Reborn as Empress

Forced love + reborn angst + obsessive emperor + groveling pursuit + rekindled love

I jolted awake from the excruciating pain of poison burning through my throat.

The moment I opened my eyes, the bitter, burning taste still seemed to linger deep in my throat. The sensation that my organs had been crushed and put back together made me sit up abruptly and cough violently.

“Miss? You’re awake?”

A familiar, gentle voice sounded beside me. I raised a trembling hand and stared at it, at its slender fingers and joints, still unstained by blood. My mind was in chaos.

“Qingzhu?” I turned and saw my personal maid, who had died taking an arrow for me in my previous life, standing by the bed with warm water. Her face was full of worry.

She was still alive.

I looked around. The carved sandalwood bed, the brocade quilt embroidered with auspicious clouds, the bronze mirror on the dressing table: this was my bedroom at home when I was sixteen.

“What’s today’s date?” I heard how hoarse my voice sounded.

“Miss, have you forgotten? You caught a chill yesterday and came down with a fever. You were unconscious all day. Today is the seventh day of the third month in the twenty-third year of Yongchang. The palace banquet is in three days.” As she spoke, Qingzhu brought the warm water to my lips.

The twenty-third year of Yongchang.

I closed my eyes, and my memories surged back like a tide.

That year, I was sixteen. I had yet to enter the palace, yet to become Lin Qingwan, the woman who climbed upward over countless corpses.

My father was the Grand Tutor of the court. He was determined to send his daughter into the palace to win the family supreme glory. And just as he wished, I schemed at every turn and climbed step by step toward the empress’s throne.

If not for that man,

Fu Yanshen.

The seventh prince, the most overlooked of them all, stationed at the border.

The last moment I remembered from my previous life was when he led the rebels in breaking through the palace gates, his iron-clad troops trampling all my plans and pride into ruin.

The officials of the entire court knelt at his feet. My phoenix crown rolled into the dust as he walked toward me, step by step, his deep, unfathomable eyes filled with emotions I couldn’t understand.

“Lin Qingwan, come with me.”

I still remembered how his fingertips trembled slightly as he reached out.

But how could I accept that? I had abandoned my humanity, my conscience, and everything else I could possibly give up, just to finally touch that supreme throne. How could I let a traitor take me away at the very last moment?

Never.

I chose to drink the cup of poison I had prepared long ago. At least I would die like an empress.

Through the agony, I saw him rush toward me, panic on his face unlike anything I had ever seen. I heard him cry out in anguish, but everything blurred and faded into darkness.

I didn’t understand why he had come for me.

Even less did I understand why, when I opened my eyes again, I had returned to the age of sixteen.

Theme: The one you love may be beyond mountains and seas, but mountains and seas can be crossed