Wolf's Pet

At court, he nails her father to death with the charge of "harboring a criminal"; in private, he stakes his own life in her palm. But Yi Ren soon discovers: she is not just a lover, but a lure. The bloodstains in the prison, the self-inflicted cuts in the dark chamber, the permitted calamities… all turn "trust me" into a joke.

The truth, once peeled open, is crueler still: Helan Xue comes from the remnant bloodline of the "wolf clan" deep in the snow mountains; his entire clan was massacred in his childhood, and he was forged as a living weapon for fifteen years—now he has only two or three years left to live. The so-called "Beibin treasure" is merely the bait with which he drags the world onto his chessboard.

From the bloody battle of Shuoyang and the eldest princess's conspiracy of jealousy to the public reversal at the accession ceremony and the toppling of the throne, Yi Ren learns one thing amid the killing arrays: if love has no equality and respect, she would rather leave with hatred.

At the snow mountain's final act, she returns to the "Wind Flower" valley where her mother and Helan Xue were born, destroys with her own hands the myth of the "wolf clan curse," and seals shut the entrance to the past. She ultimately chooses to marry Gu Yinchen, who has always shielded her with his life, and bear his children—not a cheap happy ending, but the transformation of obsession into freedom.

He lives to destroy the world; she lives so as never to be destroyed again—when the "wolf's" heart has only three years left, the cruelest love is often the sword that lets you go.