Chapter 1
Flames roared around Fengwu Palace, reducing all its splendor to ash and its beauty to blackened bone.
Fire stained half the sky crimson.
“Shen Changyuan! I curse you to lose everyone you love in this life! May you die a wretched death!”
The woman’s blood-choked screams rang with hatred.
I hovered impassively in midair. I had been with her from the beginning.
I had watched her abandon the dignity of a princess to save a little beast unworthy even to carry my shoes. She ignored the savage defiance in his eyes and the ice in his heart. She treated his wounds, begged for medicine, and bestowed every privilege of the princess’s estate upon him. To rescue him, she even disguised herself as a man and entered a brothel, where she was nearly violated.
But a beast remained a beast. Gratitude meant nothing to him.
I watched coldly as he played her for a fool. She still believed she had changed him, redeemed him, and pulled him from the abyss.
Then he gained power, and his true identity came to light: he was the crown prince of the previous dynasty—the last surviving rebel heir.
That damned beast destroyed my kingdom. He broke his promise to love her alone, crowned another woman empress, and reduced the transmigrator to an imperial consort. Later, he cast her into the cold palace, where she suffered torment every day.
At last, mad with despair and regret, she set the cold palace ablaze and burned herself alive.
I watched my own face—pale and wasted, yet still strikingly beautiful—twist in agony as the flames consumed it. It withered, then vanished from the world.
The three hundred and fifty-first.
I was bored beyond measure. The little beast remembered every cycle. In every life, he watched with contempt as each transmigrator revolved around him, laying rare medicines, money, influence, and even armies at his feet.
To him, they were merely laughably naive and stupid.
The flames surged to the heavens.
Then the world plunged into darkness and chaos.
A point of white light appeared before me.
“Your Highness, this mongrel has no respect for the rules. He dared steal your jewelry. Beating him to death would hardly be excessive…”
Once again, I found myself floating overhead.
I had returned to the beginning, before any of it had happened.
The little beast knelt on the floor with his hands bound behind him. Whip marks crisscrossed his body. His features were exquisitely handsome, but the brooding chill in his eyes made one’s blood run cold.
The first time I saw him, I felt danger as I never had before. Every fiber of my being screamed, Torture him. Kill him!
It was as if, unless I ended his life, he would someday flay me, tear out my tendons, carve out my heart and bones, torture me beyond endurance, and leave me without an intact corpse.
But in that very instant, I lost consciousness.
When I opened my eyes again, I had become a disembodied spirit hovering in the air. Another soul had seized my body, stolen my identity, and proceeded to do one infuriating thing after another…