Ranking

A new neighbor moved in next door-a man who radiated a wild, untamed energy from head to toe.

He always came home late at night.

On the rare occasions I ran into him in the elevator, he was quiet and withdrawn, looking nothing like a decent guy.

Until one night, without the slightest warning, the water in my apartment cut off.

Halfway through my shower, I stood there in silence for a long moment before wrapping myself in a bathrobe and knocking on my neighbor’s door.

“Bro, can I borrow your bathroom?”

When the hundredth prodigy of Sword One Sect abandons the Way of Heartlessness for love, its exasperated master orders the entire sect to embrace the Carefree Way instead.

Fourth disciple Ying Ruge expects a delightfully chaotic new life filled with matchmaking schemes, sect rivalries, and the silent devotion of her second senior brother, Meng Yu.

But when Demon-Suppressing Mountain breaks open, their carefree creed is tested by a battle that forces every disciple to decide what freedom, duty, and love are worth.

I was in a rush to get home that night, so I hailed a taxi.

The driver asked me, “What do you do for a living, young lady?”

“I’m a fortune teller,” I replied. “Scary accurate, too.”

The driver gave a short laugh. “Well then, can you tell mine?”

“Sure.” I turned my head and stared intently at his face.

He had the features of a truly wicked man.

The whole Immortal Sect was waiting for my archrival and me to perish together, but we secretly got married first.

On the Evil-Slaying Platform, I was ordered to kill Dong Linyuan. The moment the tip of my sword pierced through his heart, a spray of blood simultaneously erupted from my own chest.

The entire Immortal Sect was waiting to see us die together, but they didn’t know that at the stroke of midnight last night, he and I had just formed a Life-Binding Pact in the Ancestor Hall. If even one of us dies today, Yin Zhixiao will be able to ascend to immortality by stepping over the corpses of the entire Immortal Sect.

Before I became the bedchamber attendant of the Heir of Dingguo Duke Manor, I was once a “skinny horse” kept in the household of a Yangzhou salt merchant-a girl raised to be sold as a concubine.

To them, I was nothing more than a plaything passed between the powerful.

But they did not know that Qingliu, with her willow-slender waist, could also be a gentle, curved blade.

On my first day as the City Goddess, a half-grown boy came to offer me incense.

“Make my father meddle in my life less!”

So I kept his father busy with business, leaving him no time to press the boy to study.

Then his grandfather arrived, wielding an enormous sandalwood ruler.

After the beating, the boy limped back into my City God Temple.

I quietly poked my head out and saw him baring his teeth as he complained, “What a lousy deity!”

I could not stop myself from muttering, “I am not lousy.”

At 11:30 PM, I was home alone and ordered some takeout.

When the map showed the delivery driver was zero meters away, my phone rang.

I picked up, but there was nothing but silence on the other end-an eerie, unsettling quiet.

Impatient, I hung up. Just then, the driver sent me a private message: [I’m so sorry. I’m deaf and mute. I called you just to make sure you’d know your food had arrived immediately, but I couldn’t explain the situation over the phone. Please forgive me.]

[You must be waiting. I’ve already left the food at your door. Please pick it up as soon as possible.]

I was just about to open the door when several lines of bullet comments suddenly drifted across my vision.

[Don’t open the door! That person outside isn’t a delivery driver at all-he’s a murderer!]

[He called you so he could hear your voice and confirm whether you’re a woman living alone!]

[I’m so over this. The protagonists in these horror stories are always so brainless. This delivery guy is obviously suspicious, yet she’s still going to open the door.]

On a night of torrential rain, I ordered my girlfriend’s favorite milk tea and river snail rice noodles while she pulled an all-nighter.

However, even though the app showed the delivery had arrived at her location, my girlfriend still hadn’t marked it as received.

Just as I was about to call and check on her, the delivery rider sent me a photo through the app.

“Hey man, this is the right place, isn’t it?”

“That guy trying to pry the door open… that isn’t you, is it?”

I met a girl at a bar while I was away on business and ended up sleeping with her.

I thought it was just a one-night stand.

Little did I know, it was the beginning of a nightmare.

I am a Bone Demon, trapped for countless years within that cold, desolate graveyard.

No one can see me, and no one can hear me. I have spent centuries in solitary silence.

Until one midsummer, when the sun was shining just right.

A young girl came to sweep the graves, but she mistakenly offered her tributes to me.

I took a bite of a crisp peach and said, “Truly sweet.”

She froze for a moment, then covered her mouth and stifled a giggle.

“Next year, I’ll come again.”

True to her word, she returned year after year, bringing me crisp peaches every time.

Later, she died, and her remains were carelessly tossed into the graveyard.

Her five-year-old daughter, clutching the hand of a younger brother who had only just learned to walk, came to the graveyard day and night to wail for their mother.

I couldn’t stand the noise.

I possessed her body, crawled out from the straw mat, and clumsily gathered those two little brats into my arms.

“Keep crying, and Mother will eat you.”

A beautiful woman came into my shop one night to have her phone repaired.

With practiced ease, I installed screen-spying software on her phone.

After she left, I opened the monitoring terminal.

Everything happening on the woman’s phone appeared before my eyes in real time.

That thrill of peeping into someone else’s screen had me completely hooked.

Until late that night…

I saw something that made my blood run cold.

In my third year as Empress Dowager, my greatest fear is not the court officials, nor the brushes held by the court historians.

It is the moments when I wake from a dream in the dead of night and instinctively call out the name of Xie Wuyang.

As the palace lanterns flicker to life, I am reminded that three years ago, I was the one who personally wrote the secret order sending him to his death at Yanhui Ridge.

Liu Xingzhi is dead.

His wife traveled all the way from Wuxi to Beiping to invite me to the funeral.

She did so because among his personal effects, there were dozens of letters, every single one of them addressed to me.

Yet, in the past ten years, I had only met him seven times.

The night before last, I hooked up with a younger guy, only to find out the next day that he was the precious son my client wanted me to escort.

Before leaving for the airport, the young man turned to his mother and said, “You can rest easy with Auntie Que here. No one would dare mess with me except her. Oh, by the way, I finished all the liquor at home yesterday. Remember to buy some more for Grandpa.”

“You silly child, why did you drink so much?”

“…Too much pressure.”

He Died Before Spring When Lu Chen died before my eyes for the sixth time, I finally stopped trying to block that car, that river, and that fire.

I no longer clung to a medical report, fruitlessly arguing with fate.

Over the past three years, I had dragged him back from the brink of spring time and time again, only to finally realize that someone eventually has to walk that path to the end.

But I still couldn’t let go. At the very least, this time, I wanted to tell him I loved him to his face before he closed his eyes for good.

A girl came to Drunken Fragrance Pavilion and insisted on becoming a prostitute.

She went on about the romance and glamour of Shanghai’s ten-mile foreign concession, saying this was such a romantic era.

Then let her have a good look at what romance meant in this man-eating age.

The celebrity Zhu Yuan is dead. I still hate her. She always made me feel as wretched and hidden as a rat scurrying across the street.

And yet, I found her third gift. It was a plain music box sitting in the hospital corridor.

I casually handed it to the child in the neighboring bed.

She was dying, too.

My sister went to Yunnan to teach as a volunteer, but shortly after, she vanished.

All she left behind was a bizarre post on her social media feed:

“Black dogs grow white scales, the Flesh Well blinks with a thousand eyes, and humanity cannot escape Ailao Mountain!”

After failing to reach her privately, I turned to the police for help, but they refused to open a case.

Left with no other choice, I had to travel to Yunnan alone.

At that time, I had no idea that the terrifying truth buried deep beneath the surface had already begun to emerge…

I transmigrated into a world of horror, and by accident, I stole and ate the Bodhisattva’s offerings.

But the Bodhisattva did not blame me. Instead, They told me to leave that place and never come back.

After I became an adult, a huge sum of money inexplicably appeared in my account.

Someone told me I must not accept it.

Because in another world, someone was making offerings to the dead-me.

Half skeptical and half convinced, I took the money.

But that night, I heard the Bodhisattva’s whisper again.

“Run…”

“The thing from that world…”

“It has found you.”

My mother was a woman from another world.

Right beneath my imperial father’s nose, she taught me that all people are equal and that women hold up half the sky.

Because the emperor doted on her, he made an exception and let me, a princess, attend the imperial school.

Once I learned to read, everything became clear.

I understood exactly why my brothers fought for the throne.

Spending the night in an abandoned temple, I found a thin gauze handkerchief wreathed in fragrance. After nightfall, someone murmured beneath the window:

“My lady, have you perchance seen the handkerchief this humble scholar left behind?”

Through the crack in the door, the figure outside looked so ethereal that it seemed he might drift away on the wind at any moment.

At his words, I couldn’t help recalling the rumors about this place.

They said this temple had been abandoned for ages, and that seductive ghosts haunted the area. Any traveler who got entangled with them would either have their essence sucked dry or be dragged into another world, vanishing without a trace.

With that in mind, I hurriedly cracked open the window and tossed out the piece of cloth I had used to wipe the floor, the windowsill, and my stinky feet.

The other party caught it with lightning-fast reflexes.

Then he stared down at the gauze scarf in his hand, now crumpled and ruined like dried pickled greens, and fell into deep contemplation.

In the wake of a violent storm, a beautiful woman suddenly appeared out of thin air on the Deck of a deep-sea fishing vessel manned entirely by men. When the ship finally returned to shore, only a single madman remained on board.

I was ordered by my master to assassinate Han Zhaoye, the Young Master of the Demonic Sect. Instead, standing beside the broken blade buried in his chest, I lit a Life Lamp to sustain his ebbing life. From that moment on, if he was injured, I spat blood; if he sought death, I was the one driven mad. Now, the entire Immortal Sect says he and I should become Dao Companions. But what they don’t know is that fourteen years ago, in the great fire of Floating White City, our lives had already been bound together by another’s hand.

Chapter 0

The storm had passed.

Uncle Xiong rolled off me, sated, pillowing his head on my arm as the tip of his nose nuzzled into the hollow of my neck.

“I know every girl at Golden Sand Beach has a story, Shaluo. I want to hear yours.”

“Sure. Do you want the long version or the short one?”

“The long one.”

The long version wasn’t that long, either.

On the night of my wedding, the Queen ordered her guards to pin me down and force those Glass Slippers back onto my bleeding feet. She said that if the shoes were not sated by my blood before the thirteenth bell toll of midnight, she would carve out my heart to feed the mirror. The entire hall waited for me to become a Princess Consort, but only the groom, Su Zhichuan, leaned in and whispered into my ear, his voice trembling and hoarse. He said, “Don’t believe in fairy tales. Kill me before dawn, or you’ll be the one who dies.”

Yun Chu is a hungry young succubus whose fiancé despises her true form and rations the affection she needs to survive.

After she falls from a cruise ship, she wakes on a private island in the care of Song Xuye, a fierce, sun-browned recluse whose secret merman tail makes him her perfect match.

What begins as a shameless plan to seduce, abduct, and keep him as her personal food supply becomes something far more dangerous when jealousy, trafficking, and a rigged race expose how cruelly their world treats nonhuman beings.

Only when Song Xuye risks everything to defend a captive succubus does Yun Chu realize that the hunger pulling her toward him has become love.

I used brutal methods to murder ten innocent residents, then found a blind man with an unbearably tragic past to take the fall.

In the interrogation room, the police officer asked me, “Are you even human?” Human? Of course I wasn’t human. I was a god.

I can see the final moments of the deceased through their eyes, a gift that has helped the government solve countless cases.

Everything changed when the body of a drowned man was brought in.

Looking into his eyes, I saw him strangling me just before he died.

And on those hands, he was wearing the Jade Bracelet that had been buried with me.

I imprisoned the peerless genius I had secretly loved for years.

After an accident left her blind, I covered her eyes with a silk ribbon.

Now she glares in my direction and angrily condemns my despicable methods.

She asks what I want from her.

I tell her I want her to cooperate with her treatment and recover in peace.

I will heal her eyes.

And later, I really do.

I promise to return her to her old life, only for her to fly into a rage.

“What? You’ve only kept me prisoner for a few days! Are you stringing me along? How dare you leave me hanging like this!”

“You’d better pray I never find you. If I do, I’ll show you exactly what it feels like to be left hanging!”

Too guilty to acknowledge the threat, I send her away that very night.

I think everything will finally return to normal—until she actually finds me.

The silk ribbon that once covered her eyes is now cinched around my wrists, hoisting me high above the floor.

Forced onto the tips of my toes, I have nowhere to hide beneath her unwavering gaze…

Four years ago, a young girl vanished under mysterious circumstances after school.

At the time, I had just lost my job and was running a snack stall outside the kindergarten gates. Word was that her parents had been waiting right outside the whole time, yet they never saw her come out.

In the aftermath, the family’s grief-stricken protests and a massive compensation settlement forced the kindergarten to shut down.

Four years later, I’ve changed careers and come across the case files from that day.

Certain things I experienced while running that stall have started to crystallize in my mind. And those details are enough to completely overturn the entire case.

Have you ever heard of Crossing the Yin?

They say that when a woman undergoes Crossing the Yin, half her body has already stepped into the Yin Realm.

She has to stay in the same room as a dozen burly men, all night long, until dawn.

Only then can she snatch her life back from the hands of the Yin beings.

I had always scoffed at rumors like that.

Until one day, my beloved little niece underwent Crossing the Yin too.

But she was only six years old!

The System told me to teach Pei Yu, the disabled campus heartthrob, how to go bad. I agreed.

At the internet café, I snatched his Five-Year Gaokao, Three-Year Simulation out of his hands.

“Teach me how to play Minesweeper.”

Pei Yu gave a soft scoff. “What a joke.”

During a fight, I grabbed his prosthetic limb and used it as a weapon, swinging it in a full arc to smack Yellow Hair.

“Not gonna lie, this thing’s pretty handy.”

Pei Yu: “Heh.”

On a rainy, overcast day, Pei Yu’s stump started spasming. I ignored it and treated it like a massage gun, using it to help me snag concert tickets.

After I got them, I rewarded him by kissing his stump.

“A kiss, and it won’t hurt anymore.”

Later, Pei Yu pinned me against the headboard.

And coaxed me too. “Baby, hold on a little longer. A kiss, and it won’t hurt anymore.”

I am the only mortal in a xianxia drama—the lowly tool sacrificed to an immortal-demon romance.

I schemed, endured every humiliation, and fought only to survive, yet after my death, every immortal despised me.

“Dying was one thing. What a pity she sullied the snow.”

After being reborn, I watched the live comments reveal the plot, swallowed my blood and tears, and began playing the most fragile, kindhearted heroine imaginable.

Little by little, I tested the personas the audience loved most, until they adored me—until they went mad for me.

Then I would lay this world of immortals and demons beneath my feet.

Who could ever guess that Fairy Xueyi, the peerless prodigy unseen in ten thousand years, was only a mortal?

At three in the morning, the funeral home’s Morgue was only supposed to have five registered bodies, yet I found a sixth, unregistered, nameless female corpse in locker number six.

A slip of paper was pressed against her chest with nothing but my name written on it.

Even more terrifying was the moment my hand brushed her wrist; I saw the last seven seconds of her life and heard her raspy, blood-choked voice whisper: “Shen Nian, don’t trust your father.”

That was the night I realized that sometimes, the dead don’t come to say goodbye-they come to reopen a case.

After overwork kills her in modern China, Zhang Yinhe is reborn as an abandoned infant in an ancient dynasty—and learns before she can even speak that freedom will never be given to her.

Sold into slavery, exchanged for profit, and repeatedly treated as someone else’s property, she survives every household, prison convoy, raider camp, and pleasure house with sharp instincts, shameless nerve, and the hard-earned skills of a former office worker.

Her fight for independence entangles her with Gu Zheng, a disgraced young master hiding a general’s true identity, and Anyang Ge, the quiet herdsman who once offered her a gentler life, but neither affection nor safety can tempt her back into a cage.

Armed with a false beard, a belt of pearls, and knowledge from a later age, Zhang Yinhe crosses war-torn borders in search of drought-resistant seeds and a future built on her own terms—even if Gu Zheng must first learn that love begins with an equal choice.

Chapter 0

Even now, the fact that I ended up on a blind date with a university professor still feels completely surreal.

I have a car, a house, money… The only thing I lack is education. He has a car, a house, money… and an education!

So what exactly does he see in me?

In the dead of night, I received a phone call. The caller ID showed it was my husband. With a voice of utmost gravity, he told me that I would die at two o’clock in the morning.

But right now, he was clearly lying right beside me, fast asleep.

I’m a rookie Ghost Agent for the Netherworld.

To crush my KPIs and earn a promotion, I started staking out my targets three days before their scheduled deaths.

My first subject was an elderly woman.

Out of nowhere, she turned to me and asked, “Am I about to die?”

On the night before our engagement, my fiancé got a call from his first love.

He left without a word and vanished for the entire night.

Calmly, I packed my things and called him to break up.

But when the call connected, a stranger answered.

“Who are you looking for?”

I contacted my fiancé’s parents, but they told me they were DINKs. They had no children, and they didn’t know me.

Everyone around me had forgotten that my fiancé had ever existed.

I touched my slightly swollen belly, horror crashing over me.

“Then who is the father of this child?”

I am a crow, and I was perched in a tree, speaking with a young man-

“…It found a clay jar, but there was too little water inside. So, it picked up stones in its beak and dropped them into the jar until the water rose, and it finally managed to drink. However, once it returned to Penglai Mountain, the clan leader had it burned to death.”

“Why?”

“It was sick. A ‘Crow Plague’ had grown inside its head. That is a type of pestilence from your mortal realm that only we crows can contract.”

“How could they tell it had the Crow Plague?”

“It started dropping stones into jars. It even claimed that the divine bird atop the Fusang Tree looked like it had three legs and fifteen toes.”

“…That Crow Plague you’re talking about? I think it might go by another name in our world.”

“What?”

“Brains.”