Supernatural

My elder sister was said to be a bodhisattva reborn.

Her kindness cost me my dowry, my home, and finally my life.

When a magpie chose two brides for the crown prince, she became his virtuous wife, and I became the concubine who would bear children for her and do her dirty work.

Even my own son wished she had given birth to him.

I ended that life with a plate of poisoned pastries.

Now I have opened my eyes on the day of the consort selection again.

This time, I will not be her stepping-stone.

Mom brought home the dead crabs our neighbor had thrown away and cooked them with the live ones.

“One for your big sister, one for your little brother, and one for your little sister.

See how fair Mommy is?”

But my little sister spat out her first mouthful of crab roe.

“Mom, I think this crab smells bad…”

Mom slammed down her bowl in a rage.

“Why would yours be the only bad one?

Don’t waste food.

Finish it!”

That night, my sister got food poisoning.

But Mom insisted on making our neighbor pay the medical bills, delaying treatment until my sister died.

When I opened my eyes again, I was back on that same evening.

I immediately switched my sister’s crab with Mom’s.

“Hers is much too big.

We should give it to Mom!”

Then I shelled the dead crab in my own bowl and handed it to my brother.

“You’re still growing, Xingxing.

Have mine!”

Pei Yizhi was the boy my father had taken in to raise as my future husband.

But after he placed first in the imperial examinations, he married a princess.

I should have stormed up to their gates on their wedding day.

Then the princess’s vicious servants would have beaten me out into the street, where I would die a miserable death.

This time, though, I didn’t.

After her noble family falls, Si Lan and her elder sister are sold into a duke’s household.

Si Lan fights for every meal, every quilt, and every chance to survive, while her sister gives away the rewards and accepts the praise for her generosity.

In her first life, Si Lan’s sacrifices make her sister the heir’s concubine.

When his wife has Si Lan framed, the sister she protected refuses to save her.

Beaten to death, Si Lan wakes at the beginning of their servitude with every memory intact.

This time, her sister can fend for herself.

Armed with a sharp tongue and knowledge of the future, Si Lan begins working toward something far more valuable than a master’s favor: her freedom.

I am Gu Qianyu, the chancellor’s daughter, and I have unexpectedly acquired a unique gift.

I can see whether a man has been faithful.

If he has been with only one woman, a cucumber floats above his head.

The number of cucumbers increases with the number of women he has had.

The man I am supposed to marry is the heir to the Marquis of Wuling.

A rare specimen of male virtue, scrupulously chaste.

Famous for it throughout the capital.

On the day he came to ask for my hand, he stood tall and elegant, every inch the gentleman.

But when I looked up, the cucumbers above his head stretched all the way out of our residence.

With a woebegone face, I told Mother, “Mother, this is a very, very dirty cucumber!”

“I won’t marry him!”

I had been able to see the floating comments since I was very small.

They told me I would spend seven bitter years beside a fallen prince, only to be cast aside when he became emperor.

He would regret it when I was dying, turn back time, and treasure me in another life.

The comments told me to hold on.

But if happiness was certain, why couldn’t I have it in this life?

When the Fifth Prince fell from favor, I was the first maid to pay for a transfer.

The comments went wild.

Without me, how was their story supposed to continue?

Not long after I married the crown prince, he was deposed.

We spent ten years imprisoned together in a derelict garden.

I tilled the soil and planted vegetables, doing everything I could to stay alive.

Half out of his mind, he kicked my vegetables to pieces, muttering, “Thank goodness it isn’t Qianyi locked up in here.”

Qianyi was the cousin who had come to live with my family.

She was now Prince Cheng’s consort.

I had never known the deposed crown prince had feelings for her.

His ravings made a mockery of the ten years I had spent at his side.

Later, Prince Cheng ascended the throne and issued two decrees.

One sentenced the deposed crown prince to death by poisoned wine.

The other sent me to cultivate the Way in a Taoist temple.

I became Master Taihui of Purple Cloud Temple.

Less than two years later, I became the new emperor’s Consort Yu.

People sneered at my wiles, saying I had bewitched the emperor so thoroughly that he neglected even his lawful wife.

My cousin demanded bitterly to know why I had stolen her husband, why I had not followed the deposed crown prince to the grave.

The new emperor hated me too.

He hated me because, years before, I had seen him wounded and left him there to attend the consort selection.

His grave injuries had failed to heal.

He had lost his chance and spent years scheming before he finally won the throne.

Yet later, when a deadly poison left me confined to my sickbed, he cast aside his entire harem and used blood drawn from his own heart to save me.

As I lay dying, he held me and wept in anguish.

“As long as you live, I’ll agree to anything.”

“I’ll make you empress.”

“I’ll let your parents come back to the capital.”

“Your brother, your sister-in-law, your nephew—all of them.”

“Only live.”

Tears blurred my sight.

I did not even have the strength to cry.

Too late.

Why couldn’t he have granted my wish sooner?

Why had he made my whole life so miserable?

Then I was given another life.

Mother told me joyfully that the empress had specifically summoned me to the consort-selection banquet.

I looked at my cousin, who could hardly contain her eagerness, then lowered my eyes and said softly, “I don’t want to go.”

[A brother-obsessed System top + mystery + male/male romance + a horror-game NPC + two powerful leads + wish fulfillment + the Fourth Calamity]

Your newly bonded System tells you that you’re actually cannon fodder in a melodramatic romance novel. Your opening act is to humiliate the campus beauty and beat up the man she’s cheating with: the classic setup for an overpowered hero’s rise.

But when he coaches you through your lines, he’s so embarrassed that he stammers and stalls. His tone turns peculiar, yet he still mischievously coaxes you along.

[Ge, repeat after me. Thirty years on one bank of the river, thirty on the other. Never look down on… um…]

And you, Zhao Xiuming, can only ask, “Huh?”

You know there’s more to the System than he lets on, even if he insists he’s an adorable Cuddling System, a warm, nurturing system.

But at school, you encounter a campus beauty carrying a ghost fetus.

At the hospital, her lover rises from the dead as an alien creature, muttering, “Bro, you smell so good.”

In your rented room, you share a bed with a blood-drenched young boy pretending to be a girl.

At your part-time job, the killer in the shop can’t get enough of you. And when you enter an isolated-island horror story, you finally discover who you are…

You, Zhao Xiuming, are certain the Horror System is keeping you captive as his pet. He even plays puppy in front of you on purpose. [Woof.]

Then you realize you aren’t normal either. You stop fearing the System and praise him. “Good boy, Little Darling.”

Before you read: Don’t approach this as a conventional story about a player clearing instances. The protagonist is an anomaly NPC, through and through. Read it as a mystery.

Players from different horror games enter the protagonist’s world, creating all kinds of instances. The “Fourth Calamity” tag is a tongue-in-cheek reference to the havoc players wreak on a world’s native inhabitants.

My elder sister lost her reputation just before her marriage was to be arranged.

Somehow, the jade pendant she wore next to her skin had ended up in a wastrel’s hands.

He brought all seven of his concubines to our door, with gongs and drums, to ask for her hand.

Her good name was ruined.

The marriage intended for her, into a marquis’s household, fell to me instead.

But after we married, my husband suspected I had been behind it.

He would humiliate me in our bedchamber to avenge her.

Pei Zheng pitied my sister so much that he defied all propriety and insisted on marrying her as a second wife of equal standing.

Then I was given another life.

Once again, I got hold of my sister’s jade pendant.

And I had not changed a bit.

Under cover of darkness, I slipped it into the drunken wastrel’s hand.

The system told me I could only go home by becoming the male lead’s girlfriend.

After five years of groveling, his affection score was still stuck at fifty.

So I asked him one more time—and pushed him off a rooftop when he said no.

Every death resets the world.

Every loop takes us farther into the past.

If winning his heart will not set me free, perhaps killing him will.