The Third Year After My Death

On the day I was born, the morning clouds over the entire city blazed red as fire. A master declared that my fortune was beyond measure, so the royal family chose me as the Crown Princess.

But at the time, there was no Crown Prince. Before long, rumors spread that whoever won my hand would be made Crown Prince.

Several princes competed to win my favor. Only Xiao Yun Zhan treated me with disdain. In the end, he became my husband.

After our wedding, Xiao Yun Zhan went from wanting nothing to do with me to cherishing me like a precious jewel. And in keeping with the master’s words, he became Crown Prince and then emperor, all in the space of three months.

Yet I, who should have stood by his side as empress, became the imperial consort mocked by the whole world.

Later, the entire Shen family was executed, and only then did I learn that the master was Xiao Yun Zhan’s man. From the very beginning, he had meant to send the entire Shen family into ruin, to avenge his birth mother.

When the Shen family was sentenced to death, I knelt in the snow and begged Xiao Yun Zhan for three whole days. But all I heard was him flirting with his new empress.

In the end, I died outside the Imperial Study.

After my death, the palace servants threw my body into a mass grave to reunite me with my family, then burned down my palace, as though they wanted to erase my existence completely.

But no one expected that, three years after my death, Xiao Yun Zhan would spend three days and three nights digging through the mass grave.

In the end, with his fingers stained with blood, all he found was one broken hairpin of mine.

Everyone said Xiao Yun Zhan had gone mad.

But I didn’t care about any of that.

Because I was already “dead.”

Until that night, when I was about to close my shop for the day and saw Xiao Yun Zhan outside the window, his eyes red and that broken hairpin clutched tightly in his hand.

He called out hoarsely, “Yanyan, I knew you’d come back.”

But he didn’t know that I was no longer Shen Muyan.

I was now Zhuxin, an assassin.

[Important Notes]

1. The blurb is in first person; the main story is in third person.

2. The male lead is ruthless and obsessive. All he wants is power, but in the end, when forced to choose between the empire and the woman he loves, he’ll choose her.

Theme: There are countless paths to happiness. Don’t fixate on just one