2026

In the fifth year of our marriage, I got pregnant, and Fu Chi wept with joy.

Everyone said I was lucky, that I had married an up-and-coming tycoon like Fu Chi.

But no one ever mentioned the actress he was keeping on the side.

It was as if everyone had forgotten that I, too, was the girl he had confessed to at seventeen, his eyes red-rimmed with emotion.

Behind his back, one of his friends warned him, “You’re being such a bastard. Aren’t you afraid Xu Man will divorce you?”

Fu Chi had nothing to fear. He only gave a lazy smile and said, “She won’t.”

Later, without making a scene or saying a word, I aborted the child.

When the news got out, Fu Chi flew back from London overnight.

Xu Man is forced into the Crown Princess Academy with only one goal: get her tuition back and save her ailing father.

When the academy uses rules and money to grind its noble students into submission, she joins forces with her classmates, exposes its corruption through a single ledger, brings the bride-training institution to a halt, and balances the books for women determined to win back their freedom.

In the third year of my secret crush on Zhou Jinghe, we got married. A year later, at a ski resort, his close friend and I both found ourselves in danger at the same time. Zhou Jinghe rushed over, shielding that female friend as they tumbled to the ground. As I fell onto the snow, I suddenly felt that everything was utterly meaningless. And when something is meaningless, it should simply be thrown away.

I am the Old Madam of the Marquis’s Mansion, and I wanted to save my granddaughter, who had been drugged.

Instead, I was forced by the lust-addled Prince Regent.

After one night of passion…

Me: “???”

Prince Regent: “???”

The day I was cast aside for jealousy, more than half the capital applauded.

My mother-in-law wept and complained that I controlled her son, forbidding him from drinking and from taking concubines, making him the laughingstock of the city as a henpecked husband.

What no one knew was that my husband, Qi Chong, used that “henpecked” reputation as an excuse to turn away people asking to borrow money, dodge social obligations, reject beautiful spy-concubines sent by political rivals with ill intent, and rise smoothly through officialdom.

In the end, I alone bore the infamy of being a shrew and a jealous wife. I angered my father to death, and I myself fell gravely ill and died.

When I opened my eyes again, I had returned to the first year of my marriage to Qi Chong.

At a banquet, Qi Chong didn’t dare refuse the beautiful spy sent by his superior, and pushed me forward instead. Lifting his cup, he put on a troubled expression and said,

“I like the beauty very much.

“But if I bring her into the household, my wife will be upset again.”

What he didn’t know was that I took the beauty’s hand, then turned back to him with a gentle, magnanimous smile.

“Since my husband is so fond of her, and I’ve already checked that your birth dates are compatible, why not bring her into the household today?”

Qi Chong’s face filled with shock. He froze where he stood.

My rich-girl deskmate introduced me to a summer part-time job: tutoring her younger male cousin.

She said he had masochistic tendencies.

The harsher I was with him, the better he listened.

So I raised my Meow Combo Punch.

“Dharma Cultivation Sanda!”

I disciplined that cousin straight into the advanced class.

The rich girl stared at the school bully in shock.

“Which cousin of mine have you been tutoring?!”

I paid for my fiancé’s journey to the capital to sit the imperial examinations.

He came back with a reward far greater than first place.

During the palace examination, His Majesty saw a face identical to his own.

He confirmed that my fiancé was his long-lost eldest son.

Restored to the imperial family, he was named crown prince.

Naturally, his engagement to me—a mere concubine-born daughter of a seventh-rank county magistrate—could no longer stand.

But he remembered what he owed me.

He took me as his sister.

He even found me another husband: a marquis’s heir.

He himself became engaged to the chief minister’s legitimate daughter, who would be his crown princess.

Everything had worked out for both of us.

Thanks to his protection, I spent five blissful years in my husband’s household.

My mother-in-law dared not subject me to her rules.

My husband dared not entertain other women.

Everyone treated me with respect.

Until, on an afternoon as ordinary as any other, he was deposed.

When I was six years old, I first discovered I could see things that didn’t belong to this world.

My grandfather passed away that year, and we moved into his home in the Grain Bureau Residential Compound.

A week after he died, I saw him at home again. He was leaning on a dragon-head cane, tottering toward the bathroom all by himself.

I followed him, only to find the bathroom completely empty.

I told my dad about it, and he slapped me hard across the face.

Grandma said I was seeing “unclean things.”

But later, I realized I could see more than just the dead; I could see the living, too.

For instance, Aunt Chen from the compound had been away on a business trip to Beijing for several days. Yet one afternoon, I ran into her in the stairwell-just a fleeting glimpse.

I ran off to tell the adults who were outside enjoying the cool air. As a result, when Aunt Chen finally did come home, she and her husband had a massive row.

I am the most pathetic pervert alive.

After a year of crushing on the class heartthrob,

I finally couldn’t suppress my urge to spy on him anymore.

So I installed a cheap camera in his home.

Less than three hours later, the camera ran out of battery and shut off.

I tried to send him a creepy message:

-I like you I like you I like you I like you

Before it could even send, my phone notified me that my service had been suspended for unpaid bills.

Because I was broke,

I was forced to become an upstanding person.

Until one day, when I opened my door,

Xie Yu was on my bed, half-dressed and tied up with rope.

When he saw me come in, he even deliberately tightened the ropes, looking pitiful as he said,

“You don’t like me anymore, Xiaocui?”

The world is one giant slapdash production, and I somehow drift through it anyway.

My father is a financial tycoon, but I can barely handle addition and subtraction under ten. My mother is a gorgeous award-winning actress, while I look perfectly ordinary. My brother held his first solo art exhibition at four, while at five I was still toddling after him babbling nonsense.

Even our maid, Wang Ma, and our butler, Uncle Chen, turned out to be retired legends hiding in plain sight.

Thankfully, all of them adored me. I slowly made peace with being ordinary.

Then one day, a genius girl who had gone viral online showed up at our door and demanded that I give her back her place as the real daughter of the Su family.

Wonderful. The worry that had been hanging over me for years finally dropped dead.