Short Story

After my rebirth, that wayward young man whose fleeting impulse for fun had destroyed my family had already turned over a new leaf and redeemed himself. He was engaged to his childhood sweetheart and had become a young entrepreneur admired by all.

So I did everything in my power to marry him.

I’m the Sea Queen, and I’m all about living in the moment. (“Sea Queen” refers to a playful woman who has many boyfriends and enjoys a carefree lifestyle.)

Body and mind-I never shortchange myself.

One boyfriend isn’t enough; if one won’t do, I’ll make it two.

On a luxury cruise, I ran into true love again.

But even a Sea Queen can misjudge people. I realized I’d been scammed.

After seeing through the con, I thought I’d make it through the trip safe and sound.

I never expected a far bigger plot-one that would tear me to pieces.

Along the way, the killer gave me ten chances to save myself.

By the time I understood what was happening, there was only one left.

I picked up my boyfriend’s phone by mistake, only to see a message his ex had just sent: “I forgot to take the morning-after pill that night.”

Those few short words left me chilled to the bone.

The night before last, I had a sudden bout of acute gastroenteritis. He was supposedly working overtime at the office, and I called him over a dozen times, but I couldn’t get through.

Enduring the piercing pain, I eventually took a taxi to the hospital alone at three in the morning.

As it turns out, the reason his phone was off and he never came home that night was that he was with his ex-girlfriend.

Three years after Lin Wan’s death, I found the record of her seven years of love for me tucked away in an old cardboard box.

The last page still carried the smell of medicine, where she asked if, in the next life, I could be the one to love her first. That night, I finally understood that the cruelest thing I had ever done was to let someone waste away to death without ever once looking back at her.

The first thing Lu Xiangzhi did after becoming the top scorer in the imperial examination was divorce his wife.

“The Shen family woman is virtuous enough, but far too dull.”

He married a woman from a brothel, while I remarried a spoiled heir.

Lu Xiangzhi believed I had only married that ignorant, good-for-nothing dandy out of spite.

He thought a Shen family woman valued wifely virtue above all else, while that dandy was too unruly to be managed.

It would not be long, he assumed, before the man grew tired of a dull woman like me.

He waited half a year, yet never heard that I had been cast aside.

When Lu Xiangzhi finally could not resist coming to see me, I was holding a discipline ruler and tapping my dandy husband’s head with it, rather helplessly saying, “The teacher explained it three times. You still don’t understand?”

My dandy husband wrapped an arm around my waist and grinned like a shameless rogue.

“I don’t. I want a kiss.”

I was livestreaming in the Dormitory when viewers noticed that the Ceiling was leaking.

Everyone urged me to call a School Worker to fix it, but there was one Danmaku that said:

“This Dormitory is a Coffin Room. No one who lives here can leave alive.”

After overwork kills her in modern China, Zhang Yinhe is reborn as an abandoned infant in an ancient dynasty—and learns before she can even speak that freedom will never be given to her.

Sold into slavery, exchanged for profit, and repeatedly treated as someone else’s property, she survives every household, prison convoy, raider camp, and pleasure house with sharp instincts, shameless nerve, and the hard-earned skills of a former office worker.

Her fight for independence entangles her with Gu Zheng, a disgraced young master hiding a general’s true identity, and Anyang Ge, the quiet herdsman who once offered her a gentler life, but neither affection nor safety can tempt her back into a cage.

Armed with a false beard, a belt of pearls, and knowledge from a later age, Zhang Yinhe crosses war-torn borders in search of drought-resistant seeds and a future built on her own terms—even if Gu Zheng must first learn that love begins with an equal choice.

It has been three years since I transmigrated into this brothel.

I have mastered the arts of seduction, and no one knows better than I how to make a man lose his very soul in ecstasy.

But then, I overheard a group of new girls gossiping.

“It’s hilarious. Our Flower Queen really thinks she’s living in ancient times.”

“A refined Female Doctor, tricked into working as a whore for three years. These rich people really know how to have a good time.”

“Do you think she’d go insane if she found out this was all orchestrated by her ‘Young Marquis’?”

“Shh! Every actor who comes in here has signed a life-and-death waiver. Who would dare let her know?”

I froze in place, as if plunged into a pit of ice.

Could it be that these three years of transmigration were nothing more than a scam?

Before I could regain my composure, the Young Marquis’s cold voice suddenly rang out from behind me.

“Fudong, what are you doing here?”

In 2016, I was working as a security guard in a residential complex.

A homeowner’s ten-year-old daughter vanished from her bedroom under bizarre circumstances.

On the rumpled bedsheets, all that remained was a pair of bloodstained underwear.

The police and all of us searched for her with everything we had, but we found no leads at all.

Then I remembered a fairy tale the girl had once told us about when she was playing in the complex.

It was called the “Tooth Fairy.” Years later, I got married and had a child of my own.

When my kid reached the age of losing baby teeth, my wife told her a bedtime story.

And once again, I heard the words “Tooth Fairy.” Startled, I asked, “Is that how the story goes?”

“Yeah.”

That night, after lying awake until dawn, I contacted the officer who had been in charge of the case back then.

“We were wrong all those years ago.”

I was the daughter of Princess Changning and a peasant from the countryside.

When I was seven, the Empress Dowager bestowed a name on me.

She said my very birth was a grievous wrong, and named me Luoyuan.

For years I lived in the palace, fearful and ashamed, keeping both myself and my heart imprisoned.

But someone told me I should be a bird with its wings spread against the sky, free to soar.

And so, in the end, I found the courage to be brave—for myself, and for him.