Short Story

Marquis Dingbei, Lu Chenzhou, had three wishes in life. First, a smooth career in court. Second, a prosperous household. Third, to marry the woman he loved. The first two were within easy reach. Only the third remained beyond him-unattainable, forbidden, inescapable. They said another man’s wife was not to be taken. But what if that woman was the wife he had divorced in his previous life?

While the concubines of the harem fought for favor, the Empress was wondering when the emperor would finally die.

The emperor and I had been married since our youth, but ours was a match arranged without either of us having any say.

After all these years, we had only ever treated each other with distant courtesy.

And as my son grew older by the day, I found myself hoping more and more that His Majesty might depart this world sooner rather than later-if only so all my years of diligently managing his harem would not have been in vain.

I woke up in my arch-rival’s bed.

His clothes were in disarray, his body was covered in red marks, and his eyes were clouded with the lingering haze of intimacy.

Shocked and enraged, I pointed at him and yelled, “Traitorous Chancellor, how dare you defile me-”

“This Chancellor has fulfilled every custom from the three letters to the six rites. Why would I not dare?” he countered calmly.

“Nonsense!” My eyes widened. “When did I ever marry you?”

“Not long ago,” he said, his long eyes narrowing as he looked at me, “while you were suffering from amnesia.”

I transmigrated into a world of horror, and by accident, I stole and ate the Bodhisattva’s offerings.

But the Bodhisattva did not blame me. Instead, They told me to leave that place and never come back.

After I became an adult, a huge sum of money inexplicably appeared in my account.

Someone told me I must not accept it.

Because in another world, someone was making offerings to the dead-me.

Half skeptical and half convinced, I took the money.

But that night, I heard the Bodhisattva’s whisper again.

“Run…”

“The thing from that world…”

“It has found you.”

I was a female scripture teacher who recited sutras for the madam of the household.

Yet in the middle of the night, someone cornered me behind the incense-draped curtains and asked me who was better-looking: him or the Bodhisattva.

That night, I did not choose the Bodhisattva.

Unfortunately, after barely three months, he came to bid me farewell.

I thought he had simply grown tired of me, so I agreed without fuss.

From then on, he lived beneath the glow of red lanterns, lost in endless pleasure, while I returned alone to the ancient Buddha and my solitary lamp.

Who would have thought that later, when he learned I had been drowned in a pond… He went mad.

A beautiful woman came into my shop one night to have her phone repaired.

With practiced ease, I installed screen-spying software on her phone.

After she left, I opened the monitoring terminal.

Everything happening on the woman’s phone appeared before my eyes in real time.

That thrill of peeping into someone else’s screen had me completely hooked.

Until late that night…

I saw something that made my blood run cold.

The Han army captured Luoyang. My husband, His Majesty himself, knelt at the rebels’ feet, trembling like a lamb waiting for slaughter.

“The Empress is in Jiaofang Hall. Please, don’t kill me…”

I had been married to him for five years and had given birth to our daughter, Princess Heqing.

Yet at the moment of crisis, he offered me up without the slightest hesitation.

When the village held funerals, it had a custom called “Ox-Cutting.”

Each member of the bereaved family would take a blade in the mourning hall and hack a live ox to death as an offering to the departed.

A friend brought me along to watch the ritual.

I never imagined that when I woke up, I would have become that “ox.”

The villagers closed in around me with knives in hand.

But what they didn’t know was that I was the sole Earth Master successor.

Just now, I found the note my fiancé had saved me under in his phone.

“Top-tier A-grade knockoff.”

Those four words were enough to make my blood run cold.

No wonder he always said I looked so much like my older sister.

Turns out he’d been harboring those kinds of thoughts all along.

I couldn’t accept it. I immediately packed up my things and was about to leave, only to run straight into his gorgeous twenty-year-old younger brother-and in that instant, I changed my mind.

“At least I’m an A-grade knockoff. Look at you-you’re at most your brother’s 9.9-yuan free-shipping bargain-bin version.”

I was the famous beauty for miles around.

Oval face, shapely figure, hardworking. Suitors came asking for my hand from one end of the village to the other.

After weighing my options again and again, I chose Shen Jingzhi.

He was the only scholar in the several villages near us, with clean, handsome features, a gentle way of speaking, and a scholarly air no one else had.

My parents said he had a bright future ahead of him.

If I married him, maybe I’d even end up a government official’s wife someday.

They were only half right. Shen Jingzhi did indeed earn an excellent ranking later on.

But he was also unexpectedly taken back by the General’s Mansion and, in the blink of an eye, turned into a young master from a powerful family.

He didn’t want anything to do with his past anymore.

Neither I nor my mother-in-law was wanted anymore.