Destined to be Empress

Prologue

Everyone has a motivation to kill someone. There is always a drive to commit the crime, no sane person just does it because they feel like it. There is some cause that motivates them to take a person's life.

My motivation is my family.

The one I killed was a slave trader and the one I framed for his murder was my own grandmother. They were going to kill my parents and older brother if I didn't do this. As punishment, one is dead and the other will take the blame. My family and I will not have to worry about them for the rest of our lives. But there were others out there who also wished us harm.

My name is Jiang Yingyue. I killed and framed them because if I didn't, everything that happened in my last life would happen once more. This is the second time I am reliving this life and if I don't change what had happened it will all happen again.

In my last life, we didn't do anything to stop them. They worked my parents and my brother from before the sun rose until long after set every single day and were incredibly cruel to both of them, beating them quite frequently. One day, my grandmother sold me to a slave trader for wealth. My parents fought them, but so exhausted from the labour that grandmother put them through, they were soon killed. Their sacrifice allowed me and my brother to escape but my face was scarred and there was no way to heal it.

My brother, from that point on, learned how to fight and he joined the army so he could rise through the ranks to support both of us. Until he could though, I was sent to live with my grandmother. She beat me every day and forced me to wear a mask to cover my ugly face.

My brother rose through the ranks and soon became one of the youngest generals in history. At that time, five years after I had started living with my grandmother, I was taken in by him. He protected me when he could but he could not always protect me. One day, a young girl named Liu Changyin befriended me. She went out shopping with me and taught me makeup to make me look beautiful. I let her dress me up and do as she pleased to experiencing the extravagence that life had to offer, which only made me feel all the more self-inferior. I acted timidly like a puppet all day. But still, she was my dearest friend. I felt safe around her after she told me to take off my mask and walk around with her for she would protect me if anyone said anything about me as she was the daughter of a minister.

One day I was out walking in the village when I accidentally bumped into someone. It had been the 3rd prince, Xia Feng. He forgave me and instead took me out to explore. We became fast friends and I soon fell in love with him. I had pleaded to my brother to ask the emperor to grant me a marriage to the 3rd prince and the emperor had, thinking that it would keep my brother from gaining too much power and not to rise up and try to steal the throne. I had married the 3rd prince and since I loved him and he loved me, I used my connections to help him to rise to be emperor. I learned how to be the best chef in the country so he would never go hungry. I taught myself to read and write to help him with his state affairs. I learned to dance, embroider, and play the zither so that I would not disgrace him by being an idiot. I became the perfect, graceful, elegant wife for him so that he would not feel ashamed to stand by my side. I did this and so much more just to help him because I loved him.

A year after he became emperor and me the empress, I became pregnant. We were so happy to be blessed with life. But then tragedy struck and when I was 5 months, I miscarried for unknown reasons.

It was a few months after that that everything was revealed to me.

The room was damp and dark, filled with the pungent stink of death. Soft groans of pain could be heard from a heap on the floor. The heap was covered in red fabric with pink flowers and was outlined in gold. A headdress sat at the top, pinned to the top of ebony hair. The heap suddenly moved and Yingyue lifted her head, her face bloody.