Short Story

Ever since I was little, I had been slow and lacking in wit, while Elder Sister was extraordinarily gifted.

At a poetry gathering held at Marquis Manor, she was afraid I would embarrass myself, so in private, she composed a poem for me.

None of us expected that the true purpose of the gathering was to choose a wife for the Second Young Master of Marquis Manor. And the poem she wrote for me was the very one that caught the Second Young Master’s eye.

Later, I married into Marquis Manor.

After the wedding, Pei You discovered just how dull and ignorant I truly was.

Only then did he realize I was not the person who had written that poem that day.

Pei You resented me, blamed me, despised me.

He said his wife should not be someone like me, a woman with nothing but a pretty face and not a drop of learning inside her.

Whenever we were intimate, he would lean close to my ear and mock me, saying I had none of the dignified bearing of a proper main wife, only a body full of vixenish allure that was of some small use in bed.

I was terrified.

So when I returned to the day of that poetry gathering, I stopped Elder Sister before she could write a poem for me. My voice trembled as I said,

“Thank you, Elder Sister, but there is no need.”

The Sect Cannot Disband Today I was toiling away in the Accounts Office until the hour of the rat when a crisp notification suddenly rang out overhead.

“Ding! Detecting the imminent and simultaneous start of ‘The Stand-in Junior Sister’s Bitter Love,’ ‘The Yandere Junior Sister’s Imprisonment,’ ‘The Amnesiac Junior Sister’s Wife-Chasing Anguish Arc,’ and ‘The Salted Fish Junior Sister’s Flat Life.’

If no intervention occurs, the Guiyuan Sect will suffer a total collapse of its reputation due to a series of Love-Struck Mind incidents in three hundred days.

Its assets will be liquidated, and it will officially go bankrupt.” I looked down at the bright red debt of 1.03 million High-grade Spirit Stones recorded in the ledger.

Closing the book, I seriously wondered for the first time if the Heavenly Dao was specifically out to get me.

On the day my elder sister died of illness, I took my nephew to the Marquis’s Mansion to claim kinship.

The Second Young Master of the Marquis’s Mansion was in the middle of his wedding, and the place was bustling with celebration.

When the Marchioness saw the jade pendant I brought out, she nearly fainted.

She hid behind a screen and, suppressing her anger, said, “If the Chancellor’s Daughter finds out about the evil deed he committed, this marriage will be ruined!”

An old nanny offered her advice in a low voice.

“Madam, don’t panic. Back then, the Second Young Master said that woman had been drugged and never saw his face clearly.

“It was only because he left in such a hurry that he dropped this family heirloom jade pendant and gave someone leverage over him.

“Since this woman has come looking for us, we can simply pin the whole matter on the Eldest Young Master.”

I had possessed astonishingly sharp hearing since childhood, so I heard every word of their little conspiracy.

In truth, whether it was the Eldest Young Master or the Second Young Master made no difference to me.

It did not matter who became my husband.

What mattered was that my nephew would have a good place to study.

The Marquis Manor Clan School had a great scholar of the current dynasty presiding over it.

It would not waste his natural gifts.

My father was famous throughout the surrounding villages for being a good man.

One freezing winter during a famine, he gave the last of our rice to a mother and child passing by.

After they left, they told everyone they met that my family still had grain.

The starving refugees, driven mad by hunger, came to our door to steal it, only to find an empty rice jar.

Humiliated and enraged, they forced my three-year-old sister into their arms and carried her away.

“If there’s no rice, then your daughter will do!”

I ran after them. In the end, all I found in the ruined temple was my sister’s mangled remains.

When I returned home, my father wailed through his tears, “I was trying to save people! It’s not my fault… That was just her fate!”

He saved someone else. In the end, my sister died, and I died too, in the bitter winter when I was fifteen.

When I opened my eyes again, I saw my father handing the freshly cooked rice to that mother and child.

I picked up the flower hoe beside me and stepped up behind him.

The Noble Consort was the most clearheaded woman I had ever met.

Even though His Majesty showered her with endless, singular favor, she always guarded her heart and refused to give it away.

I thought that if things went on like this, she would eventually be moved by His Majesty and meet him with sincerity in return.

Unfortunately, I never got to see that day.

Because His Majesty found someone else to cherish. He came to the Noble Consort for advice, asking her to help him win over the young woman he adored.

He said, “I have never liked a girl this much before. What do you think of me marrying her and making her Empress?”

I transmigrated into the ruined white moonlight, and the crown prince humiliated me for the female lead.

“Take off one piece, and I’ll give you one million.”

I thought it over for a few seconds.

Then I promptly took off my dress.

Back when I drove heavy-duty trucks, I was often the one to lead the way down new, untested routes. In the industry, we call this “Chong Sha.”

Only after I had successfully passed through would other drivers dare to follow.

Afterward, I’d receive a fair share of red envelopes as a token of gratitude.

People always ask me, “Didn’t you ever see anything strange while you were doing a Chong Sha?” I thought about it for a moment. “Nothing much.

Just people constantly trying to flag down the truck in the middle of the night, scammers frequently collapsing in the center of the road to stage accidents, and the occasional cluster of identical villages appearing one after another along the highway…”

In my first few years driving rigs, my master used to tell me that the main road could hold back evil.

So unless you absolutely had to, you should never leave the proper road, and you should never pay any attention to the “things” that stood outside the guardrails.

Lately, though, whenever I’m out on the road, I keep seeing my childhood friend-the one who’s already dead.

At first, he only stood beyond the guardrail, one leg raised stiffly.

But little by little, he managed to get that leg up onto the rail. Now half his body is leaning out over the highway.

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.”

In the tenth year after I married Pei Yan, he made my legitimate elder sister his empress.

Then he ordered me to feed a gu with my own body to cure her poison.

“Yuanyuan, it is only a Forget-Sorrow Gu. Wouldn’t it be nice to forget all your worries?”

It did sound nice.

So, right in front of him, I swallowed that Forget-Sorrow Gu. Just as he wished, I began to “forget sorrow.”

I forgot how he had demoted me from wife to concubine.

I forgot the bowl of abortifacient medicine he had bestowed upon me.

I forgot that I had once loved him more than life itself.

Later, bewildered, I asked my maid,

“His Majesty is so strange.

“I smiled at him, didn’t I? So why was he still crying?”