Gilded Ashes - Chapter 8: Rust Room

Having been reborn, she takes one glance at her ridiculously handsome husband and wonders if she had suffered from brain damage back then—she had actually demanded for a divorce with him. Repeatedly!

Riven was nothing but a powerless runt until necromancers razed his village and butchered his sister before his eyes. As his blood soaked the dirt, his Sigil ignited, granting him a gift. He can die and reform, a cycle that resets with every rank he climbs.But fate wasn’t done screwing him.In the catacombs beneath the ruins, he found the Death Ledger—a death contract that bound him against his will to hunt those who’ve cheated death across dimensions. Historical legendary heroes and villains.From the noble King Arthur to the conqueror Genghis Khan and the fabled king of Uruk, Gilgamesh, together with Ivan the Terrible and Vlad the Impaler.Every mission is a gamble. Fail once, and the Ledger brands him a death-cheater, turning him into prey for the same immortal fugitives he hunts. And the reward? He gets to keep them as his undead summons.His enemies will not stop coming. They want the Ledger, the Sigil, his power. To survive, he will wield death itself, growing stronger with every soul he claims, because in a world this savage, only the relentless rise.[-Congratulations, you have successfully killed Alexander the Great and claimed him as your summon...you can start on the path of evolution-] The words, scrawled in blood, burned across the page of the Death Ledger.

When powerless, unfavoured Princess Soleia was arranged to marry the newly titled Duke Orion Elsher, she assumed they would find love eventually.Who knew that her father would send off her husband mere hours later to fight a war?Soleia was left alone to deal with an impoverished fief, a crumbling estate, and spiteful, vindictive relatives of the Duke who all wished to see her gone.She couldn’t leave― there was nowhere else to go. Soleia desperately wanted her husband to return so he could offer her a helping hand. However, when he did, he returned with Elowyn, a woman he claimed was his true love.A woman hellbent on taking her place as the rightful Duchess, no matter what she had to do to get Soleia out of the way.Mistreated, misunderstood, and miserable, Soleia was eventually thrown out of the estate she helped build.Fortunately, when one door closes, another one opens. Unknown to Soleia, a man more powerful than her husband had been watching her, waiting for the right time to snatch her into his gilded cage. Duke Elsher had been foolish to let go― but the crown prince of Raxuvia wouldn’t make the same mistake.***Prequel to Stolen by the Rebel King.

In all my life, I’ve only made two mistakes that I regret. The first was filling out my entrance exam application wrong, and the second was offending Zhong Yuan. If I had to use an idiom to describe the impact of my mistake, it would be simply, ‘Life is no better than death’. And if I had to use an idiom to describe Zhong Yuan’s offenses to me, it would be simply, ‘Too many crimes to record’. And yet, for as evil and wicked as he was, he attracted girls the way that flowers attracted bees and butterflies.

It happened that one day, for some reason, I taunted Zhong Yuan, “The King of Hell sent you to torture some more people, didn’t he?” Without a change in expression, he replied, “In order to torture fewer people, I decided to just choose one person to torture for the rest of my life.” I asked him, “What do you mean?” He smiled at me and answered, “If you don’t go to hell, who will?”

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