Song, Take You to the North Courtyard

The only daughter of Northern Song general Li Zhengfeng was pushed from a pavilion by her half-sister at the age of seventeen. She merely fell unconscious and did not wake, but the drunken Black and White Impermanence, out on official business, mistakenly took her soul and sent her to be reborn in the modern era. She lived there for twenty-three years, but the record of her previous life and death had not yet been completed. To meet his performance quota, the Judge erased those twenty-three years and ordered the Black and White Impermanence to send her, a woman who did not belong in the modern era, back where she came from. That woman was the unfortunate Li Nianyu. When she awoke, she was still the general’s daughter, just as before, except that she now knew things that no one in this era ought to know. Returning to the life that had once been hers, she thought everything would carry on as usual. She never expected that the real upheaval was only just beginning to unfold. Where should she go from here, and how should she face it? Yelü Hudu, the Northern Court Prince, was a legendary general who controlled two-thirds of the Liao military. He was not only handsome as a jade carving, with a graceful bearing and captivating amber eyes, but also the fearsome “Demon of the Northern Court” on the battlefield. He was nearly twenty and had yet to take a wife or concubine. He remained unmoved by everyone’s speculation, because he had given his heart to a little girl of just two when he was five. For all these years, he had waited for her to grow up, waiting for the day she would become his one and only princess consort. An imperial decree of marriage forced Li Nianyu to bid farewell to her beloved aunt, the Imperial Consort, and set out for Liao with her six-year-old younger brother. After a long, arduous journey, she finally met the man who was to be her “husband.” To her surprise, he was… The cold and hard-hearted Northern Court Prince showed a tenderness to his princess consort that few ever saw. He doted on her because he had spent all these years waiting for her alone. For her, he risked danger during a hunting expedition to catch a rare white fox of the grasslands, just to make her a cloak. For her, he refused to take a secondary consort in front of the emperor. For her, he even talked back to the Empress Dowager and knelt in the snow for three hours without budging. He was willing to give her everything he could, and feared only that she might leave him. That woman was Li Nianyu. Li Nianyu could freely indulge in little whims with him, knowing he would never get angry. She could admire plum blossoms with him in the snow and race horses by his side. For him, she would make a pair of deerskin boots even if it gave her blisters on her fingertips. She would even compete with the princess of Western Xia in archery and dancing, because he could only ever be her husband, and she would never allow anyone to set their sights on him. He was Yelü Hudu, the man Li Nianyu came to love after they married. Power, desire, greed, and revenge: every storm began with these. The world around them was battered by raging tempests, but no matter how fierce the storm, if they could face it hand in hand, it would all pass like clouds before their eyes. As if from somewhere beyond, a Buddhist chant seemed to rise: “All the evil deeds I have committed in the past arose from beginningless greed, anger, and delusion, and were born of my body, speech, and mind. I now repent of them all…” On mobile reading platforms, this novel is titled The Northern Court Prince’s Beloved Concubine