Drama

My father drowned while building a bridge for the village.

Our stepmother beat and berated us, and everyone thought she treated us terribly.

Years later, my brother rose to high office, and the emperor granted her the title of Lady of Imperial Mandate. Only when she stood at the height of honor did everyone finally understand: beneath her cutting tongue was the softest heart.

For ten years, I was a corporate Head of Administration.

Then I woke up as the legitimate daughter of a marquis.

Only then did I discover that I had landed in a female-led power fantasy about a maid’s rise to glory.

Blessed with the heroine halo, the maid could do everything: manage a household, run shops, organize disaster relief.

Everyone adored her.

Even my own younger brother and fiance became devoted second male leads who protected her at every turn.

In the end, the senior maid became a legendary merchant queen known throughout the realm.

I, meanwhile, grew jealous of the heroine.

Spoiled and willful, I courted disaster at every step until everyone abandoned me and I died alone in a secluded estate.

After a long silence, my professional instincts kicked in.

Household management was simply a logistics support system.

Running shops was supply-chain management.

Disaster relief was an emergency response plan.

Well, wasn’t that convenient?

She was the all-conquering maid with fate on her side.

I was an administrator trying to stay alive.

And survival began with rules.

My eldest legitimate sister hanged herself the night before she was to marry into the Eastern Palace.

The Court of Judicial Review’s postmortem report recorded an impossible finding: she was a virgin, yet three months pregnant.

Her baffling death destroyed my family—my mother killed herself, my father went mad, and the once-glorious Pei estate became a house of ghosts overnight.

Ten years later, I became the Court’s only female coroner and pushed open the carved door of my sister’s long-sealed chamber.

There, buried in my memories of that night, I found a truth monstrous enough to overturn everything I believed.

My celebrated fiancé casts me aside for the brilliant female thief who became his partner in solving the capital’s most sensational cases.

Branded a discarded woman, I am forced by imperial decree to marry Li Fu, an unlettered general whose rough manners could not be further from the refined husband I once imagined.

Yet beneath his beard and battle scars lies a loyalty steadier than any storybook romance, while I discover that managing a difficult household may demand more courage than grieving a broken engagement.

When the applause fades and ordinary life begins, both Gu Huaichuan and I learn which kind of love can truly survive beyond the stage.

Would living my life over again make it any better?

After I was reborn, I still chose the young general who had treated me with icy courtesy in my previous life, and rejected the devoted Tanhua scholar.

A road whose every pitfall I had already crossed ought to be easier the second time.

Across two lifetimes, I was already an eighty-year-old woman at heart.

I asked for no great romance, only a safe and steady life.

Only on my wedding night did I discover that I had not married the second son of the marquis’s residence—the man I had been introduced to before the match.

I had married the sickly eldest son, who had spent most of his life confined to bed.

The idea had come from Miss Liu, who entered the household on the same day as I did and was now the Second Young Madam.

Smiling sweetly, she asked, “I heard you and Eldest Brother fell in love at first sight, Sister-in-law. Are you happy now that you are married?”

Everyone expected me to cry, make a scene, and expose how the grooms had been switched.

Instead, I lowered my eyes and calmly served tea to my new parents-in-law before I spoke.

“A maiden treasures her reputation above all else. I did not dare look closely at my future husband that day. Only today have I learned what a true gentleman looks like.”

My parents-in-law’s worry turned to delight, and they praised me as virtuous and noble—the finest of wives.

What none of them knew was that I came from a merchant family.

I believed in fair trades, and I never forgot a debt.

For the little matter of deceiving me, I judged that a few lives would be payment enough.

In my fourth year as Song Jingyuan’s kept woman, he tired of me and asked to break up.

I had meant to cry, make a scene, and threaten to kill myself to keep him, putting on the same devoted performance that had pleased him countless times before.

But the floating comments before my eyes said he meant it this time.

He had fallen for someone else, and this truly would be the last time we ever met.

I fell silent at once.

While tears slipped down my face, I hooked a bill from the floor with my little finger, rolled it into my palm, and tucked it deeper into my sleeve.

In a year of famine, I sold myself to a brothel for the sake of my family.

My little sister came to see me with dried melons and vegetables on her back.

One patron had a taste for very young girls, and the madam tried to tempt her.

My sister believed every word and refused to leave: she wanted silk every day and fish and meat at every meal.

I said no, took out the silver I had secretly saved, and asked a man from our village to escort her home.

After that, not a single letter came from my family.

Five years later, when my beauty had begun to fade, I persuaded a cloth merchant to redeem me and make me stepmother to his two children.

Then my sister returned.

We looked seven or eight parts alike, but she was alluring and uninhibited, far more so than my dull, quiet self; within three days of raising her banner, men crowded the door.

The cloth merchant hired a sedan chair to collect me, and my sister crooked one beguiling finger at him.

He hesitated for only a moment before laying the silver meant for my freedom at her feet.

To please his mistress, my father secretly switched Mother’s newborn daughter with hers.

He meant for his mistress’s daughter to take my place as the legitimate young lady of the family and grow up surrounded by wealth and privilege.

Behind Mother’s back, the mistress mocked her.

“A country woman like her will spend her whole life laboring only to hand the fruits to someone else.”

Even Father thought Mother ignorant and easy to deceive.

But Mother was merely uneducated, not witless.

Neither of them knew that a fire broke out in the rear courtyard on the day Mother gave birth—and that she switched me straight back.

Even as he faced death, Father could not understand how a country woman like Mother had brought about his ruin.

The moment my daughter was born, Old Madam Lu of the Yongchang Marquis Estate took her away.

There was only one reason: I was once the most celebrated courtesan in Yongning, and the kept mistress of the marquis’s heir.

A filthy, lowborn prostitute like me had no right to raise the estate’s precious young lady.

Not even when I was the one who had given birth to her.