Ranking

I was a very bad merman.

I used my song to lure in a blind human.

He was an honest sort.

I wasn’t.

Once I tired of him, I threw him away.

I was about to lure in someone else when a wave knocked me senseless.

An enormous tail coiled around me, and someone laughed darkly.

“Darling, of all places, why did you have to run into the sea?”

“Didn’t I tell you it would be dangerous?”

He pressed a hand to my hot belly.

“If it weren’t for our jiaoren baby, I’d never have found you.”

Wait.

Our what baby?

I was the only child in our village with no siblings.

My classmates envied me.

“Your parents must spoil you rotten.”

What they did not know was that my status as an only child had been stolen.

Lady Wang and I went into labor on the same day.

She bore a son, while I bore a daughter.

When I awoke, lines of floating comments suddenly appeared in the air.

[The supporting woman is going to die of rage when she finds out the emperor switched her son for some stray girl.]

[With a family like hers, do you think the emperor would ever have risked letting her get pregnant if it weren’t for our precious Lulu?]

[The emperor is willing to corrupt the imperial bloodline for Lulu. The god of pure love has fallen!]

The next moment, Pei Yangxi carried the baby girl to my bedside.

“Ah Ci, look how adorable our child is.”

I transmigrated into the villainess’s… apple.

That’s right, the Poison Apple from Snow White’s stepmother.

On the very first day after transmigrating, I cried because I was so ugly.

Damn it, half red and half green.

Maybe because I was crying too loudly, the Magic Mirror next door cautiously poked me.

“Um… actually, I think you’re the most… special… apple in this world.”

I paused, then glanced at his slightly reddened mirror surface.

“…Thanks, Comfort Hero.”

My daughter spots a handsome man in a magazine and asks who he is.

Since he heads my company’s biggest business partner, I jokingly call him our “sugar daddy.”

The next day, she pins his son to the floor at school and declares that he is her father.

One spectacular misunderstanding later, the man I left years ago walks back into my life—and discovers the daughter I never told him about.

Zou Fengsheng wants an explanation.

I want to keep the peaceful, independent life I built without him.

But between meddling children, an office reunion, and feelings neither of us truly buried, keeping our past in the past may be impossible.

Yan Yuan, a carefree stone spirit, has always known her master sees only another woman’s face in hers.

So when his long-lost love returns, she gladly walks away with Xu Bai—the immortal who has eaten every poison she ever made and loved her long before she understood what love meant.

But after one reckless dose of Truthwine and a deadly battle strip away every excuse, Yan Yuan must decide whose heart has truly been hers all along.

I was a spy.

While posing as a courtesan to deceive a man, I ran into my polished, scholarly foster brother.

His eyes held a dangerous gleam.

“Short of money?”

“What business is it of yours?”

He gave a cold laugh.

“I’ll make it my business for the rest of your life.”

I was reborn on the very night Liang Zhiyan and Zhao Lingyi had arranged to elope.

As his fiancée, I gave him money for the journey.

Grateful to me, he slipped out of the city with her under cover of darkness.

What awaited them was a life of sleeping rough and grinding poverty.

He would never again have the chance to wield the power he had held in my previous life.

Zhou Qiongyue once believed marrying General Xu Ziyi would bring her happiness.

Instead, she finds herself trapped in a household that treats her devotion as a weakness.

Then she wakes in her husband’s body—and he in hers.

Sent to the northern frontier in his place, she discovers a life beyond the walls of their marriage, and a young officer who sees her more clearly than her husband ever did.

But borrowed freedom cannot last forever.

When the time comes to reclaim her own body, Qiongyue must decide what she is willing to return to—and what she will finally leave behind.

I run a brothel staffed by men.

But my courtesans don’t cater to men with a taste for other men.

They serve women with perfectly ordinary needs.

I named the place the Hundred Stallions House.

I don’t actually have a hundred male courtesans, of course, but I do have quite a few.

Gentle, aloof, strapping, dangerously obsessive—we have every type imaginable.

Our clients range from widowed officials’ wives to farm women who have lost their husbands, and even wandering swordswomen.

Now and then, a noble young lady sneaks out to satisfy her curiosity.

All in all, business is booming.

But there are complications.

Take that judicial officer from the Capital Prefecture, for example.

He has tried every trick in the book to shut down my Hundred Stallions House.

So when the opportunity presented itself, I drugged him.

Then I locked him in the woodshed out back.

To surprise my online boyfriend, I secretly traveled thousands of miles to his university.

When I arrived, I happened to see him coming back to campus from outside.

I was just about to go up and say hi when he walked right past me without so much as a glance.

?

A moment later, my phone buzzed.

“Holy crap, babe. I just saw someone who looked exactly like you.”

“But you’re the only one in my heart, so I didn’t even spare another woman a second look.”

I was so mad I laughed. Right then and there, I snapped a selfie in front of the school gate and sent it to him.

“Maybe try taking another look?”

After rescuing my young nephew from the water, I went to the east wing to change my clothes.

But my brother-in-law, Zhao Hong, chose that exact moment to shove the door open and barge in, forcing me into a marriage with him as his second wife.

On the night before the wedding, my legitimate mother personally brought me a bowl of Sterilization Decoction.

I pushed the bowl away and looked up at her. “If you dare force me to drink it, the first thing I’ll do is make sure the Zhao Family has no descendants. Do you believe me?”

My legitimate mother flew into a rage and immediately went to complain to Zhao Hong.

Zhao Hong sneered. “Scheming women like her aren’t fit to bear my children.”

My eight-year-old nephew shouted too,

“Bad woman! You’re not fit to be my mother!”

I looked at Zhao Hong. “Since I’m not fit to bear your children, then don’t come to my bed.”

“From now on, the child’s food, clothing, lodging, schooling, future prospects, and dignity in front of the nobles… none of it has anything to do with me.”

“If my lord thinks I’m so scheming, perhaps he should raise the child himself.”

Before I transmigrated here, I worked in HR at a major tech company.

Aside from competence, the job also required knowing how to spot workplace PUA when you saw it.

Because I coveted the Crown Prince’s beauty, I snuck into the Eastern Palace and became a Dark Guard.

The Crown Prince was temperamental and unpredictable, so I only dared to drool over him in secret.

Until the day he was deposed and reduced to a commoner.

Taking advantage of the chaos, I locked him inside the dungeon I had painstakingly built.

“You wretched slave! Release me at once!”

The proud Crown Prince’s eyes reddened with fury, making him look even more enticing.

I slowly undid his belt and pinned him against the damp brick wall.

“Let you go? I can’t do that. But… having you? That I can do.”

I devoured the Crown Prince completely and forced him through one position after another.

Until later.

I caught a Dark Guard slipping into the dungeon and kneeling as he begged the Crown Prince to return to the palace.

And the man who, just last night, had refused to yield beneath me even if it killed him, curled his lips in a lazy smile.

“No hurry. The Crown Princess and I still have some candlelit reading to do tonight.”

…

The freshly printed copy of Dragon and Phoenix Harmonizing Eighteen Positions in my hand fell to the floor with a smack.

I run a jewelry shop in the capital, and I have always been generous with my customers.

Whenever someone buys a piece at full price, I often throw in a cheaper little ornament as a gift.

The heir to Duke Zhenguo was a regular.

Once, while we were chatting, he told me with a smile, “Shopping here makes everything so easy.

One for my cousin, and one for my fiancée.”

Naturally, I assumed his fiancée received the expensive purchase, and his cousin the little extra.

Until the day he brought a young lady into my shop.

There, in her hair, was the plain jade pin I had given him for free.

I approached with a smile.

“You must be his lordship’s cousin?”

The young lady’s face fell.

She gave a slight shake of her head.

“You are mistaken.

I am his future wife.”

I was stunned, but in an instant I made up my mind.

I had to find a way to tell her.

I couldn’t let her remain in the dark.

Before we married, I already knew my husband had a concubine he doted on.

It did not matter.

I was marrying into a great house to become its mistress.

Naturally, I could afford to be generous.

After the wedding, I put the marquis’s household in perfect order, and my reputation as a virtuous wife spread throughout the capital.

Whether that concubine had a brain in her head, I could not say.

She actually let people know that the marquis and I had never consummated our marriage.

She meant to humiliate me, to make me a laughingstock.

What she never imagined was that her little stunt would force my mother-in-law to send the marquis knocking on my door late one night.

The system told me I could only go home by becoming the male lead’s girlfriend.

After five years of groveling, his affection score was still stuck at fifty.

So I asked him one more time—and pushed him off a rooftop when he said no.

Every death resets the world.

Every loop takes us farther into the past.

If winning his heart will not set me free, perhaps killing him will.

My imperial sister’s tomcat set his sights on my female cat and was rejected.

My mother consort ordered me to apologize, so I did.

The tom still refused to give up, and my cat’s other suitors beat him up.

Then Mother Consort told me to kill my “femme-fatale cat” to appease my sister…

This time, I refused.

“Think about who she is and where you stand,” Mother Consort advised.

Understanding dawned on me. “Oh. It’s because my mother is a coward.”

My mother might be a coward, but I was not.

Neither was my cat—she was, in fact, the greatest feline beauty in the entire imperial harem.

The day after our wedding, my husband went to the city for work and was killed by a falling billboard.

The CEO of the company responsible came to discuss compensation.

I said I was struggling to make ends meet.

He transferred me three million yuan.

I said I had nowhere to go.

He gave me a luxury apartment.

I said I didn’t want to stay a widow.

He gave me a handsome young man.

The morning after we slept together, he came to see me.

I was about to thank him when his expression changed.

“What is my brother doing here?!”

The boy who loved me more than anyone else in the world was dead.

His name was Jiang Yan. He was a police officer, stabbed seven times by a rich second-generation heir while trying to save a girl from domestic abuse.

Afterward, the girl tearfully claimed that Jiang Yan had molested her, and that was why her boyfriend had stabbed him.

The killer even got off scot-free with a psychiatric evaluation declaring him mentally ill.

As I stared at their faces, I suddenly laughed.

A psychiatric evaluation, huh?

What a coincidence.

I had one too.

The Prince of Beijing’s elite circle mistakenly thought I had a crush on him and, with a haughty air, said he agreed to my pursuit.

Because I’m a coward, I was forced to date him.

The young prince has a bad temper, is unreasonable, and uses his handsome face to bully me with his beauty.

After three years of dating, I still couldn’t convince myself to spend a lifetime with him.

But, coward that I am, I didn’t dare break up.

Just as I was worrying, I saw his group chat message:

[“I’ve never seen someone as lacking in self as her. Come home a bit late and she starts checking up on me, so annoying! Next time she pulls that, I’ll just pay her off and send her packing.”]

I was so happy I almost jumped.

I’d get money, and I could break up.

This useless coward has finally found her spring.

With my mission to win over the male lead on the verge of failure, I broke down sobbing.

I cried so hard I practically gave my system a CPU ache: “Quit your damn crying. I’ll just kill him.”

Later, the male lead asked why I no longer loved him.

My system wailed in exasperation: “Doesn’t he have a wife of his own?”

“Tell him to get lost!”

At fourteen, Ruan Qingzhu sells herself into the wealthy Jiang household for a few good meals, fully intending to run away. Her extraordinary martial arts soon make her the senior maid and bodyguard of the Jiang family’s spirited eldest young lady, Wanying. When an imperial marriage decree and a northern war threaten Wanying’s future with General Li, Qingzhu must choose between the freedom she once prized and the family she has found.

On my first day in the Duke of Liang’s household, my stepdaughter threw her ceremonial tea onto the floor, and my stepson threatened to have me cast out.

I drenched her with a teapot and took a ruler to his hand.

When their father asked what had happened, I told him I was merely teaching the children our household’s rules.

Everyone says a stepmother’s lot is hard.

But this household would recognize only one mistress: me.

I came second in the imperial examinations.

The first-place winner was the sort of swaggering hero who conquered everything in his path.

He spent his days drinking, writing poetry, and visiting brothels.

The third-place winner was the hero of an erotic novel.

He spent his days sleeping with princes and generals.

Once I became a censor, I worked overtime every day impeaching the two of them, until my face turned sallow and my eyes were ringed with blue.

Then I checked my pay at the end of the month: ten taels of silver.

Furious, I threw down my memorials, picked up my brush, and started a side business: Episode One: “The Third-Place Scholar Charms in Women’s Clothes; the First-Place Scholar Spends a Fortune for His Smile.”

Before the Second Young Master of Duke’s Manor was executed, the Old Madam wanted to leave him an heir.

She summoned all the maids to the rear courtyard and asked which of us was willing to make a trip to death row.

The girls exchanged uneasy glances.

If they wanted to climb into a young master’s bed, there were plenty of young lords in the manor to choose from. Why throw away their future on a man who was about to die?

I was the only one who stepped out of the crowd.

The others called me a fool for ruining my prospects when I had already been chosen for the First Young Master.

But what they didn’t know was that I had been lusting after the Second Young Master for ages.

He was going to die anyway. Once the deed was done, I would run.

After he was gone, I would burn plenty of spirit money for him to make amends.

But just as I was gleefully packing my bundle, news arrived that Second Young Master Jiang had escaped from prison.

I fled in a panic with the simple-minded young lady and the elderly Old Madam in tow.

Until one day, Second Young Master Jiang tracked us down with a sword in hand and bared his gleaming white teeth at me.

“Jinque, you and I have a score to settle.”

Switched at birth to repay her father’s debt, Li Yuanxi endures ten brutal years at the northern frontier while another girl grows up as a noble heiress.

When she returns to the capital, her family sends her to die in a political marriage and deceives her betrothed, Fu Qingchuan, into marrying the favored daughter instead.

After Yuanxi’s death, Qingchuan turns his grief into a patient revenge, using love, ambition, and an old imperial conspiracy to destroy everyone who betrayed her.

Yet even when justice is done, the ghost beside him knows that nothing can cross the distance between the living and the dead.

In my third year trapped inside a novel, the emperor learned to watch livestreams—and struck up an online flirtation with a thirst-trap streamer.

He even promised her: “Come over to this world, and you can be my empress!”

“Remember, bring your body.

No possessing someone else’s.”

I took one look at her username, “Will Fly Anywhere in the Country,” and spent the night packing my escape bag.

People from the modern world were crawling with viruses.

One sneeze could wipe out the whole palace.

And this woman was a prostitute!

The noble consort who had been cherished all her life said on her deathbed that she regretted everything.

“If there is a next life, I would gladly trade places with you. I would be a lowly palace maid, endure until I turned twenty-five, then leave the palace and be free.”

“The emperor’s favor, all this hollow wealth and splendor – whoever wants it can have it.”

Tears ran down her face as she said that all she wanted was a love that was pure and true.

Just before she closed her eyes, she clutched my hand.

“Cherry, will you do it? Will you trade places with me?”

Weeping, I pressed my lips to her ear.

“This servant is willing.”

I had spent a lifetime cleaning up her messes.

I was so tired.

Meng Fanyu carried himself with effortless distinction.

I thought that even if we eventually broke up, having him as my first love would leave me with no regrets.

So I pursued him with everything I had.

Eventually, I won him over, and he laid down three rules: we would date, never marry, and break up when we graduated.

For three years, we loved each other with abandon.

On graduation day, I was the one who ended it, but he went back on our agreement.

Our conversation fell apart, and Meng Fanyu lowered his proud head with a bitter laugh.

He told me I had better pray we never met again.

From then on, I did everything I could to avoid him.

But with the slightest turn of fate, the world can become very small, and two people who once belonged to each other are bound to meet again.

I was born to perform.

When I discovered that my husband from a marriage of convenience was only cold and aloof on the surface-and insatiable underneath-I helped myself to the feast.

I loved watching still waters ripple endlessly under my touch.

But I seemed to have taken the act a little too far. It wasn’t just in bed that I clung to him. I lost control outside the bedroom too.

One day, when I brought lunch to his office again, I overheard his friend teasing him.

“Who was it that said this was just a business arrangement and you’d get divorced after three months? Now you go home at six thirty sharp every day. Aren’t you sick of it?”

After a few seconds of silence, Qin Xian answered.

“I am.”

I stood outside the door, staring down at the lunchbox in my hands.

So his workday didn’t actually end at ten thirty. It ended at six thirty.

I decided it was time to rein in my urge to perform.

I remained endlessly enthusiastic in bed, but I never initiated another message to him.

On the day our contract expired, I cheerfully handed him the divorce papers. Qin Xian’s eyes instantly darkened.

“All this time, did you see me as your husband-or as a vibrator?”

When I walked in, the young nanny was debating the literary achievements of the Eight Great Masters of the Tang and Song with my fiancé.

She got so worked up that she raised her hand and thumped him on the chest.

“You’re the one who’s wrong!”

The man was silent for two seconds before a low laugh slipped out.

“Mm. I’m wrong. You’re right.”

I stood behind them, looking down at the custom wedding invitation in my hand, suddenly at a loss. Because honestly…

I really did like this design.

In my second year at the army brothel, I became pregnant.

Every soldier who had ever entered my tent fought to claim the child as his own.

Chen Shitou had come to me only once, yet he dropped to his knees and begged, “Miss Yang, I’m about to go into battle with the vanguard. My parents have no child but me. I need to leave them something to remember me by.”

Later, I went to his hometown and met two of the kindest parents in the world.

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.

By imperial decree, I was forced to marry into the Xiaoshan Earl’s Estate as the heir’s second wife.

I had heard that my future mother-in-law was cruel, my sisters-in-law were impossible, and my husband kept a pampered concubine so vicious and overbearing that she had driven his first wife to her death.

Every respectable family in the capital avoided the place like the plague.

Before I climbed into the bridal sedan, Mother clasped my hands with tears in her eyes.

“My daughter, you must be careful.”

“Don’t kill anyone in your husband’s family. Your father will have a hard time explaining it to His Majesty.”

The day I met my online boyfriend in person, I discovered he was mute.

The boy pressed his lips together, his face pale, nothing like the cheerful person he had been online.

[I’m sorry. I must have disappointed you…]

He handed me the note without daring to meet my eyes, while I stared blankly between his face and the floating comments in midair.

[I’m dying. The male lead set up his own brother and practically sold him out just to get revenge for the female lead.]

So the beautiful mute boy before me was the campus heartthrob’s younger twin brother. He had never been the one dating me online at all.

I curled my lips into a smile, utterly unconcerned that they had switched places.

A mute boyfriend was perfect.

He was adorable when I bullied him and he could not even get a sentence out.

[Were you satisfied with today?]

The message popped up on my phone just after I got home. After admiring the boy’s swollen lips and damp eyes one more time, I sent over our selfie.

[Very. But next time we kiss, baby, it would be even better if you didn’t tremble.]

It took a long while for the person on the other end to reply.

[I didn’t do well today. Let’s meet again tomorrow.]

Xu Jiao built a merchant empire while funding her childhood sweetheart Song Yin’s path into officialdom.

When she catches him courting a powerful princess and learns he expects her to accept life as his concubine, she ends their engagement and turns her full ambition toward business.

Her talent carries her from imperial supplier to a third-rank official, drawing the respect—and carefully restrained affection—of Crown Prince Xiao Jingyi.

But as court factions close in, Xu Jiao must decide whether love behind palace walls can offer partnership instead of confinement.

Have you ever heard of the Evil Children?

While volunteering as a teacher in Shanglian Village, I saw what true Evil Children were like.

They hung bloody animal carcasses outside my door.

They led an old bachelor to my place and tried every trick they could think of to get me to open the door…

But what they didn’t know was that I was a demon subduer.

This village had been placed under the Curse of the Evil Children, and disaster was about to strike.

But now, I have no intention of saving them.

I was born fickle and faithless.

Every man I met was my next great love.

Whenever I tired of one, I gave him a potion that erased his memories of loving me.

Until one day.

They all remembered.

After her father vanishes, Zhu Ling abandons corporate life to inherit Lingling Jade Shop—and the forbidden power of her bloodline.

When a wealthy lecturer asks why eight relatives occupy a mansion with only seven bedrooms, Zhu Ling discovers that one family member is an illusion and every survivor is hiding a piece of a woman’s murder.

Trapped by a vengeful spirit during a winter storm, she must uncover the silent conspiracy before the mansion becomes a grave for the guilty and the innocent alike.

Shi Wei is a lowly maid who wants nothing more than to finish her contract and leave Prince Jin’s Estate in peace.

Young Prince Jing Ting refuses to release the quiet woman who has taken hold of his heart, even when pride, rank, and an arranged marriage stand between them.

Forced into his household as a concubine, Shi Wei slowly discovers tenderness beneath his fierce possessiveness, while his gentle wife Tong Liu becomes an unexpected friend.

When motherhood finally gives Shi Wei the courage to voice every buried grievance, Jing Ting must learn that love requires more than protection—it also requires listening and change.