Tragedy

It was the first time I had ever encountered something so bizarre.

A murder had taken place inside a residential home.

The suspect had more or less been identified, but there were still plenty of questions left unanswered.

As usual, I visited the residents nearby and started with the victim’s neighbor across the hall.

The man of the household was very cooperative.

I questioned him for twenty minutes, and he answered calmly and methodically.

Finally, I asked, “When was the last time you saw the victim?”

He said, “Last weekend. He invited me to go fishing.”

“Was there anything unusual about him at the time?”

“All I remember is that halfway there, he brought up something from the past…”

Then he told me about it: a story from when he was a child on classroom duty, wiping down the tiles at school. It had nothing to do with the case.

Just some trivial little incident that barely mattered.

But halfway through, he suddenly froze.

A moment later, his face went deathly pale.

“I understand now…” he muttered dazedly to himself.

“It’s out of control…”

“What did you say?”

“I’m sorry, Officer Lu. I’m tired. Let’s stop here for today.”

Without another word, he ordered me to leave.

No matter how many times I knocked, he refused to respond.

My colleague and I had no choice but to leave for the time being.

We went down to the first floor, walked out of the apartment building, and reached the car.

Just then, a gust of wind swept past, followed by a thunderous crash- Someone had fallen from the building and slammed hard onto the windshield in front of the car.

His half-open eyes met mine for a brief moment.

Then he died. It was the very witness who had been speaking to me five minutes earlier, the same man who had been so composed ten minutes ago.

There had to be something wrong here.

Now I needed to go back and sort through everything that had just happened from the beginning.

On the day the divorce was finalized, I booked a high-speed rail ticket back to my hometown. A phone, an ID card, and a bank card with a meager balance were all I had left.

When the butler called to say the young master was crying for his mother, I finally understood that the son I had borne and his father loved the same woman.

Before the train left, I made one last promise: I would never disturb him again.

When I was young, I found the Crown Prince and took him with me as we spent three years begging for a living.

After the Crown Prince was restored to his position, the Emperor took me in as his adopted daughter.

Everyone assumed that I would be betrothed to the Crown Prince. Instead, the Crown Prince became engaged to the legitimate daughter of the Duke’s Mansion.

On my birthday, he remarked with a casual smile in front of the crowd, “How can one of noble blood be matched with a beggar?”

I raised my glass and sincerely wished him a life free of worries, year after year.

He did not yet know that I had accepted the decree for a marriage alliance.

In the years to come, there would be no more Ah Yu by his side.

My sister was a goldsmith who entered the palace to deliver jewelry, only to be knocked unconscious by Consort Yi.

Consort Yi had quarreled with the emperor, so she stole my sister’s clothes and exit token and slipped out of the palace for fun.

Furious and frantic, the emperor cut my innocent sister down with a single stroke, then rode out to find the woman he loved.

In the end, my sister’s body was thrown into a mass grave.

The emperor and Consort Yi returned sweetly together on the same horse, and their reunion became a celebrated romance.

Half a year later, I became one of the emperor’s beauties.

After all, I am not human—I am a marten.

If a fox spirit can bewitch a ruler, so can a marten.

Switched at birth to repay her father’s debt, Li Yuanxi endures ten brutal years at the northern frontier while another girl grows up as a noble heiress.

When she returns to the capital, her family sends her to die in a political marriage and deceives her betrothed, Fu Qingchuan, into marrying the favored daughter instead.

After Yuanxi’s death, Qingchuan turns his grief into a patient revenge, using love, ambition, and an old imperial conspiracy to destroy everyone who betrayed her.

Yet even when justice is done, the ghost beside him knows that nothing can cross the distance between the living and the dead.

In my senior year of high school, the school beauty, Song Shuyao, once came to me to borrow money for medical treatment and asked me not to tell anyone.

As it turned out, she used it to get an abortion. She hemorrhaged and died on the operating table of a shady little clinic.

Years later, Lu Jingnian-the untouchable top student everyone had once admired from afar-pursued me obsessively and proposed to me.

Then, when I was eight months pregnant, he locked me in a basement in the suburbs.

He cut open my belly while I was still alive and said, “This is what you owe Yaoyao and our child.”

Only then did I learn that before Song Shuyao died, she had held his hand and told him not to blame me.

But he was convinced I had deliberately killed the woman he loved and their child.

That day, I died under Lu Jingnian’s butcher knife, my eyes wide open in hatred.

Then, carrying a hatred vast enough to drown the heavens, I returned to the day Song Shuyao came to borrow money from me.