Mystery

I was trafficked to a mountain village for a ghost marriage.

But they don’t know I’ve lived for three hundred years and am the Dragon King’s Wife.

In the dead of night, I soothe the Black Dragon coiled around my waist.

“Alright, alright. They’re just little kids of sixty or seventy. What are you getting mad at them for?”

I went on a celebrity dating reality show, and the host asked me which male guest I would pick.

Smiling, I looked toward the acclaimed Best Actor, the veteran singer, and the current young idol heartthrob.

“Among these guests is a serial killer. Three years ago, you dismembered my little sister.

You left no remains of her behind and turned her into a target for the internet’s scorn.

“Now, it’s my turn to hunt you down.”

From childhood, Lin Qingcai copied case files and transcribed testimonies in her father Lin Huaizhang’s study, yet she was always kept hidden behind the Lin Family’s spotless reputation. By chance, she discovered a confession in a secret compartment that had been forged to match her handwriting, and learned that her father, elder brother, and mother were preparing to make her take the blame for the Luo Family’s old case.

She was afraid of dying, and long since afraid of being cast out by her family. So before they could speak first, she beat the drum and brought her accusation before the court, charging her father and brother with falsifying testimony and shifting the blame onto her. Using the copied case records she had secretly preserved over the years, along with witness leads and fragments from the old case, she gradually exposed the truth in the prefectural yamen: the Lin Family and Duke An’s Mansion had colluded to alter statements, take silver, and frame innocent people.

Her father was exiled, her brother was stripped of his status, and her mother finally came to see the rift her favoritism had created. Lin Qingcai left the clan and opened Qingcai Writing Service in West Lane, turning the pen she had once used to help others conceal evidence of their crimes into one that wrote the truth for the weak.

On my wedding day, my twin sister knocked me unconscious and locked me in the basement.

Then she impersonated me and married my fiancé.

“From today on, your man is mine.” Her eyes were filled with sheer determination.

She left in such a hurry

that she didn’t notice I had stopped breathing in the darkness.

I have a secret.

From the moment I was born, I carried memories of my previous life.

I buried that secret deep in my heart and never dared reveal the slightest trace of it.

Until the year I entered the palace as a maid.

The other maids warned me never to provoke Shen Ruyun, Imperial Consort Shen.

They said she was a vicious, ruthless woman, and that countless eunuchs and palace maids had died by her hand.

I did not believe it.

Because I had once seen Shen Ruyun’s portrait.

And I recognized her.

She was my daughter from my previous life.

When I died, she was only ten years old.

I wanted to understand why that sweet, sensible child had become such a wicked ghost now…

My roommate Chen Ling was always coming up with strange rules. For example, after the dorm power went out, we weren’t allowed to turn on any lights, and once a bag of snacks was opened, it had to be finished within five minutes.

If we didn’t follow them, she would nag us about it all day long.

Just now, at three in the morning, she woke all of us from a dead sleep and said:

“You have to survive. The drill is officially over now.”

With that, she gave us an eerie smile, then turned and walked out the door.

A scream came from downstairs soon after.

She had jumped from the dorm room below ours.

While everyone else was fighting for the Emperor’s favor, I built an intelligence station in the cold palace.

Until the day he died, the Emperor never knew that the woman stirring up the hidden currents of his harem was someone whose name he could not even remember.

I died in Yongxiang Alley during my third winter there.

Not truly died-only the kind of death where your name is crossed out in vermilion ink on the registry.

They said Noble Lady Li, who had once worked in the imperial garden and was later favored by His Majesty for her beauty, had gone mad.

Because on the late Empress’s memorial day, I let my hair hang loose, went barefoot, and sang a rousing rendition of “Liangzhou Ci.”

In truth, I was not mad. I had simply calculated that the Chief Eunuch of the Directorate of Ceremonial would pass through the imperial garden that day.

Madness was the best pass in the cold palace, and the best armor.

On the day I moved into the West Third Institute, only one lame old eunuch came to lead the way.

The weeds in the courtyard rose past my knees, and the moss on the well curb was as thick as a velvet blanket.

My roommate, Attendant Li, had been thrown in here three years ago after offending the Imperial Consort.

When she saw me arrive, she did not even lift her eyelids. She only kept rubbing a length of hemp rope in her hands, its edges worn fuzzy.

I set my only bundle down on the crumbling earthen kang.

Inside were two sets of worn palace clothes, a bald writing brush, and half a ream of yellow paper.

The paper pasted over the window lattice had a hole in it the size of a fist. The north wind poured in with a howl, carrying the faint sound of pipes and flutes from far away.

I stared at that hole, but in my heart, a sliver of light slipped through.

In a madwoman’s world, there were the fewest rules.

Here, perhaps, I could live.

I run a science-debunking channel.

I’m also a Taoist priest.

Every day, I livestream ways to expose feudal superstition for what it is.

One day, a young woman asked me to help sever a toxic romantic entanglement.

The next day, her boyfriend was dead.

I am the strongest NPC in a horror game, they call me the Ghost Bride.

I wear a Red Wedding Dress, swaying my crimson nails, wandering freely through the vast ancient mansion, unbound by the rules.

I enjoy watching the terror on the players’ faces and the screams they let out.

Until one day, a middle-aged woman saw my face clearly, neither terrified nor screaming.

She shed tears: “My dear, I am your mother.”

My younger sister gave birth to a son in the Eastern Palace.

I brought a fortune in family wealth and cartloads of rare medicinal pills with me to the palace to visit her.

The moment she saw me, she nestled into my arms and began to cry, tears falling one after another.

Her movements were intimate, her voice soft and spoiled. There was not the slightest trace of distance or unfamiliarity between us.

And yet my entire body went rigid, a chill crawling up my spine and sinking into my heart.

Because the face before me, identical to my sister’s in every way,

was not the dead woman’s skin I had sewn onto her with my own hands.