Reborn, the Odd-Eyed Girl Sends Her Entire Family to the Execution Grounds

I, Shen Qingci, the true heiress of the Minister of Rites’ household, was abandoned in a mass grave because of the vermilion-red mark in my right eye. Eighteen years later, they came looking for me to climb the social ladder. In my previous life, they gouged out both my eyes, called me a monster, and traded my life for wealth and glory. I paid them back by sending them to their deaths. On the day I was reborn, my right eye veiled, I stood before the Shen residence and smiled. “Didn’t you call me a monster? Why come looking for me?” My father called me a demon, so I exposed his cheating in the imperial examinations in front of everyone. My stepmother pretended to weep, so I threw out the irrefutable evidence that she had poisoned my mother. The fake heiress stole my poem and passed herself off as a talented woman. I recited the rest of it and smiled. “Sister, why do you only remember half?” My father fears me, my stepmother hates me, and the fake heiress wants to take everything from me. Only he, Gu Hanzhou, a junior minister at the Court of Judicial Review, stood between me and the blade on a bloody night in the ancestral hall, and defended me when I was framed at the palace banquet. He said, “Shen Qingci, take your revenge. I’ll protect you.” But the Crown Prince, Xiao Jingchen, also said he loved me. Yet when forced to choose between a prophecy and the throne, he chose to have my eyes gouged out. Later, after Gu Hanzhou ascended the throne, he held out the phoenix seal and asked me, “Qingci, this throne is yours alone.” I touched my right eye, which was gradually going blind, and smiled through my tears. “Your Majesty, I have only ten years left to live.” His eyes reddened. “Ten years, or even one day, is enough. As long as you live, I’ll be your husband for every moment of it.” The histories record how he left the empress’s throne empty for me, reformed the law, and established the imperial examinations for women. The folk tales say that after I died, he withdrew to a plum grove, and twenty years later, he died with a smile, clutching the glazed bead I had left behind. But they don’t know… In this life, I never regretted it. Because some people are worth giving your life for, and some roads are worth paving with blood.