The Mad Emperor's Caged Bird

Both pure / forceful pursuit / black-hearted beneath a gentle facade / transmigration / authentic ancient life / yandere / madman

One moment, office worker Qiao Man is asleep. The next, she's transmigrated.

No golden finger, no portable dimension, just a drafty thatched hut and a deep, open-air latrine where one wrong crouch could send you to an “heroic death.”

While other women who transmigrate are busy inventing soap and having chance encounters, Qiao Man is rolling up her sleeves, covered in dust, chopping wood and hauling water.

Following her life-saving rule, “Never pick up a man on the side of the road,” Qiao Man doesn't even look up when she sees a devastatingly handsome boy by the river, covered in knife wounds. She kicks him down the hillside.

But who knew the boy, who should have been dead, would show up the next day with a bloodied knife and press it to the throat of Granny Zhang, who had taken her in?

He says, “I'm staying here.” He says, “Not killing you is my way of repaying you.” Qiao Man: ...Thank you, I guess.

To stay alive, Qiao Man starts raising the boy on hard mode.

She works herself to the bone farming while he sharpens his knife ominously behind her.

She squats by the stove to drink her gruel while he stares at her as if he wants to melt her with his gaze.

As Qiao Man curses the ancestors of the god who sent her here, she imagines that once this walking disaster has healed, he'll hurry up and get lost.

But she doesn't know that he can't leave. He's the Crown Prince, a mad prince who was treated like a whetstone from childhood, betrayed by his brothers, and abandoned by his mother, the Empress. He doesn't understand love. He only knows how to possess.

He breaks her legs and locks her in a golden cage. He thinks that if he keeps her locked by his side, she'll be his.

He doesn't know that everything he does is pushing her toward death. She stops eating. She stops sleeping. She starts stabbing herself with needles.

She's close to dying.