Short Story

After being selected by the Horror Game, I took over a snack stall at the village entrance.

An Eerie opened its bloody maw to take a bite out of me, but I reached back and stuffed a meat-filled Mo into its mouth.

He chewed thoughtfully. “Forget it,” he muttered. “Since there’s Mo to eat, I’ll kill you tomorrow instead.”

The next day, it was fresh, fragrant wontons, stir-fried snails with perilla, peppery pork tripe soup, fried skewers, and spicy Malatang…

Every Eerie that passed by abandoned their hunt, burying their faces in the food and eating like possessed creatures.

The viewers in the Live Stream watched in shock as I survived until the very end, all thanks to a single cooking pot.

On my third day working as an NPC cashier in a Horror Game, the supermarket was ransacked by players.

They stormed in, smashing and looting everything in sight while gloating triumphantly.

“I told you the owner of this place was a loser. She has zero combat capability.”

“Take whatever you want, everyone. Just kill the boss once we’re done.”

My mouth was gagged, and I shook my head in sheer terror.

A player sneered, “Begging for mercy? It’s useless.”

That wasn’t it at all!

I was trying to tell them that today is NPC Internal Purchase Day.

In three minutes, every BOSS in the game will be swarming this place for the sale!

I’m the daughter of the heroine in an angsty novel.

When I was four, I finally understood those strange bullet comments:

[The heroine is still desperately staying up late, working to make money and support her daughter. She has no idea she already has cancer. If this drags on, her child is going to lose her mother!]

[If either the male lead or the female lead had just spoken up, there wouldn’t have been a “running away while pregnant” plot at all.]

[Their daughter is the real pitiful one. Her mother dies when she’s only six. The male lead never even learns the heroine died after giving birth to his daughter, and he spends the rest of his life alone.]

[And the most miserable one is our Xiao Bao. She obviously has a rich dad, yet she still gets sent to the orphanage…]

Mom was going to die?

I stared at my gentle, beautiful mother in shock. No way!

They may not speak up, but I do!

On a warm afternoon, outside an office building, I spotted a man in a sharp suit and threw my arms around his leg.

“Dad, send money! I need to save Mom!”

When my elder sister was preparing to marry Marquis Ding’an,

she caught the eye of the Crown Prince.

Our entire family was overjoyed.

To give the marquis’s household an explanation, they pushed me out in her place on the day of the wedding.

After we were married, Marquis Ding’an despised me.

Again and again, he mocked me to my face:

“Crude and vulgar. You don’t compare to your sister in the slightest.”

“You can’t even read an account book. Astonishingly stupid.”

I felt wronged too. I smashed my rouge and powder at him and cursed,

“My sister is the Crown Princess now. If you’re so capable, go steal her back, you coward!”

And so we spent our entire lives at each other’s throats.

When I opened my eyes again, I had returned to when I was sixteen and not yet married.

My elder sister looked at me with smiling eyes and coaxed,

“Little sister, would you like to marry into the marquis’s household and become the Marchioness?”

After wandering the mortal world for more than six hundred years, I hear that a once-in-a-century sword prodigy has appeared.

The young man has also found a dragon that sounds remarkably like the one I lost long ago.

Cultivators from across the realm flock to the mountain, some to seek the dragon and the Dao, others to kill and seize treasure.

I am different.

After a long, dusty journey to the Sword Sect, all I want is to set up a little stall at the foot of the mountain and sell wontons.

While I lay unconscious after giving birth, my husband’s cousin swapped her daughter for mine.

The moment she fell asleep, I switched them back.

From then on, she tormented her own daughter every day while lavishing all her love on mine.

I watched with tears in my eyes—what a tragedy.

Served her right.

After my enemy tortured me to death, the crown prince went mad.

He avenged me, then shaved his head and became a monk for my sake.

The whole country cursed me as a temptress who had brought ruin upon the realm.

But I didn’t even know him!

I am the empress of six different countries.

It’s hilarious, really. Since I’m so neglected, no one has even realized I’m just working part-time.

So, I took on a seventh.

Little did I know, this emperor wants to unify the world.

Me: “There are seven of you. Why are you the only one being such a handful?”

In my previous life, before my elder sister entered the palace to become empress, she bent her head to tell me, “Ah Ting, when I’m gone, you must take care of yourself.”

I promised her through my tears.

Five years later, the empress fell out of favor.

Her enemies had her raped, and that night she hanged herself.

The emperor decreed that the deposed empress of the Meng family was without virtue.

No one in the capital was permitted to wear mourning white.

I went to beg forgiveness on behalf of the Meng family.

Struck by my beauty, His Majesty took me into the palace, where I became the most favored woman in his harem.

The day I dragged him into the flames to die with me, he closed his hands around my throat in a rage.

“I have treated your family well!

For your sake, I even overlooked that defiled, deposed empress!”

I let the fire climb over me as though I could feel nothing.

“I didn’t.”

When I woke again, it was the day my sister entered the palace.

She stroked my head, then turned toward the palace that devoured people.

I stripped off my fine clothes and jewelry, then turned toward the bloodshed of an army camp.

Let us see whether that imperial bastard would still dare call her “deposed empress” when I surrounded his palace with my army.

My husband is very rich, but I don’t love him.

In university, he once used every trick in the book to pursue my roommate Jiang Sizhu. He sent luxury gifts one after another, and even made a grand gesture by sending nine thousand roses downstairs from the girls’ dormitory. All the girls in our dorm benefited; we carried armloads of roses back to our rooms, as if we were moving a flower bed. Only Jiang Sizhu remained indifferent. She even warned Pei Lu not to come looking for her again.

“He’s very rich and not bad-looking. You really don’t want him?”

I had a face mask on and finally asked the question I could never understand.

With such a beautiful face, she spent every day hanging around that senior who worked odd jobs everywhere.

“No way, a stuffy old bore like him? If you’re so interested, go after him yourself,” Jiang Sizhu said with disdain.

I rested my chin on my hand, thought for a moment, then nodded.

“Fine.”

“I’ll go after him.”