After My Sister and I Swapped Marriages, Everyone Was Reborn

In my previous life, as the legitimate eldest daughter, my parents married me off to the weakest of the princes, the Seventh Prince. They entrusted my younger sister to the most sought-after eligible bachelor in the capital: the heir to the Marquis of Zhennan, and the youngest God of War.

The Seventh Prince, whom no one had expected to succeed, ultimately won the struggle for the throne and ascended to the imperial seat. I, his consort, became Empress, the mother of all under Heaven.

The God of War died in battle on the frontier. My sister returned to the capital escorting his coffin and became a widow at a young age. Yet she believed I had stolen her good fortune and was secretly having an affair with the emperor.

Five years into my reign as empress, as I lay gravely ill, my radiant sister told me gleefully that the emperor had deliberately ordered someone to startle my eldest son’s horse, causing him to fall to his death; that he had deliberately ordered someone to smother my younger son with a brocade quilt; and that my worsening illness was because he had been poisoning me day after day. He had done it all to clear the way for her.

I died full of resentment, then was reborn before our betrothals were arranged. My sister got ahead of me and asked to marry the Seventh Prince. She thought I would be the widow this time and that she would become empress. But she didn’t know that much of the credit for the Seventh Prince’s ascension belonged to me, for all my covert planning. I became empress not only because I was his consort, but because I was an indispensable strategist at his side.

As it happened, I was tired of being both a prince’s consort and an empress. In this life, I didn’t want to enter the palace or become the glamorous wife of a general. I only wanted to marry into a peaceful, uncomplicated household and live out my days in quiet security. From among the many proposals, I chose the former life’s renowned Chief Investigator of the Judicial Review Office. I heard that he had never married in his previous life. Traveling the world with him and solving strange cases sounded like a carefree life, too.

*

After my sister and I had both settled our marriages, I returned from a flower-viewing banquet one day to find the Seventh Prince blocking my carriage. In a pained voice, he called me by the pet name he had given me in my previous life: “Yuanyuan!”

I replied politely, “Your Highness, you have mistaken me for someone else.”

My newly betrothed future husband happened to ride up just then. “Your Highness, blocking a woman’s carriage in the street, especially that of an official’s daughter, is punishable by ten strokes of the cane at the least, and three years in prison at worst!”

* In both lives, the female lead is her current husband’s first love, so emotionally, she is not a virgin while he is.

* Everyone is reborn. Only the new husband avoids the crematorium treatment. Everyone else gets their ashes mixed into cement so they can stay together for all eternity.

Reader advisories:

1. The blurb is written in first person, while the novel itself is in third person.

2. The setting is fictional. Official posts, titles, forms of address, and so on are not based on any particular dynasty, and neither are the rules.

3. Customs and social hierarchies in the story serve the plot. Everything is in service of the story, so please don’t try to correct them~

4. The blurb was published on May 2, 2024, and a screenshot has been saved as proof.

Theme: Respect other people’s fates, and don’t take on the consequences of their actions.