All Novel

I was my birth parents’ third child.

While my birth mother was pregnant with me, the village fortune-teller swore I would be a boy.

They could hardly wait.

They hid from place to place throughout the pregnancy and finally brought me into the world in the bitter cold of the twelfth lunar month—

a girl.

After a blackout leaves Qin Shuyi with swollen lips and three female roommates as suspects, her search for the mystery kisser forces her to confront a tangle of hidden crushes—and the girl who has loved her all along.

I told Jin Ran I was breaking up with him because I liked old men—rich, independent, quick to die, and generous with their estates—and asked whether he could offer me that.

Years later, I went on a third-rate prank show and was told to call my first love in front of a live audience.

I called Jin Ran. “Let’s get back together.”

After a long silence, his deep voice came through the phone.

“I’m twenty-seven. I’m not dying anytime soon.”

I was the greatest beauty in the capital—and the demon consort cursed by all as the ruin of the realm.

While the emperor was away at war, the empress poisoned me to death.

She believed that once I was gone, the emperor would become her wise and mighty husband again.

What she did not know was that I was the last chain holding his bloodlust and murderous rage in check.

I died.

And he went utterly mad.

While I lay unconscious after giving birth, my husband’s cousin swapped her daughter for mine.

The moment she fell asleep, I switched them back.

From then on, she tormented her own daughter every day while lavishing all her love on mine.

I watched with tears in my eyes—what a tragedy.

Served her right.

In 1993, twenty-two-year-old Huang Xincheng goes to prison after defending his pregnant girlfriend, Li Fang, from a drunken harasser.

Four years later, he comes home determined to rebuild his life and earn her family’s trust.

For a brief season, hard work gives him everything he has ever wanted: a wife, loving parents, and a child on the way.

Then one senseless act takes Li Fang from him, leaving him with a newborn son, two grieving elders, and a promise he will spend the rest of his life trying to keep.

When Meng Wei—the man whose kidney he destroyed in that first fight—returns to ruin his livelihood, Huang discovers that prison settled nothing.

Backed by a powerful clan, Meng Wei attacks every honest path Huang tries to take until the only door left open leads into the underworld.

Huang rises from mahjong-parlor manager to crime boss and real-estate tycoon, telling himself every compromise is for his family.

But as loyalty becomes murder and ambition becomes corruption, the good man Li Fang loved grows harder to recognize.

Over seventeen years of revenge, two men drag each other toward destruction.

One father’s dream of giving his son a spotless future is built upon crimes that refuse to stay buried.

My eldest legitimate sister hanged herself the night before she was to marry into the Eastern Palace.

The Court of Judicial Review’s postmortem report recorded an impossible finding: she was a virgin, yet three months pregnant.

Her baffling death destroyed my family—my mother killed herself, my father went mad, and the once-glorious Pei estate became a house of ghosts overnight.

Ten years later, I became the Court’s only female coroner and pushed open the carved door of my sister’s long-sealed chamber.

There, buried in my memories of that night, I found a truth monstrous enough to overturn everything I believed.

Mama had entered the household as the Princess’s dowry maid, only to be raped by the heir apparent.

When the Princess rushed back, she caught him in the act.

Yet the moment he had pulled up his trousers, he denied everything and insisted that Mama had deliberately seduced him.

The Princess slapped him across the face. “Too much of a coward to own what you did, and you still dare play games with this princess?”

That very night, the heir was secretly castrated.

The Princess decided he still had a passable face and sent him into the palace.

Mama, meanwhile, became the second lady of the residence.

I was a spoiled princess with an elder sister who came from another world.

With her indulgence, I escaped marriage and raised horses on my border fief while she remained at court and shouldered every responsibility.

Then one day, she vanished.

Everyone thought her era was over.

They did not expect the princess they called useless to ride back to the capital overnight and reveal the strength she had hidden for years.

If my sister was gone, how was I supposed to enjoy being useless in peace?

In the unluckiest year of my life, I—a male fox—became bound to a Fertility System.

I ended up carrying the children of a Sword Venerable who cultivated the Path of Detachment.

Then I lost my nerve and ran away pregnant.