The Emperor and Empress’s Tormented Love: Your Majesty, Stop Pretending to Be Devoted

[Emperor and empress in a cold palace, angsty romance | Old letters from a lost love | The emperor’s groveling pursuit | An old wrongful conviction | An emperor’s possessive obsession]

After being Xiao Ruyu’s empress for ten years, Mu Qingci lived in Fengqi Palace, a place no better than a cold palace.

At a palace banquet, Noble Consort Lan put on a show of fragility and publicly mocked her as unloved, frail, and little more than a figurehead.

The guests watched, while the concubines of the six palaces sneered to themselves, each cutting remark striking to the heart.

And Xiao Ruyu, the sovereign himself, sat right before her.

His eyes were restless and out of control, his gaze clinging to her inch by inch. His heart ached so much he could barely hold back a tremble,

yet he pretended to be cold, sided with Noble Consort Lan, and gave her only a perfunctory cup of hot tea, refusing even a single word in her defense.

Everyone said the empress was empress in name only, long since cast aside by the emperor.

But no one knew that she had hidden her sharpness and endured in silence,

shouldering the open and covert attacks of the imperial harem while guarding the secret behind the wrongful conviction that had destroyed the entire Mu family.

Then an anonymous secret letter broke through the palace’s impregnable walls and reached her hands.

It bore just four brief words: “A-Xu, how are you?”

A-Xu was the childhood nickname she had lost ten years ago,

a reminder of the days when she and Xiao Ruyu had known each other as young people and secretly pledged their lives to one another.

The letter concealed a cipher. As layer after layer of deception was peeled away, it pointed to the Lan family as the true masterminds behind the Mu family’s framing and the rift between emperor and empress.

An old friend returned, the old case reopened, and long-buried events rose to the surface.

Only then did Xiao Ruyu see how foolish he had been.

For the sake of political power, he had deliberately neglected her, personally breaking the heart of the girl who once had eyes only for him.

From then on, the emperor’s obsession turned to madness, and his possessiveness ran deep to the bone.

He shed his cold facade, set aside his imperial dignity, and waited in Fengqi Palace day after day, humbly begging her to take him back.

But Mu Qingci’s heart had long since turned to ash.