MTLNOVEL Chapter 159: Read Between The Lines
Princess Yuyan, the Crown Princess of Baiguang, turned the worn pages of the book with careful fingers, the candlelight flickering across the faded print. She had read it a hundred times before. Perhaps a thousand. But this time—this time she read it not as a girl with her feet tucked into a university library corner, but as a woman with her feet firmly planted inside the pages.
The Villainous Crown Prince.
That had been the title. Cheap digital cover. Blood-red font. One of those clickbait novels you never admitted to reading in public. But she had read it. Cover to cover. And now she was living it.
Zhu Mingyu—Crown Prince of Daiyu, son of the dragon, heir to the empire.
In the book, he had been a monster carved in velvet. A genius, a strategist, a man who hid poison behind poetry. His brothers died one by one. His enemies never saw the knife coming. He razed the harem, burned traitors alive, smiled at ministers before cutting their tongues out. And then… he united the realm. Five warring nations under one banner. His banner.
And he loved her.
Yuyan exhaled slowly and closed the book.
The page still burned in her mind: the line that had anchored her obsession.
"He looked at her not like a man in love—but like a man starving. She was the only thing he ever let touch his throat."
She had married the wrong prince. That was how the tragedy had started.
But not this time.
Outside her tent, the hunt had begun. Horns blared in the woods, riders shouting in the distance as nobles scrambled to play hero in borrowed armor. She moved toward the tent's opening and lifted the curtain just enough to see the treeline.
A scream cut through the silence. Faint. Far away. But familiar.
She smiled.
In the book, the bloodshed had started slowly. A few accidents. A few snares. A few warnings to the court that power was no longer inherited—it was earned. But eventually, the bodies piled high. Enemies were gutted on the battlefield. Allies were devoured by their own ambition. Zhu Mingyu didn't just win. He cleansed the empire.
And now? He was doing it all over again.
Even if he didn't know it.
She had seen the way he moved—dispassionate, controlled, never wasting breath. She had seen the flicker in his eyes when Xinying spoke too confidently. He was bored. The girl didn't know it yet, but she was already losing. She was a convenience. A shield. A temporary piece in a long game of imperial chess.
Just a placeholder.
Yuyan let the curtain fall.
She wasn't bitter about the past—not anymore. In the book, her character had entered too late. Married too wrong. Died too fast. She had been naive then, thinking love would win just because it burned brightly. But love meant nothing if you weren't alive to claim it.
Now she had a second chance.
She would not stand in the background and smile politely this time. She would not be exiled to some distant province with a child she didn't want and a husband who barely noticed her. She knew the future. She had read every word. And if Zhu Mingyu wanted to bathe the world in blood again, then she would be the one to hold the basin.
Let him kill his brothers.
Let him shatter the court.
She would clear the path herself.
This time, when the Crown Prince claimed the throne, it would not be because fate wrote it for him—it would be because she made it happen.
Yuyan stepped outside, her robes whispering against the grass. The forest stretched wide around her, the sky pale with the light of an approaching dusk. Somewhere deeper in the woods, she heard another cry. Not fear. Fury.
She tilted her head.
Deming, perhaps. Or some other arrogant fool. It didn't matter.
She would let them bleed.
They were not part of the story she remembered.
She turned toward the clearing where she knew Zhu Mingyu had ridden—silent, regal, untouched by the chaos around him. Always just far enough back to appear clean, but never far enough to be uninvolved.
He was recreating the bloodbath exactly.
Good.
Let the world believe the puppet masters were men. Let them whisper that Zhu Mingyu was merciful, that his crown was earned through noble struggle.
She knew better.
And this time, she would not wait to be chosen.
She would become the reason.
Behind her, the book still lay open on her cot, its final paragraph underlined so many times the paper had begun to tear.
"When the war ended, he returned to her—not because she waited, but because she endured."
Yuyan lifted her chin and walked toward the heart of the hunt.
It had already begun.
And she was done waiting.
Leaving her tent, she passed a trio of guards near the edge of the encampment, nodding with the serene dignity expected of a princess. They bowed in return, none daring to meet her gaze too long. That was fine. Let them think she was merely Baiguang's ornament—an offering of peace, a soft-voiced diplomat from across the mountains.
Let them forget that every offer came with a price.
Yuyan moved with purpose through the temporary camp, her eyes flicking to the towering trees overhead. This was Daiyu's land, yes—but the hunt had always been about something more than game. It was tradition, pageantry, and strategy folded into a single ritual. The Emperor thought he was in control. The Crown Prince acted like he didn't care. The court laughed and drank and whispered.
But none of them saw the truth.
This hunt wasn't a celebration.
It was a battleground.
And she would not miss her moment.
Her fingers toyed with the edge of her sleeve as she walked. Inside the lining, she had tucked two thin sheets of paper—copied from memory, every line from the original novel she couldn't bear to lose. She had rewritten them over and over by candlelight during her first year in Baiguang, terrified she might forget a single word.
Now they were her scripture.
She would watch Zhu Mingyu, follow the patterns, stay ahead of the bloodline he was tracing. And if someone tried to stop him—whether it was his brothers, his ministers… or even that perfectly composed wife of his—well.
They would learn what it meant to stand in the path of a woman who already knew the ending.
And wasn't afraid to change it.