Psychological

The world says I have been blessed with a charmed life.

My father is a first-rank official, and my mother hails from a prestigious, noble clan.

Both of my elder brothers serve in the imperial court, and all three of my elder sisters have married into high-ranking families.

Since childhood, I have been draped in the finest silks and fed the rarest delicacies from jade platters.

Even the trifles I play with on a whim are worth enough to sustain an ordinary family for half a lifetime.

Yet, outsiders see only the surface of my tapestry-like life.

They do not understand that greatness brings its own burdens. Within these embroidered curtains and silken screens, schemes lie hidden at every turn.

Between the golden chalices and jade chopsticks, murderous intent flashes when least expected.

A single misstep is all it takes to fall into the bottomless abyss.

We had been together for three years, yet my girlfriend still couldn’t forget her first love.

There was a locked room in her house-a promise she had kept for him.

As long as he returned, there would always be a place for him in her home.

For his sake, she abandoned me time and time again.

The final time, I left nothing but a single breakup text and vanished without a trace.

Yet, she acted as if she had gone mad, searching the entire world for me.

Eventually, in a cemetery, she finally discovered the truth behind everything.

With bloodshot eyes, she pointed at the person in the black-and-white photograph-someone who bore an eighty percent resemblance to her-and interrogated me.

“Shen Yu, tell me-” “Every time you looked at me, who exactly were you thinking of?”

On a night of torrential rain, I ordered my girlfriend’s favorite milk tea and river snail rice noodles while she pulled an all-nighter.

However, even though the app showed the delivery had arrived at her location, my girlfriend still hadn’t marked it as received.

Just as I was about to call and check on her, the delivery rider sent me a photo through the app.

“Hey man, this is the right place, isn’t it?”

“That guy trying to pry the door open… that isn’t you, is it?”

The celebrity Zhu Yuan is dead. I still hate her. She always made me feel as wretched and hidden as a rat scurrying across the street.

And yet, I found her third gift. It was a plain music box sitting in the hospital corridor.

I casually handed it to the child in the neighboring bed.

She was dying, too.

I am a sickly, frail, spoiled drama queen.

One night, as I was once again willfully demanding my Butler come and coax me to sleep, a stream of Bullet Comments suddenly appeared before my eyes: “The horror boss is outside hunting Players and having the time of his life. He doesn’t have time to tuck you in and coax you to sleep.”

“She’s just a human being kept as a pet in a castle by a horror boss. She actually thinks she’s some kind of Young Lady.”

“Once the big boss meets the clever and witty Female Lead, he’ll grow disgusted with this delicate, spoiled drama queen. He’ll use all sorts of perverted methods to torture her before eating her piece by piece.”

Terrified, I hid under my covers, trembling uncontrollably.

The next second, a cool hand gently pulled back the duvet. A voice, gentle yet tinged with a faint, chilling coldness, drifted down from above me: “Master, what’s wrong?”

I can see the final moments of the deceased through their eyes, a gift that has helped the government solve countless cases.

Everything changed when the body of a drowned man was brought in.

Looking into his eyes, I saw him strangling me just before he died.

And on those hands, he was wearing the Jade Bracelet that had been buried with me.

After an argument with Zhou Mingyu, I jumped from the thirtieth floor with my five-month-old daughter in my arms.

When I opened my eyes again, time had actually returned to yesterday.

On this day, because the baby wouldn’t stop crying, Zhou Mingyu snapped at me for the first time: “Chen Ran, you don’t have a mother yourself, so it’s no wonder you don’t even know how to take care of a child!”

Our relationship had always been good, so I thought he hadn’t meant it; I blamed it on my own volatile temper and for taking things too hard.

But time continued to flow backward, and I discovered that this wasn’t the first time Zhou Mingyu had said such things: During my postpartum recovery month, he joked, “If your mother were still alive, my mother wouldn’t be so exhausted.”

On the day I was hospitalized to give birth, in response to the nurse’s questions, he said with a smile, “Her mother passed away, so who else could be her caregiver but me?”

At our wedding, he held my hand and vowed, “Chen Ran, I will definitely take good care of you in your mother’s stead!”

… It turned out he had always cared about the fact that I didn’t have a mother.

But the strange thing was, why didn’t I have any memory of my mother at all?

Had she ever truly existed?

If time continued to flow backward, would I eventually see her?

I spent ten years in the imperial harem testing rouge, and not once did I fail to detect a single trace of poison.

That was until Consort Hua dropped dead after applying the “Drunken Beauty Red” I had personally verified.

It was then that a newly arrived talented lady told me: what truly kills isn’t the rouge, but the intent to murder.

While I was offering prayers to Buddha on the mountain, a young gentleman suddenly intruded upon my solitude.

He apologized, his face flushing a deep crimson.

Yet, I heard his inner thoughts: [I have heard the Princess is kind and benevolent; I wonder if she will blame me.]

[I only ended up in the wrong place because I was trying to escape my eldest brother’s schemes.]

[How should I apologize to make the Princess happy?]

He did not know that I had experienced a dream.

In that dream, I followed the guidance of his inner voice to investigate his claims, only to walk step by step toward a dead end.

In the end, my Imperial Father grew to loathe me, my eldest brother was deposed, and I was drowned in a pond.

Only after my death did I learn that this young gentleman could choose who heard his heart’s voice.

It was by relying on this trick alone that he rose from being an Outer Chamber Son to the legitimate second son of a Marquis’s manor.

Now. I looked at the fair-skinned, red-lipped young gentleman before me, who appeared shy and timid.

I gave him a gentle smile. “Someone, come. For trespassing in the Forbidden Courtyard, give him thirty strokes of the cane.”

My husband jumped from a building and died in a pool of blood.

The police quickly cordoned off the scene.

A few days later, the autopsy report came back: the cause of death was a massive intracranial hemorrhage, and his body bore numerous signs of a struggle.

The police told me he had committed suicide and that there was no killer. I didn’t believe them.