Short Story

When we were kids, I told my childhood friend, “I like your best friend, but don’t tell him.”

Then came his best friend’s wedding.

I grabbed my childhood friend by the throat. “Wow, you really can keep a secret.”

He let out a cold scoff. “Say you like him one more time, and I’ll beat your ass.”

I knew nothing of the zither, chess, calligraphy, or painting.

Before I married Yu Huaiqian, the matchmaker asked me what I was good at.

I thought for a long while, then said,

“Picking rice.”

The whole room burst into laughter.

Yu Huaiqian laughed too, but there was no mockery in it.

He said, “Being able to pick rice is quite good. A household still has to eat.”

He was a famously refined young gentleman of the capital.

Everyone thought he should have married that childhood sweetheart of his, the one who could compose lyrics.

But he married me.

After the wedding, we each did our part and supported each other.

I asked him if he ever found me dull.

He placed a chopstickful of greens into my bowl. “Dull is good. I’ve heard enough of all that outside.”

I remembered those words for a very long time.

Until his childhood sweetheart broke off her engagement and returned to the capital.

At the Qushui Banquet, she casually recited a single line from a new lyric.

The wine cup in Yu Huaiqian’s hand froze in midair.

After the banquet ended, he sat in the study and filled an entire page with that one line.

I picked up the paper and looked at him. He immediately reached out to snatch it away.

“Don’t look.”

I asked, “Is it so good that I can’t see it?”

He was silent for a moment, then his voice lowered.

“You wouldn’t understand anyway. Why insist on asking?”

After winning the war, I entered the capital, and the Old Emperor asked what reward I wanted.

I pointed at the handsome man in purple robes and a golden belt standing in the hall. “I beg Your Majesty to grant me a marriage. I am carrying his child, and he promised he would marry me!”

The elderly eunuch beside the emperor hurriedly tried to stop me. “General, mind your words. This is the Second Prince.”

A faint, languid voice sounded behind me. “Whose child are you carrying?

“Isn’t your belly full of roast duck, roast chicken, candied hawthorn, red bean pastries, dried sweet potatoes…”

I turned to look, only to find that the handsome man who had just spoken looked exactly like the Second Prince.

I made a split-second decision and cupped my fists toward His Majesty. “If that one won’t marry me, this one will do!”

The elderly eunuch was beside himself with panic. “My dear ancestor, this is the Crown Prince!”

Xu Man is forced into the Crown Princess Academy with only one goal: get her tuition back and save her ailing father.

When the academy uses rules and money to grind its noble students into submission, she joins forces with her classmates, exposes its corruption through a single ledger, brings the bride-training institution to a halt, and balances the books for women determined to win back their freedom.

Before I married into the Eastern Palace, I secretly kept a man in Jiangnan behind the Crown Prince’s back.

He had broad shoulders, a narrow waist, and worked hard in bed.

His only flaw was that he bragged far too much.

He was plainly a rough country man, yet he spoke of imperial treasures with utter disdain.

He claimed the Cloud-Mist tea reserved for the imperial family tasted like swill and that he used it to feed his cattle.

Rubies worth a fortune, he said, had been nothing but marbles to him as a child.

Even when I decided to leave him, he kept boasting.

Kneeling at my feet with both arms wrapped around my legs, he begged, “Weiwei, don’t go. I’ll make you Crown Princess!”

I rolled my eyes at him. “I have no interest in being Crown Princess.”

He stared at me in shock and muttered, “Weiwei, how are you even better at bragging than I am?”

Later, I married into the Eastern Palace. I heard the Crown Prince had long cherished another woman in his heart.

Though he had lost his memory, he had remained chaste for her.

He told me coldly, “I do not love you. Expect nothing from me.”

I blinked at that familiar face. Even after he crouched down to wash my feet, he still could not make sense of it.

With an adorably baffled look, he asked, “What’s going on? How come I’m so good at taking care of you?”

My father was a professor at a prestigious university, and my mother held a doctorate in literature.

But only my older sister inherited their brilliant genes.

As for me, all I could do was chant “Makka Pakka,” the bitter little gourd their family tree had produced.

When my parents divorced, my sister chose Dad.

“I don’t want a retarded little sister,” she said.

I turned to Mom. “Be happy, Mommy. Makka Pakka!”

Luckily, Mom took my advice: she happily quit her job and started a company.

Years later, Dad nearly drove my genius sister out of her mind.

And I, still Makka-Pakka-ing my way through life, became the daughter of a millionaire.

In college, I once “bought” myself a girlfriend.

If she agreed to be with me, I would cover her family’s medical bills.

Humiliated, the brilliant scholarship student from a poor family stayed with me for four years.

Then my family went bankrupt.

When I broke up with her, she was as cold as ever. She did not ask me to stay—not even once.

Years later, I was serving fruit platters at a karaoke club to pay off my family’s debts. She had become a CEO and was dating the handsome star from our class.

She asked me, “Do you regret it?”

“No.”

“Well, I do.”

Ever since I was little, Mother had told me that the Marchioness was a broad, hulking shrew with the heart of a viper.

Anyone who offended her, she said, would be beaten half to death and locked in a dark room to perish.

Yet on the day we were brought to the marquis’s estate, the woman seated at the head of the main hall looked like a celestial maiden.

Mother sprang forward and hoisted her out of the chair.

“Sitting in the Marchioness’s place? Have you got a death wish?”

In 2016, my younger sister fell into an abandoned mine shaft during a class outing.

It took three days to find her.

But there was something inexplicable about her death.

Her water bottle was still full, yet the autopsy concluded that she had died of thirst.

The sight of her body destroyed my parents. One died; the other lost his mind.

Our once-happy family was torn apart.

Ten years later, I earned a doctorate in criminal psychology.

I returned to that abandoned mine shaft and reconstructed the events of that day over and over again…

And uncovered a horrifying truth that overturned everything I thought I knew.

I accompanied His Highness through three thousand miles of exile, yet after he reclaimed his throne, he found me lowly and loathsome.

Later, when the time came to reward merit in the Golden Luan Hall, I asked only one thing of him.

His Highness assumed I would ask for a title or a place by his side.

Instead, I prostrated myself deeply and spoke softly yet firmly: “I ask that Your Highness grant your subject’s daughter a marriage to General Shen.”

His Highness’s eyes nearly split with rage as he finally understood-

Throughout those three thousand miles of exile, from beginning to end, it was never him that I loved.