She Who Became the Sun (The Radiant Emperor, #1)

by Shelley Parker-Chan

In a panic she began struggling, and felt her father’s hands clench tighter into her flesh, and then she was crying too hard to breathe. In that one terrible moment, she knew what her fate of nothing meant. She had thought it was only insignificance, that she would never be anything or do anything that mattered. But it wasn’t. It was death. As she writhed and cried and screamed, the bandit strode over and snatched her from her father. She screamed louder, and then thumped onto the bed hard enough that all her breath came out. The bandit had thrown her there.

The girl and Chongba, clinging to each other in terror and exhaustion, stared at their father where he lay on the churned dirt. His bloodied body was curled up as tightly as a child in the womb: he had left the world already prepared for his reincarnation.

Leaving the blank-eyed ghosts murmuring in the rain, she walked.

“You must be new. Take the punishment, or don’t eat,” the monk snapped. “Which will it be?” Zhu stared at him. It was the stupidest question she had ever heard. “Well?” She held out her hands; the monk lashed them with the stick;

Then the adult monks rose and stampeded away in their intense hurry to go somewhere and probably sit in silence again.

All like things being connected, the shape of the clouds told them what that distant land looked like. There where the clouds resembled fish scales were lakes and rivers; there, where the clouds had the shape of shrubs, were the hills. And there beneath the slow-rising blooms of yellow dust: armies.

He crouched and looked Zhu in the eye where she knelt. His drooping skin was held taut on the inside by a thrumming vibrance: the ferocious, irreligious joy of a man who has willingly cast aside any chance of nirvana for the sake of his attachment to life. And Zhu, staring at him in a daze, saw in him a reflection of herself.

it felt dangerous beyond belief that someone should see something of her. The only part of Zhu Chongba that had ever been uniquely hers: the determination to live.

Ouyang caught a brief flash of the shadow between his thighs. He felt his usual sick fascination at the sight. A perfect male body, lived in so casually—its owner never even having given a thought to its wholeness.

Chen tightened his fingers around her wrist until tears sprang to her eyes. In a pleasant undertone, he said, “Dear Yingzi, if you scald your future husband every time he opens his mouth, how will we ever hear his worthy input?”