Short Story

After I died, my boyfriend’s grief moved God.

God gave me a chance to be reborn, sending me back to my boyfriend in a stranger’s face.

If he fell in love with me again, I could come back to life.

But when I returned to him, he already had a new girlfriend.

“My youngest uncle is Yin Boyu. You’ve heard of him, right?”

My blind date asked the question with a hint of contempt.

“I have.”

“He’s only a few years older than me, but he’s already the one in charge of the family company.”

“Impressive.”

“My uncle really is impressive. Handsome, loaded, the whole package. Too bad he’s so cold. He’s almost thirty, and there’s still not a single woman by his side.”

Is that so? I took a sip of my milk tea and didn’t tell him.

My divorce certificate with Yin Boyu was tucked away in my drawer.

In the third year of my marriage to my childhood sweetheart,

I happened to stumble across an old post he’d written.

In it, he talked about being forced to part from the person he truly loved, and how he had “no choice” but to marry the girl-next-door childhood friend.

And I just so happened to be that childhood friend in his story.

In his tragic little romance, I was the obstacle standing between the male and female leads.

The Prince Consort’s carriage plummeted over the cliff. Even in his unconscious state, he still gripped his childhood sweetheart’s hand tightly, refusing to let go.

I replaced the doctor meant to save him with a Taoist priest who could bind souls, sealing his spirit within a jade pendant. I want him to see it with his own eyes.

I want him to see that the childhood sweetheart he yearns for is nothing but a fickle, unfaithful woman.

That the sister he protected with all his heart is a cold-blooded, ungrateful soul.

That the mother he respects and loves is a person who would abandon all honor for the sake of profit. Only this is the punishment he truly deserves.

Everyone knows I am merely a stand-in for the Northern Liang Crown Prince’s true love.

To coax a smile from him, I would don his beloved’s favorite dancing silks and dance until my feet were raw with bloody blisters.

To shield him from harm, I would take an assassin’s blade without a second thought.

The Crown Prince once remarked, “In the bedchamber, she at least has some use.”

The people sneered at me: “How shameless, doing anything just to claw her way to the title of Crown Princess.”

I remained silent, as I always have.

Because-

The Crown Prince? He is a substitute, too.

The year I graduated from high school, I rejected Gu Cong’s confession in front of the entire school.

I told him I already had a boyfriend.

He nodded politely and turned to leave.

At four o’clock the next morning, he boarded a plane to study abroad.

As for me, I continued my routine, heading out before dawn to snag a spot for my breakfast stall.

Eight years later.

Clutching my last seven thousand yuan, I boarded a train to the Capital with my gravely ill daughter in my arms.

After reviewing her medical records, the doctor shook his head.

“There’s probably only one doctor in the entire Capital who can perform this surgery.

“He’s a specialist who just returned from abroad. He once performed a successful operation on a patient with a condition very similar to your daughter’s.”

As he spoke, he called out to the man behind me with pleasant surprise.

“Let me introduce you. This is the man I was talking about-Gu Cong, Dr. Gu.”

The day I was escorted onto the Sacrificial Altar, Emperor Pei Yuheng personally pressed his seal onto the list of my crimes.

The entire court decried me as a Nation-Wrecker Sorceress, yet only I knew that his life was something I had reclaimed from the King of Hell, one blade-stroke at a time.

However, every time I saved him, he would forget a little more of me.

By the end, he couldn’t even remember the lantern he once held when he promised to marry me.

On the day the Crown Prince was deposed, I left the Eastern Palace with the palace servants, a bundle on my back.

When we reached a deserted place, the Crown Prince caught my hand. “Come with me. I can protect you.”

Tears shimmered in my eyes. “No. This servant will shave her head and become a nun, to pray for Your Highness’s blessings.”

With that, under his reluctant gaze, I walked into the nunnery.

Of course I couldn’t go with him. He was the male lead, and I was the vicious supporting villainess.

In the original plot, I was supposed to follow him and suffer every hardship at his side. But then he would fall in love with a time-traveling woman, reclaim the throne, and make her Empress.

As for me, I would have to fight that time-traveling woman in the palace, then die a miserable death in the end.

Ugh, please.

I did like the Crown Prince, but my motives weren’t exactly pure. More than anything, I wanted wealth and glory.

Since I already knew how it ended, there was no way I was going to suffer with him.

Luckily, I hadn’t awakened too late. I had already built up quite a fortune.

Five years later, after my first husband died and I was just preparing to marry my second, the Crown Prince appeared before me with a cold, shadowed face.

He gripped my hand with crushing force and said through gritted teeth, “Didn’t you say you were becoming a nun?”

The Emperor’s beloved Noble Consort, his one true love, was dead.

His one true love?

It was almost laughable.

And yet, the rumor had spread throughout all of Dayan.

I had been with my boyfriend for three years.

During that time, I discovered that his handle on every social media platform was July.

I assumed he simply had a deep-seated love for the romantic month of July, so I never pried into it.

It wasn’t until our wedding day, when his ex-girlfriend sent a gift, that I saw the name signed on the box-

Qi Yue.

In that moment, I finally understood. It wasn’t the month of July he cherished; it was Qi Yue.

My heart sank into an abyss…