Rebirth of the General's Illegitimate Daughter

Rebirth of the General's Illegitimate Daughter is an ancient-setting romance and rebirth web novel by Ye Xiaozi, totaling about 880,000 Chinese characters. It opens with the bleak scene of Qin Zhaoxi, the deposed empress of the Great Huai Kingdom, dying of illness in the cold palace, her body wrapped in a straw mat and carried out beyond the palace walls. In her past life, Qin Zhaoxi was the legitimate daughter of General Qin's household—elegant, refined, intelligent, and poised, a model for the young women of the capital—and was married to the "Third Lord" to become empress. Yet she was repeatedly schemed against by her cousin Shi Yuyin, Gu Yunyin, and others; branded with the false charge of harming the imperial heir and of a cruel heart, she was stripped of her empress title, the entire Qin household was executed, and she herself wept away her life in the cold palace. After her rebirth, her soul lands in the household of the governor of Cen Prefecture, becoming an unloved illegitimate daughter betrothed as a secondary consort to the emperor's younger brother, Prince Ling. The entire prince's household treats her with disdain because of the prince's coldness toward her, yet amid their contempt she slowly gathers strength: on one hand she navigates the mansion's hierarchies of legitimate and illegitimate, the jostling of wives and concubines; on the other she uses the passages between Prince Ling's mansion and the palace to draw near her enemies. She had thought her remaining years would hold nothing but revenge—to overturn the rear palace as a woman, to make those who destroyed her family in her past life wish they were dead—yet on this blade's-edge path she unexpectedly meets a man rumored to be ruthless, who alone protects her with single-minded devotion. The book advances through interwoven household intrigue, palace intrigue, and emotional entanglements, telling how a woman repeatedly crushed by fate takes hold of her own life once more.