Slice of Life

In my fifth year of trying to make it in Beijing, my boyfriend cheated on me with an intern.

The other woman posted his massive pay stub online.

The watermark on the image was clear as day.

He was done for.

Dad bought a new electric scooter.

My brother climbed onto the back seat, and my sister was lifted onto the footboard.

I ran behind them, grinning so hard my teeth showed.

Dad went around and around, but never once stopped to give me a turn.

When I could not keep up anymore, I went to ask Mom to speak for me.

Then I heard her talking about me.

“We only had her so we could use the cord blood for her sister, but who knew her sister had been misdiagnosed?”

“Oh, what a waste—all that suffering for nothing!”

I had just turned six that day, and the words I wanted to say stayed trapped behind my lips, so I never asked for a ride again.

For years afterward, I ran the road from home to school.

Then the provincial team recruited me, and I was interviewed.

Dad wheeled out that same electric scooter.

“It’s all thanks to me training her with this thing, because how else could she run so fast?”

Liang Yu had always thought the first time they met was at an amusement park. But in fact, it was not.

Those days were marked by endless rain, and even her memories carried a damp, overcast gloom.

That morning, her older sister developed a fever again. She lay in bed, sleeping through the entire day until night fell.

In the fifth year since he took me for himself, the powerful young heir finally grew tired of me.

He handed me a bank card with a lazy smile. “Your childhood sweetheart isn’t actually dead.”

“Go find him.”

I stared at the address in my hand for a long time—so long that he lost patience, hauled me out of bed, and drawled, “I’ll give you a ride. Move your things out after today.”

He had just pulled on his coat and started looking for his car keys when his phone rang.

On the other end, his childhood friend was sobbing anxiously. “If you break up with her, what’s going to happen to Xu Xinghe and me?”

For three years after I entered the Eastern Palace as a concubine, I had never even seen the Crown Prince.

I took it in stride. After all, I was face-blind.

If I mistook someone else for the Crown Prince and committed a capital offense, I would rather have no favor at all.

But after so long without his favor, even my food, clothing, and daily expenses became a problem.

To live a little better, I simply found three lovers to support me.

Zhang San worked in the Imperial Kitchen and could always bring me plenty of delicious food.

Li Si guarded the Garment Bureau and often sent me beautiful clothes.

As for Wang Wu, he was a skilled craftsman in the workshops. Every time we met, he gave me some clever new toy.

Lately, though, all three of them seemed short on money.

So I began thinking that I should try to please the Crown Prince and ask for some rewards to help support them.

On the day Mother was buried, Father gave me three copper coins.

He sent me all the way to West Street for candied hawthorns, but when I returned, he was gone.

Two days later, I found him at the lantern festival with a beautiful lady and another little girl in his arms.

The candied hawthorns he claimed to want were still wrapped in my hand.

Rather than waste them, I offered them to a pale, handsome prince who refused to drink his bitter medicine.

That small gift changed both our lives—and gave two abandoned hearts a home.

I was my birth parents’ third child.

While my birth mother was pregnant with me, the village fortune-teller swore I would be a boy.

They could hardly wait.

They hid from place to place throughout the pregnancy and finally brought me into the world in the bitter cold of the twelfth lunar month—

a girl.

Yu Taozi has seen mysterious comments floating before her eyes since childhood, but only after learning to read does she discover the truth: her world is a romance novel, and she is the greedy country-bred villainess destined to be expelled for making the heroine cry.

When the rich male lead offers to keep her for one hundred thousand yuan a month, Taozi refuses to follow the script.

She rolls on the floor, demands justice, and turns every dramatic confrontation into a lesson in rural common sense.

Soon the heroine calls her an idol, the genius second lead begs to learn her farm skills, and the arrogant male lead is digging fields and getting rammed by pigs.

Taozi wants none of their romance.

She only wants to study hard, make her grandmother proud, and get into a good university.

But by derailing the plot, this simple country girl may give all of them a happier story.

Lu Yan pursued me for five years.

The day after I finally said yes, I came across a post written by his childhood sweetheart.

[My ten-year crush is finally over.]

[My childhood friend has a girlfriend now, but it isn’t me.]

[Our story was full of missed chances.

The closest we ever came was the kiss I stole.]

[Letting go of ten years of love feels strange.

Part of me can’t bear to, but part of me is happy for him.]

[If I’d been the one who gave him that piece of candy all those years ago, would I be the one he loved now?]

People in the comments lamented the heartache of her decade-long crush and admired her courage in loving someone for so long, yet still knowing when to let go.

Then Lu Yan replied, sending the post’s popularity soaring.

[Yes.]

I stared at that single word and slowly exhaled.

At last, I had a reason to break up with him.

After Jiang Can dies in a plane crash, her grandmother, He Xiuhua, refuses to let hope die with her. Unseen by the living, Jiang Can’s spirit watches as Grandma searches, grieves, and waits through years of scams, protests, and an ocean-spanning hunt—until enduring love finally brings a family home.