Short Story

I was the unloved young lady of the Marquis Mansion.

My father gave me to my elder sister’s fiancé and forced me to bear his child.

I was compelled to write a breakup letter to the man I loved.

“How could a Mountain Village Bumpkin ever be worthy of a lady of my station?”

Later, the bumpkin from that letter had risen to the highest ranks, and he mocked me with disdain,

“And you, an Abandoned Wife – how could you ever be worthy of me?”

I got bitten by a dog, went to get a rabies shot, and ran into my ex-boyfriend. On my inner thigh, there wasn’t just a bite mark; there was also a tattoo of his name. He let out a derisive snicker. “Still haven’t had it removed?” “Is my name really that unforgettable to you?”

While packing my mom’s things, a receipt suddenly slipped out of an old cardboard box.

It read: April 8, 2006. Aigo MP3 player returned and refunded. Goods and payment settled in full. Total: 498 yuan.

I felt as if I’d been plunged into an ice cellar.

The MP3 player I had thought had been lost for twenty years, the MP3 player that became the trigger every time my mom and I fought, had appeared out of nowhere, just like that.

Clutching the receipt, I asked her numbly, “Back then… did you return that MP3 player?”

I was the adopted daughter of the most beautiful widow in Jiangcheng.

When I was twelve, the Yellow River burst its banks and Jiangcheng was swallowed by the flood.

As we fled, the beautiful widow fell gravely ill.

Before she died, she clutched my hand and, after a long hesitation, told me to go to the capital and find her lover once she was gone.

I followed the refugees for half a month.

At last, in Prince Hongyang’s Manor, I met Prince Hongyang-a man who looked half like me.

I became a simpleton while saving my childhood friend.

He promised to repay me by finding me a good husband.

“Tonight, a man will collapse at your doorstep,” he told me. “That is the husband I have chosen for you.”

I followed his instructions to the letter.

Half a year later, my childhood friend returned from the borderlands.

I excitedly introduced my husband to him:

“This is the husband you picked for me back then. He’s a wonderful man, and he even said he wants to make me his Crown Princess.”

He froze in his tracks, his face turning deathly pale.

“It was supposed to be a beggar… How could it be the… Crown Prince?!”

I was never born to be harmless.

At three, I stabbed the young master next door in the eye with a hairpin, simply because he had peeped at my mother while she was bathing.

At five, I set fire to a theater, merely because I saw the troupe buying and selling children.

At ten, I secretly brought people with me and crippled the censor’s grandson.

Who told him to harass my elder sister in the street?

There were countless incidents like these… Later, I married a good man.

Everyone in his family was kind and decent, and I nearly died of boredom in the inner household.

When I was reborn on the day the Emperor granted marriages to my elder sister and me, I decisively swapped marriages with her.

In my previous life, less than two years after my sister married into the Duke’s Mansion, she passed away like a withered flower.

My sister had been reborn too.

With tears in her eyes, she said, “Second Sister, the Duke’s Mansion is a death trap! You can’t marry into it!” I was thrilled. “But… Sister, I was born a bad seed.”

The year I turned eighteen, my mother took five taels of silver and married me off to Ji Songzhu, a man infamous far and wide for bringing death to his wives.

Before me, both of his previous wives had died of sudden illness three days before the wedding.

To catch the School Bully’s attention,

the School Beauty gave me 660,000 to publicly bully her.

“If you bully me, he’ll feel so sorry for me and come to protect me on his own!”

So I blocked the School Beauty at the school gate and shouted,

“So what if you’re a little prettier, your family’s a little richer, and your grades are a little better? What are you acting so smug about!”

The School Beauty cried pitifully, drawing a crowd of onlookers from the whole school.

On the way home, the School Bully’s Bentley cut me off.

Just as I was about to kneel and apologize, the School Bully handed me a bank card.

“Well done. I’ve been sick of that Little Green Tea for a while now.”

“There’s 880,000 in the card. I’m hiring you as my girlfriend, keep messing with her!”

The System told me to teach Pei Yu, the disabled campus heartthrob, how to go bad. I agreed.

At the internet café, I snatched his Five-Year Gaokao, Three-Year Simulation out of his hands.

“Teach me how to play Minesweeper.”

Pei Yu gave a soft scoff. “What a joke.”

During a fight, I grabbed his prosthetic limb and used it as a weapon, swinging it in a full arc to smack Yellow Hair.

“Not gonna lie, this thing’s pretty handy.”

Pei Yu: “Heh.”

On a rainy, overcast day, Pei Yu’s stump started spasming. I ignored it and treated it like a massage gun, using it to help me snag concert tickets.

After I got them, I rewarded him by kissing his stump.

“A kiss, and it won’t hurt anymore.”

Later, Pei Yu pinned me against the headboard.

And coaxed me too. “Baby, hold on a little longer. A kiss, and it won’t hurt anymore.”

There is no spring in the Sea of No Return.

On the eve of our wedding, Shang Wujiu personally gouged out my Heart Lamp and sealed me within the Sea of No Return.

Three hundred years later, he knelt by the shore, begging me to return.

But he didn’t know that the lamp-the very thing that had extended his life-had long since burned into ash at the bottom of the sea.