The Seventh Life Of The Soulbound Villainess
The knowledge arriving not as a thought but as a fact: he is mine.
I had spent three years cataloguing everything I could find about the empire's power structure. The Aura cultivation hierarchy. The capital city of Valenor, its districts, its palace layout as described in a military treatise I'd traded two months of extra chores to borrow from the minor noble house where my aunt worked as a laundry woman. I had learned to read better than anyone in my family, better probably than Cook, better than most of the servants I'd grown up beside, because reading was the only method available to her and I needed to understand the world I was going to navigate.
I had not told anyone about any of this.