Phoenix in Captivity: The Prince's Guilty Concubine

[Early on: He crushes her, believing it is revenge] Regent Xiao Jue imprisons Shen Zhiyi, the daughter of a disgraced minister, in his manor. He hates her family for supposedly colluding with the enemy and betraying their country, leading to his father's death and the burial of eighty thousand soldiers. So humiliation is her daily meal, and his cold indifference the winter clothes that keep her warm. He looks at her as if she were an insect, taking pleasure in watching the light in her eyes go out, inch by inch. [In the middle: She swallows despair until her heart turns to ash] Shen Zhiyi falls from the status of a noble marquis's daughter to that of the lowliest servant, struggling through relentless mental torment and physical abuse. Each faint hope, whether a fleeting moment of hesitation from him, the child she conceives by chance, or the return of her long-lost younger brother, is crushed by him or by the gentle yet malicious woman at his side, his beloved “white moonlight.” Until the day she watches with her own eyes as the last of her family is killed in a pool of blood by his cold command. At last, she stops crying. [Later on: She offers her death, and only then does he learn the depths of pain] At the edge of a cliff, she looks back with a smile, then leaps into the abyss and vanishes from his world forever. Soon, the cruel truth crashes down like thunder: the entire Shen family had been loyal and righteous, made scapegoats for another's crimes. Worse, she was the one he had searched for all his life, the only warmth and salvation of his childhood. Driven mad, he searches for her, slaughters the true culprits, and gives up all his power, only to receive a single unfamiliar glance from her five years later in a rainy Jiangnan alley. [Ending: Warmth amid the ashes, the beloved lost forever] “My lord,” she says distantly, holding the hand of her delicate little daughter, “what happened in the past has long since flowed away, like the water beneath our feet.” He stands rooted to the spot, watching her resolute figure disappear into the misty rain, and finally understands: The cruelest revenge in this world is not hatred, but forgetting. And for the rest of his life, he will remain trapped in her