She Who Became the Sun (The Radiant Emperor Duology Book 1)

The body became used to exercise, particular sounds and sensations, or even physical pain. But it was strange how shame was something you never became inured to: each time hurt just as much as the first.

How could her body be a woman’s body, if it didn’t house a woman? Zhu wasn’t the grown-up version of that girl with the nothing fate.

Some new hardness inside her answered: I’ll be better at being you than you ever were.

She knew that when it came down to it, you survived and died alone. But perhaps there was still a comfort in having someone at your side while it happened.

Becoming nothing was the most terrifying thing she could think of—worse even than the fear of hunger, or pain, or any other suffering that could possibly arise from life.

“But you know what’s worse than suffering? Not suffering, because you’re not even alive to feel it.”

I suppose he was a cherished son, the kind brought up believing he should bring honor to his ancestral line. But then he was cut, and made to serve the very ones who did it, and he knows his ancestors would spit at him rather than receive his offerings.” Then, slowly, because talking about her girlhood still felt wrong, she added, “But that’s the d

There was a touching pureness to it that Ouyang envied. He had never been able to inhabit a moment of pleasure as simply and purely as Esen did. Just knowing that it was transient—that any moment would be drained of its sweetness and vividness once it became memory—made it bittersweet to him even as it was happening.

For the first time since her adolescence she looked down at her body and didn’t feel aversion, but simply the fact of herself.