Song of Everlasting Sorrow

The sequel to Song of Everlasting Sorrow, The Imperial Tutor's Guide, is currently being serialized. Please keep reading and add it to your collection.

Blurb:

On the twenty-fifth day of the seventh month of the third year of the Yuanzhen reign of the Northern Yan dynasty, the last emperor, Yan Wenchun, abdicated in favor of Chu Yunxuan, Prince of Qingzhou, and then set fire to the palace. The blaze burned for seven days without going out. Historical records describe him as "strikingly beautiful and cunning," but few knew that a wandering soul from the New Era was trapped inside that body.

When Su Yu opened her eyes amid blood and filth, the wind howled beyond the palace gates, and the golden bells on the eaves of Tongque Terrace lay shattered across the ground. Amid the eunuchs' shrill cries of "Protect the emperor!" she suddenly recalled a passage from Records of Northern Yan: "On the twenty-fourth day of the seventh month, rebel troops breached the palace, and the emperor hanged himself in the Wutong Garden."

Fate's turning wheel moved with astonishing haste.

After she shed her black imperial robes embroidered with the Twelve Symbols and went into hiding among the common people as Su Shisan, she often gazed toward the royal city at dusk, where black smoke rose into the sky. Then, on a freezing night under a dim, frosty moon, she met a woman at a fresh grave, someone else trapped in the folds of history. The woman's silk stockings were smeared with grave soil, yet she recognized Su Shisan using a code only someone from their previous life would understand.

The Zhao family home was like a coffin eaten hollow by worms. Schemes lurked in the creases at Old Madam Jiang's eyes, and the gambling uncle's fingernails reeked of money. Lying on a pile of straw, Su Shisan listened to the wind chimes on the eaves and seemed to see again the line in the history books: "The last emperor of Northern Yan once plowed the fields alongside the people."

They ran a general store using accounting methods from the New Era and copied modern marketing techniques onto bamboo slips. In the lamplight, stray hairs at Zhao Anle's temples were always marked with ink, like slender gold-script calligraphy bleeding across rice paper. Zhang Peng, the village headman's son, watched them with a sinister gaze that clung like a bone-deep parasite. Su Shisan had no idea that behind those eyes lay an annotation from the Northern Yan Genealogy.

The snow came unusually early in the third year of the Tianshun reign of Western Chu. As the instruments in the imperial prison crushed Su Shisan's finger bones, she suddenly saw the course of the historian's vermilion brush clearly. All their struggles, it seemed, were merely footnotes to the words "The last emperor of Northern Yan lost his kingdom and burned down the palace." The letter Zhao Anle left her before she died was exactly the same as the one in the museum display case, down to the smallest detail.

In a laboratory in the New Era, Su Yu stared at the deaths endlessly replaying on the holographic screen. The digital lifeform called Zhao Anle cycled endlessly through the quantum cloud: forced into a ghost marriage, running a general store, forever remaining in the autumn winds of the fourth year of Western Chu. When the AI announced that the error rate in the 137th simulation had fallen below 0.01%, she finally tore up the Northern Yan History Revision Act.

Historical records say: "The last emperor of Northern Yan, Yan Wenchun, lost his kingdom and burned down the palace, weeping tears of blood."

The holographic projector hummed. Su Yu drove the neural connector into her temple. This time, she would make the written record bow to the truth of their hearts.

Content warnings:

1. A woman transmigrates into a man's body, and the story involves two different civilizations.

2. The first volume focuses mostly on farming and everyday life. Starting in the second volume, the male lead spends a long time as a famous courtesan.

4. A simple story, with amateurish writing.

Theme: Be self-reliant and keep striving.