Abusive Characters

A diary chronicling the last two months of my life…

Maybe I was simply born unworthy of love. Why else would everyone who loved me leave?

By day, Song Wenxi is presented as a chaste Daoist nun; by night, Yuzhen Convent sells her to powerful men.

After her abused younger sister dies, Wenxi refuses to accept the same fate and uses a pregnancy to enter the household of Gu Zhun, heir to the Prince of Pingnan.

Inside the princely estate, she discovers that noble wives, concubines, and prostitutes are all trapped by the same brutal order.

To avenge the dead and free the women still imprisoned at Yuzhen Convent, Wenxi turns the desires of the men around her into weapons and sets out to make sure the long night finally ends.

In the twelfth year after my rebirth, the first thing I did upon leaving the Xie estate was visit my grave from my former life.

It lay alone in the wilderness, with Qingming as cold as winter and weeds growing ten feet high.

I added a shovelful of fresh earth and told myself, “Ah Lan, don’t look back. Keep walking.”

With my mission to win over the male lead on the verge of failure, I broke down sobbing.

I cried so hard I practically gave my system a CPU ache: “Quit your damn crying. I’ll just kill him.”

Later, the male lead asked why I no longer loved him.

My system wailed in exasperation: “Doesn’t he have a wife of his own?”

“Tell him to get lost!”

The boy who loved me more than anyone else in the world was dead.

His name was Jiang Yan. He was a police officer, stabbed seven times by a rich second-generation heir while trying to save a girl from domestic abuse.

Afterward, the girl tearfully claimed that Jiang Yan had molested her, and that was why her boyfriend had stabbed him.

The killer even got off scot-free with a psychiatric evaluation declaring him mentally ill.

As I stared at their faces, I suddenly laughed.

A psychiatric evaluation, huh?

What a coincidence.

I had one too.

When my mother died, she entrusted me to the Yu family in the capital.

Only after I arrived at their gates did I discover that the “madam” she had named was merely one of the master’s concubines.

When bandits swept through our village, every man in the family vanished without a trace.

The women, hobbled by their tiny bound feet, could not keep up and were abandoned to die.

Before he left, Father handed Mother a knife.

“If they violate your chastity, use this to kill yourself.”

“When I return, I’ll see you enshrined in the Chaste Women’s Hall.”

After Father left, Mother smashed the memorial tablets in that hall and used the wood to build several beds.

Then she and my sisters-in-law went into business with the bandits.

That night, every woman suffered worse than death.

But every one of us survived.

When Father finally came home, he asked Mother how she wanted to die.

Mother set down the knife, raised a pistol, and aimed it at his head.

You are a village girl from the mountains.

By a twist of fate, you save the Crown Prince from an assassination, and you leverage that debt to demand he marry you.

But he disdains your plain looks and gently refuses many times.

You settle for the next best thing and ask him to appoint you as an official.

Since you were five, you’ve decided you will rise above your station in this life.

If you become a consort, you’ll be like Wu Zetian.

If you become an official, you’ll be like Sima Yi.

I had a boyfriend who checked every box.

From his face to his body to his personality, he fit my tastes perfectly.

So perfectly it felt like a romance scam tailor-made for me.

Until that day, when I saw the bullet comments.

[The Female Supporting Character doesn’t actually think the Male Lead likes her, does she?]

[If his Simp Bro hadn’t threatened to jump off a building, why would he have spent so much time with a woman he doesn’t love?]

[The Simp Bro likes the Female Supporting Character himself, but he’s too insecure to confess, so he can only quietly play the role of her best friend.]

[And just because the Female Supporting Character said she was interested in the Male Lead, he actually trained his own bro into shape and sent him over to be her boyfriend. That’s insane.]

[It’s fine. Once the Female Lead shows up, the Female Supporting Character will learn the truth, and then the Male Lead will dump her.]

Stunned, I turned to look at the boyfriend beside me.

His brow was furrowed, and he looked a little impatient.

Then he said,

“No matter how long you stare at me, I’m not wearing it.”

“This outfit is seriously too much.”

In the second year after my husband took a mistress, I heard a voice:

“A man who won’t behave? Break his legs, and won’t he behave then?”

I had spent two years in the Buddhist shrine, chanting sutras day after day, trying to cleanse myself of my sins.

But I could never understand what my sins were.

Everyone in the Ling Family blamed me for being unable to keep my husband.

Being childless was a sin. Being jealous was a sin.

That voice had to be guidance from heaven.

At last, I understood. If his legs were broken, he would no longer be able to leave.

So when Ling Xu came to the Buddhist shrine once again to ask whether I agreed to let his mistress enter the household,

I snapped the candle off the candlestick and drove the copper spike into his leg.