Tragedy

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.

On the day I died, Xiao Xu was about to make another woman his empress.

He came to the Cold Palace, hoping I would swallow my pride and yield to him. What greeted him was only my ice-cold corpse.

For reasons no one could explain, Xiao Xu broke down. He did one deranged thing after another, and every day he wept blood before my grave.

In the end, he got his wish and was reborn a thousand years later.

In the twenty-first century, Xiao Xu and I were classmates.

He was still dazzling. Still exceptional.

He was looking for me.

But he didn’t know that I had been reborn too, with all my memories intact.

I am blind.

Inside the refrigerator, I felt my boyfriend’s corpse.

And someone was standing right behind me,

waiting to see how I would react.

On the day His Majesty traveled south to Jiangnan, the Empress Dowager took a liking to Miss Xu of the Xu Family in Yangcheng.

“Such a lovely, fresh-faced child ought to become a daughter-in-law of our imperial family.”

As she said this, the Empress Dowager’s gaze seemed to drift, intentionally or not, toward Fu Yanli at my side.

Fu Yanli was the current Fifth Prince, and also my husband.

Later, on the day Miss Xu was to be invested as consort, I stood at the palace gates, clinging to a sliver of hope. “Not even I may enter?”

The guards at the gate all knew me. One by one, they lowered their heads, not daring to meet my eyes. “The Empress Dowager said it wouldn’t matter if anyone else came, but Your Highness, as Crown Princess… you absolutely cannot enter the palace today.”

I nodded, returned to the manor, and picked up the bundle I had packed long ago.

The capital blazed with lights. All at once, I remembered Fu Yanli from that year, when everyone had turned their backs on him.

He had held me tightly, refusing to let go no matter what. “Jianxi, even if I die, I will never betray you.”

Fu Qiu had always accepted her lot in life.

When she was a child, a blind man read her fortune through bone-weighing and said her bones were light, her fate was lowly, and that in this life she could only sell her body.

As it happened, her family was going through hard times, so her father simply sold her to a brothel.

When she was still young and first put on display, the madam said that although she was beautiful, her face carried a pitiful, sorrowful look, and the customers she attracted would never be decent men.

Sure enough, every few days, she suffered another bout of abuse.

By middle age, her looks had withered, and she married a merchant. The neighbors said her thin lips and fox-like eyes meant she would never be the faithful sort.

Before long, rumors were flying everywhere. The merchant could not bear it, and on a rainy night, he drove her out of the house.

Even so, she never hated anyone. She only hated that her own fate was so poor.

As she lay on the verge of death, the Old Blind Man happened to pass by drunk, bragging to the crowd.

“Twenty years ago, I saw a little girl in another town. She was so young, but she already had the looks to topple a kingdom.

“So I pretended to be blind, did a bone-weighing for her, and told her she had a lowly fate-that in this life, she could only become a whore.

“And guess what? Her whole family believed me!”

My boyfriend had depression.

Medication and sessions with specialists cost over ten thousand a month.

To help him get better, I took on art commissions and delivered takeout day and night. Even my friends warned me to be careful before I worked myself to death.

Then one day, I managed to grab an errand order from a wealthy villa district.

The high-end Japanese takeout was worth eighteen thousand. I held it with both hands and handed it to the customer with the utmost respect.

But when I lifted my eyes, I saw my boyfriend-who should have been in therapy-standing in the doorway, staring at me in utter shock.

In my third year of living the high life in the Underworld, my ex-husband suddenly developed a passion for courting death.

To save him, I called in every favor I had, spent fortune after fortune, and kowtowed to King Yan until my head nearly fell off.

After a few months of this, I went from the richest soul in the Underworld to a homeless drifter.

Not only was I penniless, I also owed the Heaven and Earth Bank a massive loan.

King Yan had no idea what to do with me. After brooding over it for ages, he finally made a grand stroke of his brush:

“Permission granted for you to return to the mortal world for one day. Go collect money from the living to repay your debt.”

On the day my boyfriend and I got our marriage license, the lottery ticket I bought won fifty million.

Double happiness had come knocking.

Who could have known that very night, he would brutally murder me?

As I lay dying, I heard him call another woman, practically giddy with excitement.

“Baby, we’re rich! Get over here and help me cut up the body.”

“Can you believe she actually asked me before she died if I’d ever loved her? Of course I loved her. Loved using her as an ATM and a fuck buddy, hahaha.”

I died. My body was dumped into a pit latrine and a garbage dump, left to be gnawed on by maggots, mosquitoes, and flies.

When I opened my eyes again, I had been reborn on the day I won the lottery and got my marriage license.

My boyfriend was opening the door. He looked back and smiled at me. “Honey, tonight is going to be very exciting. Are you ready?”

The newly appointed Tanhua Scholar was gentle and refined, a young lord as flawless as jade.

No one knew that at three, he had killed a man and slit him open from chest to belly. At five, he had peeled off a human face to make a lantern. He was born rotten to the core.

Xie Zhixing and I grew up depending on each other for survival. I exhausted every trick I had just to barely rein him in and make him pass for a normal person.

During the parade through the streets, the Commandery Princess fell in love with him at first sight. When she confessed her feelings, he politely refused.

Several days later, I was found dead in the street, violated and murdered by wandering bandits.

At last, the Commandery Princess got her wish and took my place. With a gentle smile, Xie Zhixing married her as Madam Xie.

Later, when blood dyed the capital red, this became the thing she regretted most in her life…

Without me to hold him back, Xie Zhixing went on a killing spree.

By sheer chance, I stumbled across a diary from a hundred years ago.

Its owner seemed to have been the young master of some wealthy household. Inside were little records of his daily life: “May 7, Year 14 of the Republic of China. Clear skies. I skipped class to play cards with my classmates, and my teacher chased me all the way home and scolded me. So annoying!”

I found it amusing, so I added a line beneath it: “May 2024. Been working for too long. Exhausted.”

The very next second, a sentence surfaced on the diary page: “Who are you?”