After She Was Reborn from the Kiln

In her previous life, Shen Jiaoyan's mother always told her, "Keep your head down, and you'll survive."

When the village chose a child to sacrifice to the kiln, the divining lot fell before her. She lowered her head, but they still dragged her out of the crowd.

She escaped the porcelain kiln by a hair's breadth. Covering the half of her face that had been burned away, she went from door to door with her head bowed, begging for help. All she received were slops thrown in her face and people driving her away.

Later, when she was abducted again to be sacrificed to the kiln, she heard people whisper behind her that since she kept her head down and neither cried nor called out, she must have done something shameful and deserved this punishment. Only then did Shen Jiaoyan suddenly understand: keeping your head down won't keep you alive.

Reborn in her next life at the age of thirteen,

she would hold her head high and turn the tables using the kiln-transformation techniques she had researched in her previous life

Anyone who wanted her dead would die by her hand.

In the fourth year of the Decheng reign, a genius ceramicist became the talk of the capital.

Every piece she crafted underwent kiln transformation, bursting with dazzling, mottled colors, each one unique among ten thousand. The artist called herself Jiaoyan. No one knew what she looked like. They only knew she said she did not make porcelain for porcelain's sake: she had debts of gratitude to repay and grudges to settle.

A charlatan preached that only sacrificing a young girl to the kiln could produce kiln-transformed porcelain. She exposed his lie with a red lotus kiln-transformed beauty vase, then had him arrested and punished.

A porcelain merchant stole her secret formula, hoping to monopolize the porcelain trade and drive her out of the capital. She developed fully glazed saggar-fired porcelain and defeated him in a contest, leaving him bankrupt.

Sitting in the first chair of the capital's porcelain merchants' guild, Shen Jiaoyan looked down at the hometown visitors who had once tried to sacrifice her to the kiln and now smiled obsequiously, calling her "Young Master Shen." Slowly, she lifted the veil from her head and sneered.

"Thirty years east of the river, thirty years west. It's been a long time, old acquaintances. How have you been?"

That day, fresh willow shoots appeared on the branches and orioles left their nests. Shen Jiaoyan made another mark in her notebook: one more debt of gratitude or vengeance settled. She turned around and saw a familiar face from her past life, beautiful as jade, smiling at her amid the spring breeze.

He said, "My lady, I'm late."

...Wait, how had the quiet little rabbit of a wife from her previous life suddenly turned into a man-eating rabbit?

Today, the Left Chancellor, pretending to have lost his memory, was once again cheering his wife on while utterly unable to figure things out.

An elegant, refined, seemingly pure-hearted but secretly devious fox of a male lead × a black-hearted lotus of a heroine who plays the pig to eat the tiger, pretending to be harmless while secretly a man-eating bunny.

One-on-one romance, happy ending, satisfying read, both leads sexually inexperienced.

Theme: Preserve intangible cultural heritage and take control of your own fate.