Fifth Junior Sister

A scandalous legend clings to Chóngxū Palace (Chóngxū Gōng). Once upon a time, there lived a certain Fifth Junior Sister (Wǔ Shīmèi), the fifth disciple to the former sect master. Wedged uncomfortably between four brilliant senior brothers (shīxiōng) above and a lavishly adored, genius little junior sister (shīmèi) below, she was utterly ordinary, thoroughly unliked, and spent years silently pining for her First Senior Brother with nothing to show for it. Then came a perilous trial. To rescue her trapped First Brother from absolute doom, she voluntarily swallowed the dreaded Heart-Lock Gu (Suǒqíng Gǔ), binding her heart to his for all eternity—or facing complete soul obliteration. Touched by duty, her First Brother bound his path to hers as a cultivation partner. Years passed, the First Senior Brother ascended to become the almighty Sect Master, and our Fifth Sister naturally became the grand Sect Master’s Wife (Zhǎngmén Fūrén). Yet for thirty agonizing years, she lived without a drop of true love, branded by the entire immortal realm as a scheming, manipulative vixen who used a debt of gratitude to trap a genius. She simply could not wrap her head around it: saving a fellow disciple was supposed to be a good deed, so how on earth did a single act of sudden selflessness trade her thirty years of suffocating misery? None of that matters anymore, because through a miraculous twist of fate, she accidentally broke the Heart-Lock Gu. The story truly begins right here: Chóngxū Palace’s ultimate utility character, the overworked "tool" Fifth Junior Sister, refuses to be just a Fifth Sister any longer. She has a proper name and surname, and she is Yú Nántáng.