The Deposed Empress Is the Minister's Beloved

Complete. Please add to your favorites. Story blurb:

A nation's empress, framed by a favored consort for "meeting a foreign official in secret"!

Empress Li Lingyi died. She had used her family's military power to help her husband seize the throne, only to be deposed and fall to her death.

When she opened her eyes again, she saw a foreign official by her bedside. His looks were so extraordinary that he surpassed even her emperor husband.

Wait! Had she become someone else? Had she returned to life in another body?

She had become the Empress Dowager, a young woman who had escaped the imperial harem without ever having served the late emperor!

And the foreign official was none other than Cui Ji, the powerful minister who had helped the young emperor seize the throne!

Li Lingyi decided to seduce the powerful minister and enlist his help in getting revenge.

Her enemy, the favored consort, saw her dream of becoming empress shattered! And was exposed for having an affair with someone else?

What? The only prince was someone else's child, too?

Only then did the emperor realize that everyone in the palace had been scheming, and not one person truly cared for him!

After personally killing the consort who had cuckolded him, he gradually descended into madness. "A Ling, what should I do? Why didn't you bear me a child?"

Meanwhile, in the Empress Dowager's chambers, the powerful minister pressed her night after night: "Are you satisfied with all this, Your Majesty?"

Cui Ji had dominated the court for years, cold and distant, never letting anyone close. He had never imagined that a woman would approach him to use him!

Especially since she had once broken off their engagement to enter the palace!

Though the two had never been close, he couldn't let go of his resentment. Faced with her seduction, he had meant to see how she would use him to get what she wanted...

Then he discovered she was the very empress who had been deposed!

The second daughter of the Li family had once been too dazzling for him to look at directly...

He had never dared look at her for long, afraid that once he did, he would never be able to look away.

Second male lead's perspective:

The young emperor Fu Qian discovered that the young Empress Dowager's every move was becoming more and more like that of his late wife, whom he had personally killed.

And his Grand Tutor, who had always shared life and death with him, was growing closer and closer to the Empress Dowager.

Until one night, deep in the hours before dawn, he saw the Grand Tutor hurrying out of the Empress Dowager's chambers with his own eyes...

Reader's Guide:

1. One-on-one, both leads are each other's first. The hero is tormented, not the heroine.

2. The trashy man is the emperor, the second male lead. The heroine doesn't take him back. After her soul transmigrates into the Empress Dowager and she ends her adoptive mother-son relationship with the second male lead, there is no romance, intimacy, marriage, or other such plotline between them...

---Now serializing: A Good Wife Pretending to Take Concubines for Her Husband---

Fake wanton villainess vs. genuine chaste man of integrity

From the moment Princess Xiao Yurong returned to her wedding day, she was busy arranging concubines for her husband.

Her husband Song Yuan was handsome enough to make everyone envious, yet he had dared to bring home an injured woman on their wedding day.

Xiao Yurong immediately arranged for the woman to become her husband's concubine and called a physician to treat her wounds.

Her husband was naturally alarmed and refused to accept her arrangement.

As the two argued, the physician suddenly announced:

The woman wasn't injured at all. She had clearly suffered a miscarriage!

"The child she lost... was it your husband's?"

"How could that be!"

Song Yuan was so furious he turned green.

Xiao Yurong didn't care. She went around flirting with men, determined to earn the reputation of being "arrogant, domineering, and debauched."

The newly appointed top scholar was handsome and talented, and the young general returning to the capital from the frontier had a body full of muscles...

Her husband's younger brother was also her childhood sweetheart.

But no one knew that her outrageous behavior was all for one reason: she wanted everyone to survive.

In her previous life, she had glimpsed the secrets of fate and defied destiny, but brought about an irreversible ending...

On closer examination, it all began because she had acted too soon in her previous life and harmed one person:

Her husband's childhood sweetheart, Yuan Jiuli, the woman destined by heaven.

When Xiao Yurong opened her eyes again, she was back on her wedding day.

She made up her mind:

First, bring the woman destined by heaven and her husband together so their fates could return to their proper paths.

Second, focus on making money, then wait for the two of them to seize the throne and take her whole family away to live well under assumed names.

Both leads are each other's first. A light, sweet romance~

Theme: Women should be self-reliant and cherish themselves