Cutting the Lotus

A Fu loved Huan Ke humbly for ten years.

He was her sovereign, and she was his slave. From the cold palace where they depended on each other for survival to the Taiji Hall, where he ruled the world, they had come a long way over ten years.

A Fu knew her lowly status and had never entertained any fantasies about the emperor. So when a young guard she'd known for years confessed his feelings, she happily accepted and cheerfully told the emperor she planned to marry.

But that day, the emperor stood with his hands behind his back, gazing out the window in silence for a long time. At last, he simply informed her, "I need an heir."

"A Fu, I want you to bear him."

The teacup in A Fu's hands shattered into pieces. Calmly, she bent to pick them up, her fingers soon soaked in blood. "All right."

*

Huan Ke had once thought they would be together for the rest of their lives.

Not as lovers, but as sovereign and subject.

What he felt for A Fu wasn't love, but the use of someone far beneath him. She was the only person he trusted, so when he desperately needed an heir to secure his power, using her seemed only natural.

The Jade Candle Palace was lit night after night. A year later, the baby was born, and the emperor, away on an imperial tour of the northern frontier, began to think that the Crown Prince's birth mother shouldn't have too low a rank. A Fu had been with him for ten years. Making her a consort, or even changing her status and naming her empress, would be entirely reasonable.

But when he returned to the capital, all he found was a prince babbling for his mother, and... a palace reduced to ruins.

In the tenth month of that year, the empress's chambers caught fire. The empress died, and the entire realm mourned.

※ A female palace official fakes her death and flees without the child x a widowed emperor left raising their child. Regret-and-redemption romance + possessive pursuit, both leads are virgins, one-on-one. The original title was "His Majesty Regretted It After My Death."

※ The female lead helped him take the throne, but no longer wants to be sovereign and subject. He still won't let her go, so she runs away after giving birth. She's on the run, he's in pursuit: a melodramatic romance.

※ The title may change. Blurb to be revised.

Theme: Once we shared the rain and dew among the weeds, but in the end we endured the frost and snow with the pines and cypresses