Short Story

While I was offering prayers to Buddha on the mountain, a young gentleman suddenly intruded upon my solitude.

He apologized, his face flushing a deep crimson.

Yet, I heard his inner thoughts: [I have heard the Princess is kind and benevolent; I wonder if she will blame me.]

[I only ended up in the wrong place because I was trying to escape my eldest brother’s schemes.]

[How should I apologize to make the Princess happy?]

He did not know that I had experienced a dream.

In that dream, I followed the guidance of his inner voice to investigate his claims, only to walk step by step toward a dead end.

In the end, my Imperial Father grew to loathe me, my eldest brother was deposed, and I was drowned in a pond.

Only after my death did I learn that this young gentleman could choose who heard his heart’s voice.

It was by relying on this trick alone that he rose from being an Outer Chamber Son to the legitimate second son of a Marquis’s manor.

Now. I looked at the fair-skinned, red-lipped young gentleman before me, who appeared shy and timid.

I gave him a gentle smile. “Someone, come. For trespassing in the Forbidden Courtyard, give him thirty strokes of the cane.”

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.

After fifteen years of marriage, Meng Ye had taken a mistress-a flamboyant young woman he kept on the side.

Cradling her pregnant belly, she stormed into my presence to demand a formal title.

“You’re a fading beauty with one foot in the grave, and you haven’t even produced a son to see you off. What right do you have to cling to the position of Madam?”

Amused, I looked past her at Meng Ye and asked, “Well? You tell her. What right do I have?”

He didn’t dare answer. He knew that if I, a Tiger Woman of a General’s Family, ever lost my temper, his little girl wouldn’t even dare to cry out loud.

From the moment I was born, my Father Emperor could hear my inner thoughts.

[Whoa, so my Father Emperor is actually a brilliant and divine Emperor for the Ages!]

[It’s a pity he has a few stains on his record.]

[First, he’ll act on impulse and execute a great hero who served him well, only to cry afterward and curse others for not stopping him.]

[Then, he’ll execute the Chief Minister of the Court of Judicial Review, brewing a wrongful case that will shock the world for centuries, all while shifting the blame onto his ministers.]

[He’ll praise the Grand Preceptor as a ‘clear mirror’ in public, but after the man dies, he’ll raid his tomb and whip the corpse.]

[And the biggest death wish of all: he clearly loves my Mother Empress so much, yet he insists on making her give birth over and over again. When she eventually dies in childbed, he’ll be holding some other beauty while reminiscing about my mother. What a total scumbag.]

My Father Emperor’s brow twitched again and again. Finally, he couldn’t hold it together anymore.

“Quickly! Go and invite the masters from Huguo Temple!”

I’m a delivery driver.

Just as I used my lightning-fast reflexes to snag a hundred-yuan errand order for a box of condoms, Before I could even gloat for two seconds, I realized with a shock that the delivery address was my boyfriend’s apartment.

I grabbed a meat cleaver and charged into the elevator.

There was another man in the elevator wearing a raincoat, clutching a large sledgehammer in his hand.

Just as I reached out to press the button for my floor, several lines of twisted text suddenly floated before my eyes.

[Is the Cannon Fodder Female Supporting Character coming online already? The male lead’s clingy ex-girlfriend.]

[Holy crap, that’s the Hidden Plot Killer next to her! Is the first act really this intense?]

[She’s about to become the first victim. Once the male lead finds her corpse, he’ll go berserk and take out the Killer to get his revenge.]

[But isn’t the male lead with the official female lead right now?]

[What do you know? A ‘White Moonlight’ only reaches her ultimate power once she’s dead~]

My finger froze in mid-air. The mirror-like surface of the elevator doors reflected the shadow behind me.

The Raincoat Man was silently raising his hammer, the shadow looming over the back of my head.

The very second the wind from the hammer’s swing pressed down on me, I spun around abruptly.

I didn’t swing my blade; instead, I slammed my hand heavily onto his shoulder. “Brother, let’s talk.”

He froze mid-motion. “Can you let me go slaughter that cheating couple first?”

I gripped the handle of my cleaver, gritting my teeth. “Then I’ll come back and let you hit me with that hammer.” “?”

In my previous life, a woman armed with a conquest system won over my parents, my brothers, and my fiance one after another.

They adored her, indulged her, and let everything go her way until she stood at the height of favor.

As for me, everyone despised me.

I was imprisoned in a secluded palace alley for life, forbidden to take even half a step beyond its gates.

Only after I died did I learn that she had come from another world, and that every bit of my suffering fed her luck. Reborn, I traded away a lifetime of love for a single wish.

The Bodhisattva asked me, “What do you want?”

I whispered, “I want everyone she targets to know that she is here only to conquer them.”

And from that moment on, they could all hear her conquest alerts.

I was born cold-blooded.

When my mother died, I stood by her bedside without shedding a single tear.

In the front courtyard, lanterns and streamers were being hung to celebrate my father’s concubine’s birthday.

“Yuntan,” my mother said, “you are just like your father.”

A dying person always carries a certain air of decay.

She stared up at the canopy of her bed and sighed again.

“It is better to be like him… the heartless… always live longer…”

“Do not be like me, trapped in the word ‘love’ for a lifetime. It was a mistake…”

My mother was a loser her entire life.

I never expected that years later, the most reputable and upright gentleman in the capital, Xie Yijue, the Heir to Duke Zhenguo, would come to my door to ask for my hand in marriage.

He had one condition: He wanted to take my younger half-sister, Ji Zhi, into his household alongside me.

I was a child bride, bought by the Song Family for five taels of silver.

But Song Jitong didn’t like me; he preferred the daughter of the family living at the east end of the village.

I originally liked someone as handsome as Song Jitong, but eventually, I simply gave up on those feelings. I planned to repay my debt of gratitude to the Song Family, see Song Jitong off to the capital to become the Top Scholar, and then leave.

However, Song Jitong later appeared with an imperial marriage decree in one hand and my redemption money in the other. In the middle of the night, he cornered me against a wall just as I was trying to sneak away with my bags packed. Gritting his teeth, he hissed, “Jiang Miao’er, don’t you dare try to run away.”

Before I could even answer, this elegant Top Scholar-as refined as iris and orchid-was the first to turn red-eyed, looking just as aggrieved as he did when we were children.

“Elder Sister, please don’t abandon me…”

On the night I was crowned Empress, Lu Yuheng personally handed me a cup of Poisoned Wine. He said that since the Ye Family’s name had been cleared, I should spend one night as a glorious Empress before going to meet my kin with a clean slate. But what he didn’t know was that the most painful wound of my life was never death-it was him.

On her seventieth birthday, Song Xiaotao found an unconscious young man in her vegetable patch. Judging by her years of experience cracking melon seeds and shooting the breeze at the village entrance, this fellow was clearly trouble. Yet, she brought him home anyway. Song Xiaotao had seen off her last living relative ten years ago. Even if he brought a calamity that wiped out her entire household, she was the only one left to go. When the young man came to and saw Song Xiaotao’s wizened face, his vision swam, and he nearly blacked out again. Heavenly Bodhisattva, why was his Love Tribulation partner an old woman?!