2026

Bai Nianqiu transmigrates into a Mary Sue novel as its vicious supporting character. To stay alive, she casts herself as a pitiful girl suffering from unrequited love for the villain.

Neither the eighteen-year-old Yu Qi nor his twenty-six-year-old self could ever have imagined that one day, he would fall so completely for someone that desire would make a slave of him.

As a teenager, the aloof, sensitive Yu Qi catches her chin in his hand. Right in front of her fiance, the novel’s male lead, he says, with a casualness that leaves no room for argument, “Kiss me.”

And once he regains the memories of his darker self: “Jealous? What’s that? Love me or die. Your choice.”

Bai Nianqiu: Not even death can keep us apart.

My best friend and I both traveled to another world.

But I was born into it.

She arrived in someone else’s body.

By the time she came, a feudal order that devoured its people had already bent my back.

She, meanwhile, was full of ambition.

She meant to fight for the throne beside the emperor.

“I might be the heroine of this world,” she said.

“I’m Zhen Huan, and you’re An Lingrong!”

“I can do what even Zhen Huan couldn’t.

I’m a modern woman, after all.

We’re a thousand years ahead of these people.”

“And even if you are An Lingrong, I won’t treat you the way Zhen Huan did.

We’ll always be best friends.”

But she did not understand.

The cruelty of an imperial dynasty was more than two women from the modern world could bear.

She was no Zhen Huan.

I was no An Lingrong.

We were only ants struggling to survive a merciless reality.

After three years away recovering from illness, I returned to the capital.

My betrothed now had a woman at his side who looked rather like me.

At my welcome banquet, I accidentally stained her dress.

She dissolved into tears.

And Pei Yanli, always so cold and reserved, lost his temper with me for the first time.

“Lu Shijin, must you be so unreasonable?”

Unreasonable?

Without changing expression, I slapped him across the face.

“Who gave you the right?”

Perhaps it was time he saw what being unreasonable really looked like.

Mother always said I took everything to heart.

People said husband and wife were one, that they ought to stand by each other through hardship.

I believed them.

After the crown prince was deposed, I knocked my forehead against the ground twenty-eight times before the eunuch guarding him.

At last, my pleading won the prince a bowl of medicine to save his life.

But everyone except me, his unloved wife, knew he was only pretending to be ill.

He stared at my injured forehead, stunned and deeply moved.

“From now on, I’ll… be good to you.”

“Let’s be husband and wife in earnest, for the rest of our lives.

Will you?”

So afraid was he that my heart might change, he even spent a fortune to make me swallow a love gu.

But it had no effect on me.

Pitying him for how little sincere affection he had ever known, I pretended it had taken hold.

I followed him everywhere, shamelessly telling him one sweet thing after another.

Yet barely a year after he took the throne, he summoned the gu master to the palace again.

“She isn’t the only woman in the harem.

She clings to me all day.

Where does that leave the others?”

“Find a way to erase her memories.

Let her spend the rest of her days in comfort, with nothing to trouble her.”

At last, something got through even to me.

After thinking it over all night, I took everything of value I owned to the gu master and earnestly begged him: “I still want to visit Mother’s grave.

I don’t want to forget everything.”

“Could you give me a gu that will make me seem dead instead?

Please?”

By the time the palace found me, I was already three months pregnant.

Even so, the man who called himself my imperial father issued a decree arranging my marriage.

And just like that, I went from an orphan with neither father nor mother to a princess, sent away to buy peace with a marriage.

The first thing I did after being reborn was hurry back from the country estate to my father’s residence.

A young woman was kneeling inside.

Gloom shadowed her eyes; she was small and frail, her clothes patched over patches.

She was the daughter my father had conceived in a single night’s dalliance years ago.

In my previous life, she had married the tyrant in my place.

After winning his favor, she poisoned our entire family.

I spent twelve years as a ghost.

At first, I hated her bitterly.

Once I pieced together the truth, I could only pity her.

“Father, Mother.

I’ll marry him.”

I helped my younger half sister to her feet.

“His Majesty asked for me by name.

There’s no reason someone else should suffer in my place.

I’ll go.”

When I was sixteen, Dad suddenly said to me with a smile, “Our family has a big secret.

I’ll tell you when you’re older.”

He said it again when I was eighteen.

Every few years, for no apparent reason, he would bring it up again.

But however much I pressed him, he refused to tell me what the secret was.

When I turned twenty-six, he said it once more.

This time he was especially excited.

Tomorrow, he said, he could finally tell me.

I was excited too.

I’d always suspected the secret might be that my parents were actually rich.

But the next day, Dad was killed.

His body was hanging from the ceiling fan in the living room.

There was a note in his mouth.

It read: [Sweetheart, run!]

My unhinged artist and I were heading out for a late-night snack when we ran into a man carrying snail noodles.

We decided to take the other elevator beside it.

By the time our elevator reached the ground floor, the man’s head was wedged between the doors of the other one.

His body lay sprawled backward inside, with blood sprayed all over the elevator.

We called the police immediately and helped with their investigation.

But when we got back to the door of our hotel room, a tiny glint of metal caught my eye…

A one-of-a-kind piece of jewelry the company had lent my artist was stolen during a performance.

The good news: we had a lead.

We knew the woman was a regular at a certain nightclub.

The bad news: joining me on our undercover investigation were my unhinged artist and two psychiatric patients.

Of those three, one wore huge pink SpongeBob shorts, one dressed as a Calabash Brother, and the other climbed onto roofs for no reason.

The boss decided they all had something special and hired them as male hosts.

And me, the only normal person in a proper suit…

I became a waiter.

Late at night, a crow outside my window spat out a human eyeball right in front of me.

I jumped up to call the police, terrified, but all I got was a busy signal.

I went to get the phone belonging to the obsessive, boyish-looking performer I managed.

He suddenly stood up and stared straight at me.

One hand pointed toward the window.

I looked.

The crows filling the sky were all crashing into our glass.

Their dead bodies covered the window, blood and feathers smeared across it.

I grabbed his phone.

This time the call connected, but what came from the other end was a crow’s piercing screech!