Short Story

It took me three thousand years to become an Upper Immortal, and another thousand years to find her reincarnation.

But on the day of our grand wedding, her memories of her past life suddenly awakened.

She held a sword to my throat, claiming that I had personally sealed her within Purgatory for eight hundred years.

During those eight centuries, her soul was scorched by Karmic Fire by day, and she cried out my name by night.

Now that she remembers, her first priority is to make me pay for it in blood.

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.”

The first time I killed someone, the blade was dull.

I was fourteen that year. It was winter, and the north wind whipped against my face with a stinging bite.

Three bandits had scaled the wall of my grandfather’s courtyard, intent on stealing the last half-sack of millet he had hidden in the cellar.

My grandfather was blind. Hearing the commotion, he called out my name: “Shen He, Shen He!” He was using my alias.

My real name is Shen Heyi, and I am a girl. But the bandits didn’t know that, and Grandfather pretended not to know either.

He just kept calling, his voice urgent and hoarse, sounding like an old crow being strangled by the neck.

I fished out that Bone-Cleaver from beneath the stove.

Its edge was curled and nicked, so dull it couldn’t even slice through sheepskin cleanly.

But a human neck is softer than sheepskin.

I didn’t think about that day again for a very long time-not until I met Xie Changgeng.

In the dead of night, I received a phone call. The caller ID showed it was my husband. With a voice of utmost gravity, he told me that I would die at two o’clock in the morning.

But right now, he was clearly lying right beside me, fast asleep.

I am a newly appointed NPC in a horror instance.

On the third night after successfully starting work as a Maid in the Ancient Castle,

I sneaked into the room of the instance Boss with a little tail trailing behind me.

The Vampire Boss, who had been waiting for a long time, had his shirt collar wide open, faintly revealing the metallic sheen of a chain underneath.

I raised my hand to cup his handsome face as he tried to lean in and kiss me, but I only rubbed noses with him affectionately:

“Darling, our secret has been discovered.”

“If you want a reward, you’ll have to deal with those rats first.”

0

My sister is dead. She committed suicide for a man.

When I was sorting through her belongings, I found a pair of handcuffs and some photographs.

In the photos, she was completely naked, her body covered in bruises.

A rush of blood surged through me, my whole body turned cold, and I was instantly overwhelmed by an indescribable terror and confusion.

But I didn’t know yet that the person who started all this had no intention of stopping.

And I was his next target.

Before she died, my closest friend gave me two things.

A piece of skin she had cut from her own body, and her lover.

She asked me to use that skin to make a shadow puppet for the opera…

I think I understood what she meant. She was telling me: Ah Mei, I’m giving you a generous gift. You should return the favor-kill someone for me.

My virginity was sold by my family to a seventy-year-old tycoon for the steep price of one million yuan.

The price was fair, all things considered. After all, I wasn’t just selling my virtue; I was selling my life.

On our wedding night, the old man squeezed my throat and asked, “Do you have any final wishes?”

To stay alive, I told him three stories.

And then, I made a prophecy.

“You will die within my third story.”

I am the sole Earth Master successor. While leading a group of elderly wealthy businessmen to Xiangxi to treat their corpse poison, we were kidnapped and dragged deep into the mountains.

The villagers forced us to work the fields, but they had no idea that after the sun went down, the things that came for us weren’t human at all.

July 14, 2018. My flight was delayed due to weather, and I didn’t land until three in the morning.

As soon as I turned on my phone, I received a call from my senior. He told me to get to Baoshan Hospital immediately. Now!

I asked him what was wrong, telling him to explain himself first.

“Xiaoyu,” he said. “Something happened to Xiaoyu.”

My ears began to ring, and a splitting headache took hold.

That day was the third anniversary of my relationship with Qiu Xiaoyu. If the plane hadn’t been delayed, I would have proposed at midnight.

At four-thirty in the morning, I saw her at the hospital.

She was covered with a white sheet. Her exposed skin was deathly pale, and when I took her hand, it was cold and stiff.

It didn’t feel like Xiaoyu’s hand at all.

But the autopsy report stated it clearly: Qiu Xiaoyu had died in a car accident at 6:10 PM at the intersection of Qinghe Road and Wenshuo Road.

“It was a truck. The driver was exhausted and didn’t slow down before… Li Tong!” My senior suddenly grabbed my hand tightly.

My hand was just about to lift the white cloth covering Xiaoyu’s face.

“Let go,” I said.

“Li Tong, it’s better… if you don’t look.”

Choking back a sob, I repeated, “Let go.”

He stopped blocking me.

I slowly pulled back the sheet.

She was still beautiful, her features soft, just like when she tried to sleep in every morning.

Only, there seemed to be a wound on her neck.

And that wound extended downward. It grew deeper and larger, until her entire body…

Was completely destroyed.

I collapsed to my knees.

It felt as if a knife had been driven through my heart. My eyes stung, but there were no tears, and I couldn’t make a single sound.

“Did you forget our anniversary? You have to make it up to me tomorrow.”

I knew it was an auditory hallucination; those were the words from the WeChat message Xiaoyu had sent me.

The final WeChat message of her life.

Our entire story had somehow ended on such an unremarkable sentence…

Suddenly, my throat tightened, and I retched, vomiting up mouthfuls of bile.