My name is Shen Zhaoning. I died in a car crash in 2024.
When I woke, I was lying in a gold-roofed phoenix bridal sedan carried by sixteen men, wearing a phoenix crown and wedding robes so heavy I could barely lift my arms. The matchmaker lifted the sedan curtain, and instead of red silk and lanterns, I saw mourning white everywhere. The wedding procession wore mourning clothes, and the suona played not “A Hundred Birds Saluting the Phoenix,” but the funeral dirge “Weeping to the Emperor of Heaven.”
The maid beside me knelt on the ground, her voice trembling. “Princess, His Majesty said… that the God of War on the northern frontier wants only your corpse. If you go to marry him alive, he’ll massacre the city. If you die in the bridal sedan, he’ll withdraw his troops.”
I looked down at my porcelain-white wrist. A line had been written there in cinnabar: “Die in my place, and I’ll let you be reborn.”
This so-called “parallel world,” the Great Liang Dynasty, was nothing like any history book I’d ever read. Here, women could rule as emperors and strategists could be made marquises. And the “Prince Who Pacifies the North,” Xiao Yan, who had slaughtered an entire Turkic royal encampment at the age of fourteen, was a legendary figure I had studied a hundred times in the history books.
But I never imagined that
On the day my bridal sedan was seized, Xiao Yan lifted its curtain with his sword. Standing beneath the moonlight, covered in blood, he gazed at me for a long while, then suddenly smiled.
He said, “Shen Zhao, you owed me in your last life. It’s time to pay me back in this one.”
