Short Story

Everyone in my family had sickly bones.

My eldest sister coughed three times for every three steps, spat blood every third day, and fainted every fifth.

My brother’s bones broke at a touch—one a month, seven or eight times a year.

I alone had a head of iron and a body of bronze.

I could ram a peach tree with my forehead to bring down the fruit.

The tree shook, the peaches fell, and I was perfectly fine.

When I was seven, an eminent monk passed by.

One look at me, and he blurted out: “Bronze skin over bone.

A demon born.”

I couldn’t be bothered to listen.

I charged him headfirst and knocked him flat on his back.

It took him ages to wake up.

When he did, he laughed instead of getting angry and asked my parents: “Would you have your children live long lives, sound in body and bone?”

“Take one bone each from your eldest daughter and your son.

Nurture them beside your youngest daughter’s heart, then cut them out when she turns eighteen.”

“Your eldest daughter will then rise like the sovereign moon, and your son will be the richest man in the realm.”

My parents trembled.

“And this girl?”

The monk held my wrist, half closed his eyes, and chuckled out a little song: “No future as a human.

As a beast, she’ll have plenty of room to roam.”

My best friend was a top-tier Alpha, but he had a medical condition.

Pheromone overload.

If he didn’t get the excess out of his system, it could kill him.

So I, a Beta, volunteered to be his pheromone storage tank.

I was a Beta, after all.

The scent wouldn’t stay on me for more than a couple of days anyway.

Except that, before long, my best friend was sinking his teeth into my neck every few days.

Wait.

Had his condition really gotten that bad?

Dude!

Keep biting me and people are going to start wondering what we are to each other!

The crown prince married me because I seemed content to ask for nothing.

He made me promise that when my elder sister changed her mind and returned, I would surrender my place as crown princess.

What did he know?

Asking for nothing could be the surest way to gain everything.

After the wedding, I wore myself out in his service, at court and within his household alike.

I even nearly “died” for him several times.

The day my sister returned, I kept our agreement: I took off the crown princess’s robes and handed over the phoenix seal.

He was the one who began to hesitate.

I paid for my fiancé’s journey to the capital to sit the imperial examinations.

He came back with a reward far greater than first place.

During the palace examination, His Majesty saw a face identical to his own.

He confirmed that my fiancé was his long-lost eldest son.

Restored to the imperial family, he was named crown prince.

Naturally, his engagement to me—a mere concubine-born daughter of a seventh-rank county magistrate—could no longer stand.

But he remembered what he owed me.

He took me as his sister.

He even found me another husband: a marquis’s heir.

He himself became engaged to the chief minister’s legitimate daughter, who would be his crown princess.

Everything had worked out for both of us.

Thanks to his protection, I spent five blissful years in my husband’s household.

My mother-in-law dared not subject me to her rules.

My husband dared not entertain other women.

Everyone treated me with respect.

Until, on an afternoon as ordinary as any other, he was deposed.

To break his betrothal to my elder sister and marry me, Lu Jin agreed to three conditions.

First, on her birthday every year, he must personally bring a bouquet of pomegranate blossoms to her residence.

Second, if we ever had a daughter, the child must bear her name.

He agreed to both.

As for the third, my sister said she would name it another day.

After we married, it did bother me that he went to her with flowers year after year.

But he was gentle with me, and we were so deeply in love that I could hardly bring myself to complain.

Besides, whenever I showed the least displeasure, he would say, “Once a promise is given, not ten thousand mountains can stand in its way,” and tell me not to ask again.

What truly stuck in my throat was the way he mentioned my sister every time he called our daughter’s name.

She did not live in our house, yet she was everywhere in it.

At last I could bear no more.

I wept and insisted on changing the child’s name.

Lu Jin merely watched me coldly.

“Have you finished making a scene in front of the child?”

He resented my suspicions and grew steadily more distant.

Then my sister sent word of her third condition: he was to help her divorce her husband and bring her home.

I promptly wrote a divorce agreement of my own.

Lu Jin took it with a weary sigh.

“She’s already given up so much.

What more do you want?”

“If she hadn’t stepped aside, I would never have married you.

Had I known it would come to this, she might as well have refused.”

I was reborn on the day Lu Jin came to ask for my hand.

He handed the betrothal token straight to my sister.

“The eldest Miss Xie alone holds my heart.

I wish to take her as my wife and remain true to her all my life.”

I breathed a sigh of relief.

Before the zombie virus broke out, I could barely lift a thing.

After the apocalypse hit, I was taking out zombies with a single swing.

When that two-faced bitch threatened me, I had one answer: Then we die together.

The day after our wedding, my husband went to the city for work and was killed by a falling billboard.

The CEO of the company responsible came to discuss compensation.

I said I was struggling to make ends meet.

He transferred me three million yuan.

I said I had nowhere to go.

He gave me a luxury apartment.

I said I didn’t want to stay a widow.

He gave me a handsome young man.

The morning after we slept together, he came to see me.

I was about to thank him when his expression changed.

“What is my brother doing here?!”

My father is a black dragon.

My mother is a white dragon.

So my left half is black, and my right half is white.

In my spare time, I cover the left side of my face and cosplay as the White Wuchang, then cover the right side and cosplay as the Black Wuchang.

My parents will never have to worry about me finding a job again.

I was sent into the palace because I wasn’t clever.

Before I left, Mother warned me never to fall for the emperor.

I asked her what falling for someone meant.

“It means seeing him makes you happy.”

Puzzled, I tilted my head and asked: “Happier than eating braised pork?”

“A hundred times happier.”

I immediately thumped my chest and promised I would never fall for anyone as long as I lived.

After all, nothing in the world tasted better than braised pork.

Then one day, the noble consort everyone called arrogant and overbearing smiled and pressed a sweet cake into my hand.

On the night before she joins her boyfriend’s startup, Wen Xiyue receives a call from herself twelve years in the future.

He will become a billionaire, but she will spend those years running his errands and surrendering her own ambitions.

Her future self has one urgent warning: take the developer job instead.

This time, Xiyue chooses her own career—and refuses to let the man who wants her talent steal her future.