All Novel

I could hear the Noble Consort’s thoughts.

Inside her head, she cursed the emperor: “That decrepit bastard!”

“He’s much better at lecturing me than he ever is in bed!”

I looked up in shock.

She was nestled sweetly in the emperor’s arms, feeding him a slice of pear.

Inside her head, she was still raging: “Would someone please poison him already?”

“I’m so damn tired of serving him…”

Fu Yanxiu’s younger sister was still growing, his mother lay half-paralyzed on the kang, and he still had to study for the imperial examinations.

For all seven years of our engagement, I worked his family’s fields.

The day he passed the provincial examination, Fu Yanxiu came to break off our engagement, his face grim.

“Sui Zhu, the capital isn’t a place for someone like you,” he said.

I am a blood demon, and the young demon I raised with my own hands poisoned me and carved out my core.

She fell for a mortal man, stole another woman’s identity, and entered the imperial palace.

Then she reduced the emperor’s wife—the woman who had once shared all his hardships—to a beggar.

She thought that would make her the heroine of the story.

Demons do not usually pity humans.

But she dug out my ten-thousand-year demon core just to steal a man?!

I would feed it to a dog before I let her have it.

My husband could not father children, but he was so kind and capable that he brought home another man for me.

“He is an outsider, and a handsome one at that; once he gets you pregnant, we will simply throw him out.”

We pretended to be brother and sister and carried out our plan.

To our surprise, the man proved practically saintly: he not only left me with a child, but also paid me a fortune before he departed.

“A rustic village woman is no match for me, so do not pester me again.”

My husband was so furious that he tried to fight him, and I tearfully held him back.

“Brother, let it go—do not hurt him.”

Then I turned and whispered to my husband, “A gigolo who works for free and pays us on top of it is hard to find these days, so just play along.”

Together, we saw our generous benefactor off, used his money to buy land and open a clinic, had a son, and lived very comfortably indeed.

Three years later, the Crown Prince returned to the place where it had all begun and found the three of us together.

He went mad on the spot.

“Some brother and sister you are—you made a complete fool of me!”

When seven-year-old Linzhi watches her licentiate father bring home Xingdi, a disgraced quanzao maid meant to cook by day and warm his bed at night, she sees two very different women discover that obedience will never protect them.

After lust, cruelty, and a child’s preventable death bind Xu Tingyu, Xingdi, and Linzhi together, they turn the rules of a patriarchal household against the man who owns their lives—and set an exquisitely patient revenge in motion.

But killing one tyrant cannot free women from a world built to strip them of property, names, and futures, so mother, aunt, and daughter must risk everything to claim a life their laws refuse to grant them.

On the day the Xu family’s long-lost heiress returns, the adopted daughter everyone expects to humiliate discovers that the woman coming home is the girlfriend she just broke up with—and the two must fight a patriarchal dynasty and expose a twenty-year-old murder to stay together.

Ever since I was little, I had refused to let anyone get the better of me.

When my elder brother gave my sister perfume from across the seas, I cried until I got some too.

When Mother hired a palace matron to teach my sister court etiquette, I threw a tantrum until I was allowed to learn beside her.

When it came time to arrange our marriages, the family chose the finest husband imaginable for my sister.

Then came my turn.

“There is only one Crown Prince in the realm,” they told me.

“His full brother is imperial blood as well. You can marry him.”

In my last life, I refused to accept that.

Why should I settle when the two princes were born of the same mother?

So I devoted myself to serving the Empress and winning her favor.

At last, I got my wish and became Crown Princess.

But Pei Jin despised my competitive nature.

The moment he ascended the throne, he made my elder sister his empress instead and sneered at me.

“Why struggle for something fate never meant you to have?”

When I was reborn in the year of my coming-of-age ceremony, I stopped fighting.

“Prince Rui is a fine match too. Thank you for arranging it, Mother.”

When Nan Mu was very young, he met someone who told him: never, under any circumstances, become friends with Wen Miao.

As the years passed and he was on the verge of forgetting that warning, he met a girl. Her name was Wen Miao.

Even more shocking than the genius girl Wen Miao winning the nation’s highest award in physics was the fact that she was murdered in the Biology Research Lab like a common lab rat-with her very skull sliced open.

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.

My family was on the verge of bankruptcy, so to stage a comeback, my father cheerfully decided to marry off his daughter.

There was just one problem: I was a lesbian, and my prospective husband was gay—a forced match in every sense of the word.

Before our first dinner at the Liu estate, Dad reminded me again and again, “The Liu family is run by their eldest daughter now that she’s back from abroad. Be on your best behavior and make a good impression on your future sister-in-law.”

I nodded without paying much attention—then caught sight of the woman coming down the stairs, and my vision went black.

Wasn’t she the little canary I had kept overseas five years ago?