once stopped to give me a turn.

When I could not keep up anymore, I went to ask Mom to speak for me.

Then I heard her talking about me.

“We only had her so we could use the cord blood for her sister, but who knew her sister had been misdiagnosed?”

“Oh, what a waste—all that suffering for nothing!”

I had just turned six that day, and the words I wanted to say stayed trapped behind my lips, so I never asked for a ride again.

For years afterward, I ran the road from home to school.

Then the provincial team recruited me, and I was interviewed.

Dad wheeled out that same electric scooter.

“It’s all thanks to me training her with this thing, because how else could she run so fast?”

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.”

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?

My junior brother curses every peeping tom to be struck by lightning—and when forty-nine bolts come for me, I discover I was the immortal undergoing a mortal tribulation all along.

Between a shameless master, a lovesick senior brother, a possessive silver dragon, and one disastrous scheme involving aphrodisiac tea, surviving my sect may be harder than ascending to heaven.

But when my memories return, so does the truth: the beautiful junior brother I meant to seduce, kill, and abandon is actually the husband who has waited seven thousand years to take me home.

My husband was an emperor too powerless to rule.

Again and again, his ministers stopped him from deposing the empress, naming our son crown prince, or making me his empress.

After he died, the empress imprisoned me in the Cold Palace for twenty years, keeping my son alive only as long as I survived.

On the day death finally took me, a eunuch came to say that my son had been given poisoned wine as well.

History called me a temptress and a demon who ruined the realm, though I had spent my life urging mercy and never harmed a soul.

My husband and I once promised to find each other in another life.

Yet when that life came, I avoided the crown prince’s gaze and did everything I could not to be chosen—only to hear him tell his mother, “I choose Eldest Miss Song as my crown princess.”