Shen Fangru — the only daughter of the Vice Minister of the Imperial Household Department — shocked the capital with a single breathtaking dance. Her engagement to Gu Zhou, the young master of the Gu family, was praised as the perfect match.

But everything shattered on the day Gu Zhou was framed for colluding with the enemy and sentenced to execution.

In order to save the man she loved, she took a desperate gamble at the Xuanji Banquet and intercepted the young emperor Zhou Ling, who was traveling incognito.

The man lifted her chin with cold fingertips, a playful smile on his lips.

“Save him? Fine.”

“But I want you in the palace tonight.”

She endured the humiliation, but what she received was not her lover’s path to survival—only the news of his death.

After swallowing a prayer bead, she opened her eyes again—only to find she had returned to the beginning of the Xuanji Banquet!

Fate’s gears began to turn for the second time.

In her second life, she used her foreknowledge to negotiate with the emperor…

Only to be forcefully pressed onto the imperial desk.

Beneath the dragon robe, his burning palm clamped the back of her neck as he murmured darkly, “Since you understand the will of heaven, why don’t you tell me—in what position does your emperor wish to take you right now?”

In the fifth life, sixth life… she fled, fought, and even attempted to kill him.

In the seventh life, she avoided him like the plague.

But he relentlessly pursued her, eventually issuing an imperial decree to imprison her deep within the palace—caging her in gold and silk, taking her night after night.

Until the ninth life.

Shen Fangru finally understood: since she could not escape this madman’s obsessive entanglement… then she would stop running.

She would make him taste what it meant to lose everything—pain to the bone.

Years later, the history books wrote:

On the day Empress Shen Fangru ascended to heaven, the former tyrant Zhou Ling personally dug open the imperial tomb with his bare hands, holding the cold coffin in his arms, blood and tears mixed together as he whispered:

“It’s been so many years… shouldn’t you forgive me by now?”