Short Story

My Imperial Elder Brother is into men, and my Imperial Elder Sister is into women.

Imperial Father has pinned all his hopes for the empire on me.

I’m trembling-should I tell him that the one I love is a eunuch?

Imperial Father: “Impressive.”

The day my fiancé came to break off our engagement, my mother was so excited that tears streamed down her face.

As it turned out, I was not her biological daughter.

She had adopted me only so I could take the calamity meant for her real daughter.

She said, “Now that the ordeal has been fulfilled, you ought to return to your own family.”

I packed my bundle. There was little I could take with me, which made for easy travel.

My birth mother was waiting by the back gate.

She had a booming voice and had come driving an ox cart-every inch an uncouth peasant woman who knew nothing of proper manners.

Because of her, everyone in the Marquis Manor looked down on me even more.

And yet, the one who would bring me back to the capital in splendor was precisely her.

On the day of my hairpin ceremony, my brother-in-law, tipsy from wine, barged into my room.

That same night, my mouth was gagged and I was taken to the Marquis’s Mansion.

My legitimate elder sister told me she could not bear children and needed to borrow my womb.

A year later, I gave birth to a son.

My legitimate elder sister brought me to the Bamboo Garden, where four old maids covered my mouth and buried me in a pit they had dug long before.

Before I died, I kept wondering what the point had been of someone like me coming into this world.

But I never imagined that I would be dug up again.

The person who found me was small and thin, yet he staggered along with me on his back for ten miles.

He covered me with the only clothing he had and gave me a chance to live.

An old man took me in. From that day on, I changed my name and became someone else.

Five years later, my wonton shop opened in Capital City, and I happened to run into my legitimate elder sister and her family being sold off.

She begged me to save her son.

But I pointed to the young man kneeling off to the side and said, “I’ll only save him.”

While exploring Devil City with the Decoding Science Program Team, I was looking straight into the camera, talking absolute nonsense with a straight face.

“The recent buzz surrounding the Man-eating Snake incidents is all fake. These are just ordinary Sand Snakes.”

The next second, the ground beneath us gave way, and the entire Program Team plummeted into a pit of snakes.

There is no spring in the Sea of No Return.

On the eve of our wedding, Shang Wujiu personally gouged out my Heart Lamp and sealed me within the Sea of No Return.

Three hundred years later, he knelt by the shore, begging me to return.

But he didn’t know that the lamp-the very thing that had extended his life-had long since burned into ash at the bottom of the sea.

I married a man three years my senior, and everyone said he was head over heels for me.

But not long after our wedding, he cheated.

He smoked, he drank, he got into fights, and he even kissed other women right in front of my face.

He did everything I hated most.

Duan Yi took a drag from his cigarette, looking down at me through hooded eyes. “What? Regretting it now?” Clutching the divorce papers in my hand, I took the glowing, red-hot cherry of his cigarette and ground it hard into his palm.

“Duan Yi, you ruined me. You should have died back when you loved me most.”

Duan Yi acted as if he had just heard the funniest joke in the world, his shoulders shaking with laughter. “That actually hurts.”

My Mother was a courtesan, earning money with her own flesh and blood to support my father’s studies and imperial examinations.

Five years later, my father succeeded and was granted marriage to a princess by the Emperor.

Yet, in the Golden Throne Hall, he refused the marriage at the risk of his own life, and with great fanfare, married my Mother with ten miles of red bridal procession.

The princess was displeased.

Three days later, Mother was found abused and disheveled, dying at the entrance of an alley.

Half a year later, the princess finally married my father as she wished.

She did not know that this was the beginning of her misfortune.

After Wei Xuan and I had tormented each other for most of our lives, he finally grew tired.

On his deathbed, he refused even to see me.

He had our children deliver his last words instead.

“In my next life, I would rather be your brother for a lifetime than spend half a life as your resentful husband, with both of us losing the ones we truly love.”

Sure enough, the moment he returned to the past, he rushed to free his childhood sweetheart from prison and showered her with tenderness.

Then he forced his mother to take me as a goddaughter.

Smiling, I accepted the jade pendant and bowed with perfect obedience.

“May all be well with you, Elder Brother.”

His hand faltered, then dropped stiffly to his side.

Before long, we were each betrothed to someone else.

He remained in the capital.

I was bound for Lin’an.

Yet on the day my boat departed, he tore off his wedding robes, leaped into the river with no thought for his life, and clung desperately to the gunwale, begging me to stay.

My wife is the kindest person in the world to me.

I know I should cherish her, but looking at her body, which has been out of shape since she gave birth, I honestly can’t muster a spark of interest.

I ended up keeping a mistress on the side. She’s been pressuring me to get a divorce, but I refuse.

I tell her that my wife loves me too much-that she wouldn’t be able to survive without me.

I’ll stay in this marriage out of pity for her.