Slice of Life

I picked up my boyfriend’s phone by mistake, only to see a message his ex had just sent: “I forgot to take the morning-after pill that night.”

Those few short words left me chilled to the bone.

The night before last, I had a sudden bout of acute gastroenteritis. He was supposedly working overtime at the office, and I called him over a dozen times, but I couldn’t get through.

Enduring the piercing pain, I eventually took a taxi to the hospital alone at three in the morning.

As it turns out, the reason his phone was off and he never came home that night was that he was with his ex-girlfriend.

Six years after our divorce, I ran into my ex-husband on a street corner while holding my three-year-old daughter.

He stared blankly at the girl in my arms for a long time before knitting his brows. “She’s almost six years old,” he said, his voice laced with accusation. “Why does she look so thin and small?”

Ha!

He actually thought the child I was holding was his.

I suppose he believed I loved him so deeply that even after he cheated and divorced me, I would have gone off and raised his child all on my own.

It was the fourth year of my relationship with Tong Yuen.

The harshest words I had ever heard came from his mother.

“Two men together-how are you supposed to get married and have children?”

“Don’t ruin him.”

“He was perfectly normal before he met you.”

“Mr. Fu, you’re not a child anymore. Have some sense.”

Finally, enduring the pain, I broke up with him.

But Tong Yuen spent the entire night huddled outside my door.

He tried to force the Little White Dog he had sewn together, stitch by stitch, into my hands.

When I rejected him again, he finally broke down in tears.

“Gege, you don’t want the Little White Dog… and you don’t want me anymore either?”

I am a Bone Demon, trapped for countless years within that cold, desolate graveyard.

No one can see me, and no one can hear me. I have spent centuries in solitary silence.

Until one midsummer, when the sun was shining just right.

A young girl came to sweep the graves, but she mistakenly offered her tributes to me.

I took a bite of a crisp peach and said, “Truly sweet.”

She froze for a moment, then covered her mouth and stifled a giggle.

“Next year, I’ll come again.”

True to her word, she returned year after year, bringing me crisp peaches every time.

Later, she died, and her remains were carelessly tossed into the graveyard.

Her five-year-old daughter, clutching the hand of a younger brother who had only just learned to walk, came to the graveyard day and night to wail for their mother.

I couldn’t stand the noise.

I possessed her body, crawled out from the straw mat, and clumsily gathered those two little brats into my arms.

“Keep crying, and Mother will eat you.”

My husband thinks I’m one of those women who bleed their husbands dry for their brothers and sisters. What he doesn’t know is that my “eldest brother” is actually the son I gave birth to at nineteen, my “second brother” is the son I gave birth to at twenty-five, and my “little sister” is the daughter I gave birth to at twenty-eight.

I am the most pathetic Marchioness in all of the capital.

Marquis Jing’an married me for one reason only: I was honest, kind, and easy to manipulate.

Before our wedding, he told me quite bluntly, without a shred of hesitation:

“As long as you treat my beloved Concubine Bai well once you enter my home, and as long as you don’t get jealous or pick fights with her, I will grant you the dignity and status you deserve.”

For the sake of my family, I had no choice but to marry him.

From then on, whenever Concubine Bai sat, I stood.

When Concubine Bai ate meat, I drank the broth.

Whenever rewards arrived from the palace, Concubine Bai got first pick; I only received whatever she didn’t want.

I thought Marquis Jing’an was satisfied with my performance over the years, yet when I prepared to leave, he blocked the doorway, his hands trembling.

“You are my wife! You aren’t going anywhere!”

Me: “?”

I’m literally making room for your sweetheart!

My fiancé had been secretly sponsoring a young girl behind my back.

As my car passed by her school, I saw the girl clutching the faded sleeve of a teenage boy, timidly calling him Brother Xu.

The boy had delicate, handsome features and stood tall and elegant, like a white birch tree.

“Bring him over,” I said. “Miss?” I lifted my chin, my tone indifferent. “It’s nothing. I just want to do some sponsoring of my own.”

“Fine, I’ll be the one to marry him.”

The moment the words left my mouth, a sudden sense of relief washed over me.

It was no big deal. In fact, I suppose you could even call this a blessing, couldn’t you?

“I once blew thirty-five thousand on a man in a single night.”

Everyone thought I was drunk and talking big, and the room burst into laughter.

Only one person remained expressionless. He was the star of the night.

The entire department had taken turns playing Truth or Dare, all for the sake of buttering him up and securing the seven-figure ad placement case in his hands.

When the drinking was over and everyone had left, the man looked at me, the only one who had stayed behind.

His gaze was indifferent, his tone laced with mockery.

“Director Yu, how many years ago was that? And you still remember it so clearly?”

She Has Been in the Wind for Two Years

Synopsis: Two years after my wife passed away, I still received messages from her every day and ate the dinners she had “arranged” for me.

I thought she had never truly left-until one late night, when I followed a text begging for help back home and realized I had been living all along inside the Fengli she left behind for me.