Psychological

My son was being pestered by another boy.

The teacher called and asked me to come to the school.

When I arrived, he shouted at me for the first time. “Mom, what’s wrong with me liking boys?”

I looked at him, feeling neither anger nor resentment.

I crouched down and asked him in a low voice, “Then how can you be sure that you like boys?”

Elder Sister was a physician.

After she treated the Noble Consort, the Emperor praised her for having a “miraculous touch.”

Consumed by jealousy, the Noble Consort had Elder Sister’s hands severed.

She smiled and said, “I hear Doctor Song’s medical skills are peerless. In that case, heal your own stumps.”

She denied Elder Sister water and medicine, watching as she slowly succumbed to the agonizing pain.

Six years later, the Noble Consort contracted a strange illness that left her wishing for death.

I stepped forward and reported, “There is one person in this world who can cure this ailment.”

Hope flared in the Noble Consort’s eyes. “Bring this divine physician here at once! I will pay any price!”

I shook my head with regret. “Six years ago, Your Ladyship killed her with your own hands.”

This was the seventeenth time I’d run into my roommate Cheng Yuming’s girlfriend on my way downstairs.

As was her habit, she pulled a plump orange from her bag and offered it to me, her eyes curving into a gentle, sweet smile.

I didn’t take it. I simply called her name. “Jiang Tingyu.”

“Yes?”

“Try a different fruit,” I said, my voice flat. “Oranges cause too much internal heat.”

When Princess Huaying catches a lowly musician wearing her ceremonial robes, mysterious floating comments reveal that she is meant to be the vicious supporting villainess in someone else’s triumphant love story.

Refusing the fate of disgrace, exile, and death assigned to her, Huaying turns every trap against the scheming Prince of Qi and follows a buried imperial secret to the heart of a decades-old succession struggle.

Yet when rebellion finally erupts, Huaying discovers that her cleverest ally may be her formidable mother—and that surviving the story requires more than defeating its supposed heroine.

From a very young age, I knew I was a Villainess Supporting Character.

I knew because of a strange palace maid by my side named Sui’an. Sometimes, she would stare blankly at the top of my head as if there were words written there.

Later, after spending enough time with her, I managed to piece together the truth from countless minor details: There really were words floating above my head, and those words were: Villainess Supporting Character.

I am the most ill-fated princess in history.

Widowed young, my homeland was invaded, I was carried off to a foreign land, and after suffering endless humiliation, I died at the age of twenty.

When I woke up, I thanked heaven it had only been a dream.

But then my maid told me that Father Emperor had betrothed me to the doomed Cheng Su.

In an instant, dream and reality overlapped…

Thinking of Cheng Su’s beautiful face, I steeled myself and made my decision.

“Tell Father Emperor I refuse this marriage!”

Father Emperor is a transmigrator, and I have been able to hear his inner thoughts since the moment I was born.

[Huh, so this is the future villainess? She’s so soft and adorable; how did she end up turning out so wrong? No, I have to protect her. My daughter can only be the lead heroine.]

In the beginning, that was exactly what he did. He taught me self-respect and self-love, told me not to depend on men, and said that girls could hold up half the sky.

But later, things changed. He looked at me with eyes full of loathing, claiming I didn’t have a shred of the decorum expected of a young lady, and forced me to kneel in the Buddhist hall to copy Buddhist scriptures. And I could no longer hear his inner thoughts.

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 cousin’s parents passed away, so my Imperial Mother brought her into the palace to live with us.

From then on, she enjoyed the favor of my parents, the protection of my elder brother, and the devotion of my younger brother.

Even my fiancé praised her for being exceptionally gifted and refined.

There was only one exception. His heart and eyes were filled only with me, never swayed by any outsider.

I married beneath my station to become his wife, and for a time, we lived a life of joy and freedom.

But later, he died-stabbed countless times before being hurled off a cliff.

During the year we fled the war, my mother saved a Princess Consort during labor, ensuring that both mother and daughter survived.

However, the barbarians arrived.

My mother told the Princess Consort to take us and flee first, while she stayed behind, sword in hand, to hold back the enemy.

With a single blade, she cut down countless foes, but in the end, she was simply outnumbered.

After her capture, she sought only the release of death.

Instead, they dislocated her arms and tore at her clothes, exposing her snow-white skin…

The Princess Consort and I were saved. However, the Princess Consort broke her word. She did not treat me like her own daughter.

Instead, she loathed my mother, claiming she had been rendered filthy and defiled by the barbarians.

Because of this, she made me her daughter’s personal maid.