I Played It Safe and Became the Mad Prince's Favorite

1.

Xiaoxia transmigrates into a book, becoming a maid.

More specifically, she’s a disposable maid who gets strangled to death after trying to give the unconscious male lead an aphrodisiac.

When she arrives, the grip around her neck hasn’t fully loosened, and she nearly dies along with the original owner of the body.

After learning the whole plot, Xiaoxia has no choice but to keep her head down and scrape by under the disabled male lead.

She reports everything in careful detail, attends to his every need, and is more obsequious than anyone.

She completely accepts and understands the male lead’s volatile, strange moods.

Xiaoxia’s plans are clicking along nicely. She intends to hang on until the heroine is reborn, then leave with her money and bow out in triumph. But as she keeps laying low, she suddenly realizes that the male lead has started acting strange.

“If you get hurt again…” The man drawled, his gaze dark, sinister, and unnerving, like a venomous snake coiling around its prey. “I won’t mind keeping you tied to my side for good, so I can watch you myself.”

Xiaoxia: “?”

2.

Fu Huaiyan is gravely wounded after being ambushed on the battlefield.

The imperial physicians declare that he’ll be disabled for life. But while he’s unconscious, the maid tending to him insists again and again that he’ll walk again.

The maid speaks incoherently, though. One moment she’s rude, insolent, and vulgar; the next she becomes deferential, ingratiating, and sycophantic. She seems to have a screw loose.

The two finally meet face-to-face.

Fu Huaiyan looks at the pale, scrawny little maid with dry, yellow hair, who’s so terrified by a single remark that she nearly loses her wits. At last, he’s certain that all the defiant words he heard while unconscious had been her inner thoughts.

Her soul came from another world, and she took over someone else’s body to survive.

She isn’t a maid. She’s a celestial maiden.

A celestial maiden who came for him.

Since she came for him, then she must belong to him.

So even when she tries to leave time and again, he patiently stops her, one time after another, using the things she treasures and loves to coax and lure her back.

The celestial maiden is kind, and gives in again and again.

But just when he thinks he can keep her by his side forever, she dies.

She dies saving him.

Then his vision turns white, and pain cuts to the bone.

The love that had silently taken root bursts free of its buried depths and grows wild and alone.

3.

The forty-third year of Dayu, in the depths of winter. The new emperor ascends the throne.

With the first corrupt official’s head hitting the ground, the real ceremony begins.

One head falls at the palace gates each day, right at the hour when the first victim died, in the late afternoon.

A flash of steel, a gush of blood, and a glaring patch of dark red spreads across the pristine snow.

The snow melts in the blood, red mingling with white in a horrifying sight.

Winter gives way to spring.

The criminals held in the capital’s prisons have all served their sentences, while corrupt officials uncovered across the provinces continue to arrive in the capital, one after another.

The court and country are terrified, but nobody dares speak, until an impossibly ugly cat appears in the new emperor’s arms.

※ Note:

The original novel has no romance, which will be explained later~

The dynasty is entirely fictional, with a mix of historical influences. Both leads are each other’s first and only, 1v1, happy ending.

The male lead can hear the heroine’s thoughts at first. Important!

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Clearheaded, independent, career-minded heroine who only wants to survive × secretly soft-hearted male lead who says one thing and means another, overthinks his way into love, competes for her, and goes absolutely feral

Theme: Work hard for a better life