Taming the Wolfish Lord

A palace coup in the Southern Kingdom left the imperial city awash in blood. Princess Xiang Fu, once the most beloved and beautiful woman in the Southern Kingdom, was ordered seized.

Her maid was shot to death, her body riddled with arrows, while trying to save her. Xiang Fu fled to the Blackwater Forest, a lawless region on the border between the Southern and Northern Kingdoms.

The rebels did not know the forest's true nature and pursued her inside. Deep among the leaves, pairs of beastly eyes glowed green, gleaming with ferocity.

The rebels were torn to pieces. The trembling little princess poked her head out from beneath a pile of corpses.

The leader of the wolves was a young werewolf wearing animal skins and fangs, with a pair of beautiful phoenix eyes.

"I... I'm afraid of pain... Please don't kill me... Will you?" the little princess begged tearfully. "I want to live. I'll do anything..."

The werewolf tilted his head, as though he understood.

He carried the little princess back to his den and made her his wife.

Later, the princess plotted with her own royal brother to escape him. She couldn't kill him, and wherever she ran, he always found her and brought her back. So she decided she might as well die right in front of him...

The year the princess "died," the young wolf king wandered alone each night beneath the mulberry tree she had loved to climb. He howled in grief, tears of blood falling as the waning moon turned red.

He did not know that she had only climbed the mulberry tree to get away from him.

Later still, after the Northern Kingdom defeated the Southern Kingdom, Princess Xiang Fu sacrificed her own happiness for her homeland and went north to become a concubine.

The mysterious new ruler of the Northern Kingdom was said to have been found in a neighboring country by the old king just a few years ago.

The cold new ruler stood before Princess Xiang Fu, dressed in a dance costume. His long, pale fingers gripped her chin and forced it upward.

That handsome face, like something from a nightmare, appeared before Xiang Fu once more.

"After you died, do you know how many mulberry trees I planted for you? And now you tell me you never died? Hmm?"

Here are some upcoming stories. If you like them, remember to add them to your favorites! O(∩_∩)O~

Upcoming: The Love-Struck Madam Wants a Divorce

Blurb: Pei Lujie had been the person at the very center of Qi Yangyang's heart for her entire life.

The whole Duke's estate knew it, as did her aunt. Pei Lujie had known from the very beginning, too.

Qi Yangyang knew that if her aunt were not Pei Lujie's stepmother, and if the Duke of Ying had not felt indebted to her aunt, a poor orphan like her could never have married Pei Lujie.

It did not matter if Pei Lujie found her annoying, or treated her coldly. They had a long life ahead of them, and all he had to do was accept her devotion.

For five years of marriage, she coaxed him into taking every dose of medicine.

When he was young, he had served as the Crown Prince's double and lived in a cave of the dead in Qiangbei. He was afraid of the cold, the dark, and being alone. Qi Yangyang found every excuse to cling to him. On summer nights, she took him to catch fireflies. In winter, no matter how hard the wind blew or snow fell, a little yellow umbrella waited for him beneath the archway when he finished work.

When the Pei army was short of funds, she used the dowry her parents had left her to help them.

She thought that loving someone meant asking for nothing in return, and even being willing to overlook how little they loved you.

Everyone believed Qi Yangyang could love Pei Lujie for her whole life. Qi Yangyang believed it herself.

But one day, Qi Yangyang suddenly remembered that the young man who had risked his life to save her in Qiangbei might not have been Pei Lujie.

And then everything began to spiral out of control.

·

"Pei Lujie only seems like a man of serene elegance. Inside, he's sinister, obsessive, pathologically jealous, and deeply twisted."

"And you are the only reason he can keep up that beautiful pretense."

"You walked away just like that, after putting on such a dramatic performance, acting as if you couldn't live without him. How could he possibly take that?"

"Pei Lujie will die. Aren't you afraid he'll take you with him before he does?"

"It's strange. When I loved him, I could love with all my heart and care about nothing else. I stood in the wind and snow holding an umbrella over him, even though my hands were covered in chilblains. I was afraid of the dark, too, but I still made myself teach him to catch fireflies. He spoke coldly to me and mocked me, and I still loved every minute of it. But now, I can't even stand next to him for a little while without feeling disgusted."

#Once a love-struck fool realizes they've been in love with the wrong person, not even eight horses could drag them back. #

Upcoming: Your Highness, the Crown Prince, Please Go Back

A Zhen was the man Su Su, a courtesan at the Cuihong Brothel, kept hidden away in her private quarters.

He had originally been a beggar, found unconscious in the alley behind a brothel with the tendons in his hands and feet severed. To pay for his treatment, Su Su reluctantly sold the Autumn Pond Cold Jade zither she had bought with the money she had spent ages saving from performing.

For his sake, she was forced to leave her bright, comfortable rooms and rent a tiny, shabby place in the countryside, where she was often bullied.

But with something to look forward to, she never felt that life was too hard. She took embroidery work during the day and returned to the Cuihong Brothel to perform at night. She was always covered in dark bruises where people had pinched her, but she would smile and say, "A Zhen, I managed to preserve my virtue for you again today."

"When are you going to marry me?"

Li Longzhen gave her a cool look.

What a joke. How could the Crown Prince of the Great Jin dynasty marry a prostitute?

But he smiled warmly and said, "All right."

Once his subordinates had gathered enough evidence of the crimes, he would return to the pinnacle of power in the Forbidden City. A woman like her had no place there.

When that day came, he would not let this fool become a weakness others could use against him. He would deal with her himself.

But before he could, she knowingly drank the medicine his subordinate handed her.

As he watched her body grow cold, Li Longzhen smiled, then suddenly vomited a great mouthful of blood.

·

As a celebrated courtesan at the Cuihong Brothel in Suzhou, Su Su loathed the false faces men wore and thought life was terribly dull.

A friend suggested that since men came to her to enjoy a little pretense, she could do the same and find pleasure in playing along with one of them.

So Su Su decided to give it a try, choosing a seemingly helpless disabled beggar in the alley behind the brothel as her first target.

She had not handled things well the first time and had fallen for him, giving him her whole heart.

Fortunately, she remembered why she had started in the first place, and once she learned he was someone far above her station, she calmly walked away.

·

Later, when he sent a large troop of soldiers to surround her and her new lover, she remained composed and entirely at ease, as if she had dealt with countless men before. "Your Highness, the Crown Prince, please go back. Your Highness is of noble blood and beyond compare. A woman like me should never presume to dream of you."

Upcoming 1: The Black Moonlight Cannot Escape

Blurb:

Pei Jin was the pampered, highborn daughter of the Marquis's household, spoiled into a capricious and overbearing girl. She could not stand Mingyu, the son of her father's concubine.

When Mingyu entered the household when she was nine, she threw a fit and refused to let him in until he drank the water she had used to wash her feet.

Mingyu drank it without saying a word.

She gave beggars the tuition money he had earned with great effort carrying sandbags. She tore the precious books he treasured page by page into paper figures, and joined her friends in mocking his legs.

Whenever she was displeased, she made him kneel before her or serve as a footstool.

One day, little Pei Jin dreamed of scattered scenes from a life she had lived, both real and unreal.

In the dream, she had grown up and learned that she had taken someone else's place: Mingyu was the dazzling heir of the Marquis's household,

while she was the illegitimate child of a concubine and a man she had an affair with, born to extort the marquis. And that was not all. When her real father tried to marry her off to an old county magistrate as his second wife, she set her sights on the eldest young master of the Marquis's household.

But she got drunk and went into the wrong room, then forgot the whole thing afterward. On the day she married her cousin Mingyu, her husband was killed in the palace. Before the red candles had even been replaced with white ones that night, Zhong Mingyu came to her bridal chamber.

From then on, a noble young lady became a plaything in a cage and spent the rest of her life imprisoned. Meanwhile, Zhong Mingyu made his way through countless hardships to the highest ranks of the court, and even the marquis's household had to rely on him.

Little Pei Jin woke in a cold sweat. She had not understood much of the dream, but she vaguely knew that she had to treat Mingyu well.

So their daily routine changed. When Mingyu knelt shirtless in her room to serve as a blood meal for the mosquitoes, she would promptly offer him a stool and say with a cheerful smile, "Thank you for caring about me, Brother. Otherwise the mosquitoes would have eaten me alive."

When Mingyu warmed ice against his chest in winter so he could make her tea, she would frown earnestly and say, "Brother, you need to keep training like this so you'll be able to protect me in the future."

Mingyu smiled, his dark eyes chillingly cold.

Pei Jin thought this would surely help her get rid of Mingyu.

She had no idea that once protecting someone became a habit, it was the most frightening thing of all.

Later, grown-up Pei Jin no longer had to live in a cage, but she still cried miserably. "Brother, the heir, A Jin knows she was wrong!"

Upcoming 2: After Losing Her Memory, Her Enemy Becomes Obsessed with Her

Blurb:

Su Xixi was the only daughter of the Duke of Ning's household, a famously cool beauty in the capital.

After the Duke of Ning's household fell, Su Xixi caught her fiance cheating with her cousin. He bribed people to dump her in the wilderness, where bandits took her as their woman.

She was injured in a fall and lost her memory when she woke. Mistaking the bandit before her for the man she had fallen for but failed to win over, she began pursuing him.

The man had been forced to become a bandit. He narrowed his eyes and scattered the poison he had prepared earlier, then looked at the young woman before him, who was boldly flirting with him and had completely forgotten who he was, with an utterly conflicted expression.

Su Xixi could not resist reaching out to stroke his firm waist with her slender fingers, her eyes shining.

The man stiffened, his expression darkening. He gripped her soft chin between his thumb and forefinger, his rough thumb rubbing until it hurt. "Do you really not remember me?"

"Of course I remember. You're my dear older brother, the one I could spend eight lifetimes trying to love and still never love enough." Forced to tilt her head up, she answered with shining eyes.

·

Everyone in the capital knew that the deposed Crown Prince Li Yi and Miss Su, the Duke's daughter, had always been enemies.

They had disliked each other since childhood. When they grew up, they were forced into an engagement, but Su Xixi broke it off without caring about Li Yi's safety, leaving him isolated and helpless and allowing him to be framed and imprisoned.

Li Yi had planned to kill her.

But she seemed to have forgotten their feud and even confessed her love to him.

"Li Yi, I think I really love you. Whenever I think of you, my heart aches like someone has punched me hard."

"Brother Yi, I think I'm sick. Every time I see you, I can't help wanting to kiss you. I have lovesickness."

"I think I'm so fickle. I like you as a child, as a grown man, as the Crown Prince, and as a bandit. I like every version of you."

"When the mountains are leveled and heaven and earth become one, only then will I part from you."

At first, Li Yi was embarrassed and annoyed. But as she showered him with one sweet confession after another, he finally fell for her, unable to escape his feelings.

Just as he regained his position as Crown Prince and was preparing to marry her, she suddenly remembered everything.

So the reason her heart hurt when she thought of him was that he had accidentally punched her in the chest while suppressing bandits!

And... and those mortifying things she had said... had she really said them?

Looking at the bridal sedan waiting at the door, Su Xixi steeled herself and ran. How could she face Li Yi?

Later, the Crown Prince, tall and handsome in his bright red wedding robes, caught her with red-rimmed eyes and pinned her in a corner. "So it was all a lie?"

Upcoming 3: My Childhood Friend's Older Brother Has Desired Me for Years

Blurb:

In her previous life, Liu Xiyi gave her heart to the wrong person and ended up broken in body. Her husband hated her, burned her alive, and died with her.

Meanwhile, the eldest prince, Lu Yun, whose reputation she had ruined by falsely accusing him of trying to seduce his younger brother's wife, rose again. He murdered his father, seized the throne, and ordered the graves of Prince Rong and his consort to be dug up.

Just as Liu Xiyi thought he was going to whip her corpse to vent his rage,

he ordered them to whip Prince Rong's corpse instead.

With trembling hands, he lifted her into his arms and used his black-and-gold embroidered sleeve to wipe the soot from her face.

His voice was hoarse. "Xixi, you asked your older brother to grant your wish, but is this really what you wanted?"

Liu Xiyi watched him dress her in an empress's robes. Despite the ministers' objections, he gave a charred corpse the honors of an empress and seated her on the phoenix throne. The palace servants passing outside the hall could not help covering their noses with their sleeves.

She remembered telling him, when she had forced him to withdraw his troops, that her greatest wish in life was to be empress just once.

She knew Lu Yun had always treated her like a younger sister, cherished her, and granted her every request.

Reborn into a new life, she decided to leave her faithless childhood sweetheart and repay Lu Yun for the dignity he had given her in her previous life.

Back then, she, Prince Rong, and Lu Yun were all young and lived together in the central palace.

She and Prince Rong were treasures whom their aunt, the empress, adored, while Lu Yun was merely the lowborn son of a bandit's daughter. He could only live in a dilapidated side hall of the central palace, where the roof leaked and his clothes were patched again and again.

She looked at the boy she had never treated well, whom she had only ever used as a pawn. Her eyes quietly reddened as she embroidered a cute rabbit over the hole in his knee, stitch by stitch, then invited him to eat the steamed milk pudding with sugar that she had made herself.

The boy was overwhelmed by her kindness. From then on, he kept the old trousers she had embroidered at the bottom of a chest. A beautiful handmade wooden box sat on his desk for years, giving off a foul stench. Inside was the enamel porcelain bowl she always used, decorated with a magpie crossing a bridge. The contents had turned green and grown moldy, no longer recognizable.

A little scene:

"Brother... Your Highness, I may really be leaving this time."

Lu Yun smiled. "Xixi, are you asking your older brother to help you come up with a way to win over Third Brother again?"

She shook her head. "I'm really leaving this time. Take care, Your Highness."

The smile that had been as gentle as moonlight disappeared from Lu Yun's face.

Later, he stormed into her bedroom in the middle of the night, dressed in bloodstained black and carrying a severed head. His handsome features held a cruel, desperate expression.

"Xixi, your older brother has killed the female assassin who wanted to seduce Third Brother. I'll help you be with him. Won't you come back?"

"Xixi, why don't you call me Brother anymore?"

"Xixi, if you want it, your older brother will cut out his own heart for you..."

Liu Xiyi was so frightened that she knocked over the sweet soup, spilling it over herself. "B-because I don't want to marry Lu Sheng anymore..."

Lu Yun was instantly anxious and at a loss. "Then who do you want to marry? Your older brother will kidnap him for you. If you don't know who you like, I'll kidnap them all."

Terrified that he might really go and kidnap someone, she hurriedly shouted, "You! I mean you..."

Theme: Have the courage to live as yourself.