Short Story

In the tenth year after I was abducted and forced to take part in ability experiments, I finally escaped.

Only to discover that the apocalypse had descended outside, and zombies had broken out everywhere.

My former best friend was being forced by her newly awakened husband to hand over her food.

“Everyone else turned theirs in. Why are you so selfish? You’re even hiding a few pieces of chocolate?”

My best friend defended herself in a small voice. “I wanted to save them for Tongtong.”

But the young woman beside her cut her off with a scornful laugh. “Sis, every time you get greedy, you use the kid as an excuse. Honestly…”

Under the contemptuous stares of everyone around them, I threw a backpack full of chocolate over.

It hit her squarely on the head.

“Is that enough?”

Expressionless, I said, “Say one more word, and I’ll kill every last one of you.”

When my elder brother returned to the capital after investigating a case, he brought back two Liuxian Skirts, one blue-green and one pink.

He first asked my eldest sister which one she liked.

When it was my turn, my brother smiled gently.

“Pink is delicate, and it suits your complexion too. Do you like it?”

If I didn’t, there would be nothing left for me.

I nodded and took it.

Later, when choosing tutors and selecting study companions, it was always the same.

It was no different on the day we were to choose our husbands.

The Crown Prince won my eldest sister’s hand, looking thoroughly pleased with himself.

The Third Prince was crushed. He pointed at me at random.

“Then the Second Miss it is.”

After we married, the Third Prince regretted it a little.

But he was a good man.

He was willing to hand over management of the household to me, and he took no concubines.

Even when my eldest sister and I fell from our horses on the same day, he was the one who risked his life to save me.

At the very end, he touched my brow bone and let out a long sigh.

“Even if all I can ask for is a resemblance, so be it. In this life, I sought the highest, and in the end got only what was second-best.”

And so, when I was given a second chance at life, at the banquet where husbands were chosen,

I covered my brows and eyes and answered the Third Prince in a muffled voice.

“Yinyin already has someone she loves.”

On New Year’s Eve, I received a message from the boy who had shared my desk in high school.

I’m broke. Can you lend me some money?

A medical report followed.

Late-stage stomach cancer.

I sent him the last 19,873 yuan in my account.

Will that be enough for now?

After a long silence, he sent a voice message, his clear voice ringing with laughter in my ear.

How are you still this gullible?

My husband—an arranged match—and my boyfriend had swapped bodies.

But I didn’t know.

All I knew was that my husband had been very happy lately.

Something about finally being official.

My boyfriend wasn’t nearly so brooding anymore, either.

He kept saying things like, “As long as it’s the man I am now that you love.”

Until one day.

My boyfriend asked me when I was getting divorced.

I had plans to go sing karaoke with my best friend that night, but my five-year-old daughter just would not go to sleep.

Left with no choice, I took her with me. Once we were in the private karaoke room, I ordered a couple of model guys to look after her.

Halfway through my song, the door to the room was shoved open.

My husband-my marriage-of-convenience husband-came in looking like he was here to catch me cheating.

“Su Xu, look at you getting bold. You actually dared to bring our daughter along while you ordered random men-”

Before he could finish, he finally saw what was happening inside.

His five-year-old daughter was currently sitting there with an arm around each of the two model guys. “…”

At a palace banquet, my elder sister accidentally inhaled an aphrodisiac and ended up alone in a room with the heir of the Xie family.

But she was already the Crown Princess, and if the secret got out, the consequences would be catastrophic.

To protect her reputation, the young lord publicly took responsibility and claimed that I had been the woman who spent that night with him.

After I married into the marquis’s household, he remained unfailingly polite but distant, as cold as frost behind a screen.

So determined was he to sleep in separate rooms that he even ruined his own reputation, pretending to be drunk and lamenting before others that he suffered from an unspeakable condition and could not perform as a man.

To preserve the family’s dignity, my mother-in-law simply announced that I was the infertile one.

My sister tormented herself day and night, convinced that she had ruined my life.

I alone breathed a secret sigh of relief, stroked my steadily rounding belly, and made an announcement at the family banquet.

“A miracle from heaven! My husband is going to have an heir!”

On our wedding night, my husband apologized to me.

He said that to defend his true love, I had to take my own life.

“Tell me-poison, a dagger, a noose, or the river? Which do you choose?”

I asked, “Can I choose to die of pleasure?”

Twenty years into Wen Lishu’s widowhood, her bedridden mother-in-law reveals a secret: her husband faked his death and eloped with her sister.

Even the children Lishu raised supposedly belong to that treacherous pair.

The old woman expects despair, but Lishu calmly offers another spoonful of medicine.

Her husband really is dead—and his ashes have been in his mother’s medicine all along.

They told me it was only a game, and had me wipe out the male lead’s entire household.

But when the NPCs’ blood splashed onto me, it was so scalding, so searingly hot, that I finally realized this so-called full-dive game was connected to a real world.

A real village. Real people. And a real young male lead who blushed as he asked me what flowers I liked.

Behind me came the sound of frantic, uneven footsteps.

Covered in blood, I turned around-only to see the young man staring at me in a daze.

In his hands, he was still holding a bouquet of dew-damp white begonias.

The night I married Pei Guanli, I cried so hard I soaked half my bridal veil.

Not because I didn’t want to marry him, but because everyone in the capital knew that Pei Guanli was more upright and proper than the ancestral tablets in a shrine.

He oversaw ceremonial protocols at the Ministry of Rites and revised the dynasty’s statutes and rites.

If a family used the wrong ritual vessels at a wedding, he could remember it for three years.

If someone wailed one time too many at a funeral, he could submit a memorial impeaching them straight to the emperor.

As the daughter of a merchant family from Jiangnan, this was exactly the sort of man I feared most.

Before my mother sent me into the bridal sedan, she clutched my hands and cried even harder than I did.

“Ah Ning, once you reach the Pei Family, speak less, smile less, and eat less.”

I asked, “Why eat less?”

Choking back sobs, my mother said, “Noble young ladies in the capital eat as delicately as if they’re painting flowers. You eat three bowls in one sitting. You’ll give yourself away too easily.”

I paused, suddenly feeling that before this marriage had even reached the bridal chamber, I had already lost on appetite alone.