All Novel

The day I married into the Gu marquis’s household, my father-in-law died and my mother-in-law fell ill.

The wedding feast became a funeral banquet, and I was forced to take charge in the midst of the crisis, assuming control of the household and carrying the funeral through with composure.

My husband thanked me for preserving the Gu family’s dignity, yet never set foot in my room again.

In time, he filled the household with concubines and fathered a brood of sons and daughters by them.

I raised them conscientiously and planned for their futures.

Then I overheard my husband speaking to them behind my back.

“I have never met anyone as coldhearted as your mother. Your grandfather died, and she did not shed a single tear. You may call her Mother, but never learn from her. She is unworthy of the name.”

By then, a physician had already told me I did not have long to live.

Not one of those children came to visit me or bring me medicine; they simply left me to die.

With my last strength, I set fire to the Gu residence and burned that cold, loveless place to the ground.

When I opened my eyes again, I had been reborn.

The Gu family came to propose marriage, and as I looked at the refined, handsome man before me, we spoke the same words at the same time.

“I refuse.”

It turned out I was not the only one who had returned.

I paid for my fiancé’s journey to the capital to sit the imperial examinations.

He came back with a reward far greater than first place.

During the palace examination, His Majesty saw a face identical to his own.

He confirmed that my fiancé was his long-lost eldest son.

Restored to the imperial family, he was named crown prince.

Naturally, his engagement to me—a mere concubine-born daughter of a seventh-rank county magistrate—could no longer stand.

But he remembered what he owed me.

He took me as his sister.

He even found me another husband: a marquis’s heir.

He himself became engaged to the chief minister’s legitimate daughter, who would be his crown princess.

Everything had worked out for both of us.

Thanks to his protection, I spent five blissful years in my husband’s household.

My mother-in-law dared not subject me to her rules.

My husband dared not entertain other women.

Everyone treated me with respect.

Until, on an afternoon as ordinary as any other, he was deposed.

I picked up my boyfriend’s phone by mistake, only to see a message his ex had just sent: “I forgot to take the morning-after pill that night.”

Those few short words left me chilled to the bone.

The night before last, I had a sudden bout of acute gastroenteritis. He was supposedly working overtime at the office, and I called him over a dozen times, but I couldn’t get through.

Enduring the piercing pain, I eventually took a taxi to the hospital alone at three in the morning.

As it turns out, the reason his phone was off and he never came home that night was that he was with his ex-girlfriend.

After we broke up, I ran into my ex at the mall.

My hair was a mess, and I was in the middle of a frantic struggle to change a diaper.

He, on the other hand, was impeccably dressed, surrounded by a fawning entourage as he inspected the premises.

Our eyes met. When he saw the fussy child in my arms, his expression shifted instantly. “Is he mine?”

I gave a cold laugh and turned the baby’s face toward him. “Do you think he looks like you?”

He studied the child for a long moment before nodding with certainty. “He does.”

“Xue Chang, we broke up over three years ago.” I gave him a mirthless smile and bounced the little one in my arms to remind him. “My baby is only six months old.”

My cousin was so determined to stay with her bleached-blond bad boy that her parents locked her at home and refused to let her out.

I saw the light: all I had to do was fall for a blond, and I could become a shut-in with a perfectly legitimate excuse.

So I went home and told my stepbrother, “Wenzhou, I’ve fallen for a guy with blond hair.”

Jiang Wenzhou smiled and poured me a cup of hot water. “Was it cold out today? Drink this and warm up.”

Disappointed by his lack of reaction, I took a sip and stubbornly continued with my lines.

“Don’t look down on him. He’s not like other blonds—”

The next second, I lost consciousness.

When I woke again, a gleaming silver chain had appeared around my ankle.

Still as gentle as ever, Jiang Wenzhou stroked the chain.

“Tong Jia, you have no idea how awful men out there can be. Until you forget him, I’m not letting you leave this room.”

I froze for a moment, then resolutely lay back down.

“I’ll never forget him, even if it kills me!”

To gain the protection of a powerful family, I tried every trick I knew on a distant cousin whose connection to me was tenuous at best.

My impeccably aloof cousin merely said, “Have some self-respect.”

Later, when I decided to set my sights elsewhere, he regretted it.

Cui Zheyu pinned me against a wall and kissed me, his dark eyes unreadable.

“You think you can stir up my feelings and then run?

Too late.”

My mother had come from another world, and she believed firmly in monogamy.

When she discovered that my husband was keeping a mistress, she stormed into his princely residence, demanding that I divorce him and come home with her.

I stared at her.

“Mother, your daughter already has power and wealth.

Why should I care if he keeps another woman?”

After my Senior Sister died, Master brought back a Seductress Spirit.

The Seductress Spirit looked exactly like Senior Sister, only far more alluring.

Seductress Spirits were wanton and wicked by nature. All she had to do was crook a finger, and my senior brothers would slip in and out of her bedchamber night after night.

She had stolen Senior Sister’s face and used it to do every filthy, degrading thing imaginable. I hated her to the bone.

But when I went to kill her, she took out a plum candy and spoke in a voice gentle enough to bewitch me:

“Since I’ve already used this skin, I have to fulfill its original owner’s dying wish.

“Seductress Spirits have their own rules. But do you want to avenge your Senior Sister with your own hands?”

My best friend was a top-tier Alpha, but he had a medical condition.

Pheromone overload.

If he didn’t get the excess out of his system, it could kill him.

So I, a Beta, volunteered to be his pheromone storage tank.

I was a Beta, after all.

The scent wouldn’t stay on me for more than a couple of days anyway.

Except that, before long, my best friend was sinking his teeth into my neck every few days.

Wait.

Had his condition really gotten that bad?

Dude!

Keep biting me and people are going to start wondering what we are to each other!

On the second day of the tenth lunar month, the great warlord Lu Zhi took a second concubine: Song Anran, the youngest daughter of the chairman of the Shanghai Chamber of Commerce.

Lu Zhi had made a name for himself in recent years.

He had won battle after battle, commanded a formidable army, and wielded immense power—but surely not so much that the chairman of the Shanghai Chamber of Commerce would deliver his own daughter to him as a concubine.

Oh, but it was.

My father did exactly that.