Josei

When we loved each other most, Jiang Shen and I promised ourselves three lifetimes together.

Perhaps our hearts were too sincere in that moment, for Heaven actually granted our wish.

In our first life, he and I walked hand in hand through the innocence of youth, stopping only one step short of marriage.

In our second, he was reborn as the Crown Prince, second only to the emperor and above all others, while I became the daughter of an impoverished family. I was imprisoned deep within the palace; he galloped across the battlefield.

In our third, the wheel of fortune turned, and it was I who became the sovereign.

Three lives, three lifetimes. How romantic—and how terribly long.

Long enough for me to become meat beneath another’s knife. Long enough for me to become the butcher.

And long enough for me to be born anew.

I was the heroine of a sweet-wife story: delicate, soft, and made to be swept off my feet.

All I had to do was behave and let one man after another dote on me.

My stepbrother was walking toward me with a glass of milk when a system appeared.

It told me that, according to the plot, I was supposed to develop a sex addiction that very day. From then on, the slightest contact with a man would leave me unbearably aroused, and it would only get worse.

That sounded pretty good to me.

I drained the milk in one gulp.

My stepbrother smiled.

I smiled too.

The system gave an even more wicked little chuckle.

“Except I just changed it into an addiction to studying.”

On the day Mother was buried, Father gave me three copper coins.

He sent me all the way to West Street for candied hawthorns, but when I returned, he was gone.

Two days later, I found him at the lantern festival with a beautiful lady and another little girl in his arms.

The candied hawthorns he claimed to want were still wrapped in my hand.

Rather than waste them, I offered them to a pale, handsome prince who refused to drink his bitter medicine.

That small gift changed both our lives—and gave two abandoned hearts a home.

After my divorce, I married the woman I had cheated with.

She was gentle and considerate, the kind of woman who always knew how to make me feel valued.

Her only drawback was that she came with a son.

But that was all right.

I had promised to love her, and I would love her child too.

As for my ex-wife, apart from the three thousand yuan I sent in child support every month, we had nothing more to do with each other.

Until the day I saw a hanging chair at a friend’s house—a chair that had once belonged to me.

On our wedding night, the prince was summoned away to the side courtyard by his cousin.

I had already taken off my bridal robes and slept soundly until morning.

After all, neither of us was the heroine.

Why should one supporting villainess make life difficult for another?

When I married into the Shen family, I already knew my husband had one great love.

She was the fisherman’s daughter who had saved him after he was gravely wounded while suppressing bandits.

They had sworn themselves to each other through life and death and privately pledged to marry.

But his mother threatened to take her own life and would only permit the woman to become his concubine.

On the eve of my wedding, Mother wept with worry and asked, “How will our Zhen’er ever live like this?”

How else?

He could play the devoted lover.

I would be the lady of the household.

Shen Yunfeng and I were merely two people traveling the same road toward entirely different ends.

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 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.

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.

My mistress prides herself on being a virtuous wife, even as she forces her husband’s bedmaids to drink mercury-laced contraceptive draughts.

When one girl dies and another is sold, my mistress chooses me as the next woman for her husband’s bed.

She does not know that I was once a modern physician—or that I have stopped waiting for mercy.

If this household refuses to recognize its servants as people, I will teach its masters the price of treating women as things.