It was an ordinary mountain village, connected to a small town.
There were several dozen households in the village, and one of them was destitute.
Rain fell, and the sky grew steadily darker.
[The next life exists if you believe; if you do not, it does not-]
[Two identical flowers will someday appear in this world. One will wither, and one will bloom.]
The Female Emperor had grown up poor and beset by hardship. She had never owned new clothes, only little garments worn to tatters, and she had only an older brother to depend on.
But when she was still very young, her Older Brother was forcibly taken away. He left his homeland and died in a foreign land, while she was only four or five years old.
After that, she became even more lonely and helpless. It was hard to imagine how she had survived—a frail girl barely over four, stripped of her only support, spending every day longing for her sole remaining relative. The Older Brother she was destined never to see again.
Even before her Older Brother was taken away, their lives had been bitterly hard. They never had enough to eat or warm clothes to wear, yet those had been her happiest days. Her Older Brother, only a few years older than her, always managed to find a few scraps of leftover food outside. Hungry himself, swallowing his saliva, he would still feed her first. Though the Female Emperor had been little then, she knew that her sallow, emaciated Older Brother was hungry too, and always insisted that he take the first bite.
That longing drove the Female Emperor to defy heaven with a mortal body. In the end, she became a Great Emperor of her era, the most astonishing and gifted woman in all