Short Story

Seven years into my marriage, I met the woman I wanted to protect for the rest of my life.

She was gentle.

Romantic.

Her smile lit up my stagnant life.

Beside her, my wife seemed so much less.

All she ever talked about was our child and the endless petty details of daily life.

So, on our anniversary, I asked for a divorce.

But the tears, the accusations, the desperate struggle I expected never came.

Her hands merely paused over the food she was preparing.

She turned to me calmly.

“Fine.

I have just one condition.”

“Sell this apartment, and I’ll sign.”

The couple living across from me fought until midnight every single day, while their child wandered around scavenging for trash to eat.

Anyone who dared to give the boy food was met with a barrage of verbal abuse at their doorstep, or even targeted with malicious sexual rumors.

One day, as I was passing through the stairwell, I spotted the boy hiding in a corner, too afraid to look at me. “Hey kid, want something to eat?” I asked.

He claimed he wasn’t hungry, but his stomach was growling like thunder. “Big sister, just leave me alone,” he sobbed. “My mom isn’t a good person.”

I leaned down and looked him in the eye. “Well, neither am I.”

Fu Yanxiu’s younger sister was still growing, his mother lay half-paralyzed on the kang, and he still had to study for the imperial examinations.

For all seven years of our engagement, I worked his family’s fields.

The day he passed the provincial examination, Fu Yanxiu came to break off our engagement, his face grim.

“Sui Zhu, the capital isn’t a place for someone like you,” he said.

When the Sword Venerable stood at the entrance of my Milk Tea Shop, sword in hand, the entire Sect thought he had come to demand an accounting for some grievance.

Only I knew that he just wanted to cut the line again for a cup of full-sugar milk tea with no ice.

But today, even the Demon Realm Young Master, the man destined to trample the Cultivation World underfoot a century from now, was standing behind him, clutching a queue number and waiting for me to call his turn.

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.

I’m a good-for-nothing.

My husband, on the other hand, is a golden boy who has appeared on the cover of a finance magazine twelve times.

Later, he told me all of those covers had been bought and paid for.

Then, claiming he didn’t want to drag me down, he decisively asked for a divorce.

Wait… did I marry into a fake wealthy family?

I transmigrated into a cultivation novel as its vicious supporting woman.

The system told me that if I kept courting death, I could die and go home once my true colors were exposed.

So I devoted myself to making trouble for the heroine.

I seduced the senior brother she loved, poisoned her medicine, and deliberately injured myself in a secret realm so I could accuse her of attacking me…

At last, the day of judgment arrived.

Senior Brother produced the evidence and tore away my hypocritical mask.

The elders sentenced me to endure forty-nine bolts of heavenly lightning, have my immortal bones stripped away, and be cast down as a mortal.

I was overjoyed. My exit scene had finally come.

Then I heard the heroine say, “Senior Sister didn’t mean it.”

I whipped around in shock.

Her cheeks were faintly pink, almost as if she were shy.

“Senior Sister only did all that because she loves me too much.”

“It was her way of testing me.”

When I was thirteen, I traded myself for a bowl of chicken soup. From that moment on, I knew I was born for this life. I used it to trade for one head after another.

I am the pampered little fake heiress who was driven out to the countryside.

To go from the young lady of Marquis Manor to a carpenter’s eldest daughter-there is simply no living like this!

In order to return to the noble circles of Capital City, I set my sights on the scholar next door.

Standing on a ladder, I waved my handkerchief coquettishly over the wall.

“Hey~ I heard you’re my fiancé?”

The man chopping firewood with his upper body bare slowly turned to look at me.

In an indifferent voice, he said, “I am Lin Jiaoyue’s fiancé.”

I was the most envied courtesan in all the capital.

Simply because I bore a seventy-percent resemblance to the Crown Princess, someone threw down a fortune and bought me on the very night I was first listed.

Hugging that heavy pile of silver, I sat in a small sedan chair, both thrilled and anxious.

I secretly made up my mind: even if my patron turned out to be some nasty sixty-year-old geezer, I would still gaze at him with tender affection and kiss him anyway.

As long as I could get my contract of sale and take hold of my own freedom, I could do anything!

But when I saw the prisoner in the cell, soaked with urine and raving like a madman…

I turned around and wanted to leave.

Sorry. I had still overestimated myself!