[No warnings for any potential triggers. Do not read if you have any. This is a story about a hapless couple who save someone out of kindness, only to get bitten in return. The male lead deludes himself, repays kindness with resentment, and steals his subject's wife. A contemptible ruler.]
Later, Hua Linglong would often lose herself in thought, wondering what sin she and her husband had committed to deserve such a cruel retribution for simply showing kindness and saving a man's life.
From a poor man's wife to an imperial consort, she was endlessly favored and became the envy of women throughout the country. People even flocked to pray before the Buddha, hoping to chance upon some noble benefactor and share her good fortune and glory.
All Hua Linglong could do in the Golden Hall was smile bitterly. Yes, the emperor's beauty was beyond compare, like a celestial being, and he treated her with such tenderness and devotion.
So, to repay his kindness, she plunged a blade into his lower abdomen in the middle of the night...
*
I would rather wrong ten thousand people than let one person wrong me.
Xie Tanxuan had never felt much gratitude toward the couple. All he cared about was how to use them to contact his troops and reclaim his throne.
As it happened, the woman had always harbored unspoken feelings for him. So he decided to give her a little encouragement to keep her hooked, hoping she would be all the more useful to him and willingly risk her life on his behalf.
The ruler believed he was the one who pulled the strings of people's hearts, and that he could always get his way, until...
Though he eventually escaped and returned to his ornate palace, the village woman from that remote backwater had become an uncanny flame in his heart that would not go out. It constantly reminded him of the humiliation of being abandoned by a lowly woman after mistaking her feelings for love, and he could not let it go.
So he sought out that woman again...
Theme: A tenacious will and an unyielding spirit of resistance.
