[Cool, down-on-her-luck noblewoman × sinister, unhinged regent]
[One couple + both devoted only to each other + coercive love + prized canary + intense push and pull + emotional and physical torment + groveling pursuit]
The day all 130 members of the Shen family were beheaded, heavy snow sealed off the city.
Shen Qingyi knelt at the execution ground, with nowhere to turn for help.
In the end, she was taken back to his estate by Xiao Jingheng, the regent who wielded power over the court and sat in a wheelchair.
Everyone in the capital knew that Xiao Jingheng was lame, cruel and ruthless, a living demon who killed without blinking.
But no one knew that deep in the regent’s residence, in the Moon-Gathering Pavilion, that arrogant man was using his pale, icy hands to break her proud spirit, bit by bit.
“Qingyi, do you want revenge?”
The man coughed blood as he pressed a sharp dagger into her hand, his voice as gentle as a ghost’s:
“Want to kill me? You can. But before you do… you must first learn how to be my accomplice.”
The first time she resisted, he pinned her to a bed reeking of medicine and forced her to drink a concoction that would make her infertile.
The second time she tried to escape, just as she thought she would make it to freedom, he casually blew the ten thousand rebels outside the city gates to ash. Smiling amid the flames, he asked her, “Still want to run? Think you can get away?”
The third time, she finally stopped wanting to run.
She learned to set fires, to administer poison, and to laugh like him amid mountains of corpses and seas of blood.
When she finally held a knife to his throat, the paralyzed madman did not even dodge.
He caught her around the waist and turned his neck toward the blade, his eyes filled with a sickening mix of madness and devotion:
“Do it, Qingyi. Kill me…”
The more I read, the more disgusting I get.