2026

By the tenth year of failing to find a human skin, I was ready to flay even the old yellow dog at the temple.

Then I met a beautiful concubine who had been thrown out of the marquis’s estate.

She knelt beside my white bones and burned paper money at the altar.

“The Immortal Lady likes the skin of beauties, and I hate this pretty face of mine. Let’s trade.”

Dad bought a new electric scooter.

My brother climbed onto the back seat, and my sister was lifted onto the footboard.

I ran behind them, grinning so hard my teeth showed.

Dad went around and around, but never once stopped to give me a turn.

When I could not keep up anymore, I went to ask Mom to speak for me.

Then I heard her talking about me.

“We only had her so we could use the cord blood for her sister, but who knew her sister had been misdiagnosed?”

“Oh, what a waste—all that suffering for nothing!”

I had just turned six that day, and the words I wanted to say stayed trapped behind my lips, so I never asked for a ride again.

For years afterward, I ran the road from home to school.

Then the provincial team recruited me, and I was interviewed.

Dad wheeled out that same electric scooter.

“It’s all thanks to me training her with this thing, because how else could she run so fast?”

I was the widow everyone despised.

One summer night, I went out intending to seduce Censor Zhang, only to be stopped by the Crown Prince.

He bent to my ear and murmured, ‘Aunt, am I not good enough for you?’

Oh, he was good.

Just rather exhausting.

My mother was beautiful.

That was why she was imprisoned in the imperial city, kept there as my father’s possession.

I never imagined I would inherit her fate along with her face.

When the palace gates were breached, I dismissed my maids and guards, loosened my hair, and knelt in mourning clothes in the middle of the great hall.

With the fall of the dynasty, I would no longer be a princess.

But I was Fuling.

I had lived with dignity, and I would not submit to humiliation.

I raised the sword Mother had used to take her own life.

Before I could draw it across my throat, someone knocked it from my hand.

Blood stained the side of his face.

Still in his armor, he strode toward me and dropped to one knee.

“Your Highness.

Forgive me for being late.”

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.

The day I decided to divorce Pei Qingshu was an ordinary one.

Only the night before, he had promised that he would send Miss Liu away the next day, then celebrate my birthday properly with me.

It finally seemed as though our life was about to get better.

Delighted, I rose early, opened my dressing case, and carefully drew my brows while looking into a copper basin.

Then I dug an old pomegranate-red skirt out from the bottom of the camphorwood chest.

After seven years of marriage, I did not own a single decent piece of jewelry.

Seeing my bare ears, I pinched off a balsam blossom and tucked it behind my bun.

On my way out to buy vegetables, I ran into Chunxiang’s mother, who caught my arm with a teasing smile.

“I saw Master Pei buy two hairpins the other day—one gold, one jade. Let me see which one you’re wearing.”

Then she noticed the balsam flower in my hair and froze.

On the day of my daughter’s sixth birthday, she fell into a lake, and the soul of a transmigrated woman took possession of her body.

She was not the first transmigrator I had encountered.

I expected another loud, shallow creature like Consort Chao, but this one proved entirely different.

As she stood on a spy and scolded me for being weak and softhearted, I discreetly wiped the blood from my hands and sighed.

Facing the Buddha, I said only, “Amitabha.”

I came to the city looking for work, and somehow ended up as the male secretary to a young, domineering CEO.

Like an idiot, I asked him, “Bro, I don’t have much schooling. What can I do?”

The CEO frowned around the cigarette between his lips and motioned for me to bend lower. “You can.”

Three months later, I was standing beside the CEO’s bed while he shifted over with his laptop in his arms to make room for me, then reached out to blow-dry my hair.

All at once, it hit me.

Wait.

Something about this doesn’t seem right.

I landed in a beastfolk novel as a serpent woman.

Unlike the delicate heroine, I was tough enough to nearly conquer the jungle.

The next time she curled up in some beastman’s arms, blushing and making coy little noises, I sneered.

Hah.

Naive.

The most basic, brutal truth of a beastfolk novel was that females were expected to bear the young.

Arms folded, I remarked from the sidelines, “Make one bad decision, and it’s babies, babies, babies.

One litter after another…”

The young man eavesdropping nearby lit up.

He looked at me with eager, bashful eyes and said excitedly, “I don’t like babies.

Take me instead!”

As he spoke, his shameless snake tail hooked around my calf and crept higher, testing the limits.

My eyes widened.

Take him?

What kind of outrageous invitation was that?

I’m one of the hottest actresses in the industry.

I’m also the internet’s favorite “gold digger.”

That’s because I publicly announced that I was very “traditional”: anyone who wanted to marry me would have to give me a billion yuan as a betrothal gift.

Men online cursed every last one of my ancestors.

I couldn’t have cared less.

I even signed up for this year’s biggest dating show.

I never expected to find anyone worth dating on it.

But one of the female contestants, a non-celebrity, said to me, “I’ll give you a billion.

Will you marry me?”

Me included, everyone lost their minds.