Abusive Characters

After my Imperial Mother Consort died, I was given three foster mothers in succession.

Of those three foster mothers, some were deposed, and the others were ordered to die.

In the end, I landed in Beauty Lin’s care.

For three years, she and I lived together in peace, without incident.

Until she offended the wrong person and was thrown into the Office of Punishment.

My heart gave a jolt. Oh no. It looked like I was going to have to change foster mothers again.

Worse still, this time, she was the only one I wanted.

I was the unloved young lady of the Marquis Mansion.

My father gave me to my elder sister’s fiancé and forced me to bear his child.

I was compelled to write a breakup letter to the man I loved.

“How could a Mountain Village Bumpkin ever be worthy of a lady of my station?”

Later, the bumpkin from that letter had risen to the highest ranks, and he mocked me with disdain,

“And you, an Abandoned Wife – how could you ever be worthy of me?”

The year I turned eighteen, my mother took five taels of silver and married me off to Ji Songzhu, a man infamous far and wide for bringing death to his wives.

Before me, both of his previous wives had died of sudden illness three days before the wedding.

My husband jumped from a building and died in a pool of blood.

The police quickly cordoned off the scene.

A few days later, the autopsy report came back: the cause of death was a massive intracranial hemorrhage, and his body bore numerous signs of a struggle.

The police told me he had committed suicide and that there was no killer. I didn’t believe them.

On the day my stepsister was murdered.

I told my dad and the police that I had gone to school to do homework, that I hadn’t been home, and that I really didn’t know what had happened.

But the truth was, I lied.

On the day the Su Clan was raided and seized, Father dressed me in a magnificent gown and threw me in front of the soldiers.

“She is Su Yueying, the Eldest Young Miss of the Su Clan.”

Everyone said Father was a loyal servant.

When I saw him again, Father had become the New Emperor’s most trusted Divine Martial Great General.

Su Yueying had become Empress, the New Emperor’s one and only for the rest of his life.

And I was a courtesan in a brothel, a woman anyone could have.

To buy back my freedom, Mother dragged her gravely ill body to beg Father for help.

The gatekeepers beat her to death with two strikes of their staves.

I begged Su Yueying to let Mother be buried.

But she said, “There are plenty of untouched entertainers in the pleasure houses. If you had held fast to your principles, I might still have helped you. But you chose to debase yourself. I will not help someone like that.”

That very night, someone hacked off my limbs and sank me into the river.

When I opened my eyes again, I had returned to the day the Su Clan was raided.

This time, let Su Yueying go to the brothel herself and hold fast to her precious principles.

During the poorest year of my life, I sold myself to Zhou Jinyan for three hundred thousand yuan to serve as a substitute for his White Moonlight.

His friends once egged me on to drink until I suffered a gastric hemorrhage.

They asked him, “Don’t you feel bad for her?”

He looked down, his tone indifferent. “She’s just a substitute.”

Later, to save his White Moonlight, Zhou Jinyan stood by and watched as I fell from a cliff into the sea.

The search and rescue team never found my body.

He suddenly went mad, searching the entire world for me.

Five years later, I was invited back to the country and ran into him at an event.

He stared at me intently, his eyes rimmed with red. “I knew you weren’t dead. I’ve been looking for you-”

I took a step back, offering a polite yet distant smile. “I’m sorry, who are you?”

My father was famous throughout the surrounding villages for being a good man.

One freezing winter during a famine, he gave the last of our rice to a mother and child passing by.

After they left, they told everyone they met that my family still had grain.

The starving refugees, driven mad by hunger, came to our door to steal it, only to find an empty rice jar.

Humiliated and enraged, they forced my three-year-old sister into their arms and carried her away.

“If there’s no rice, then your daughter will do!”

I ran after them. In the end, all I found in the ruined temple was my sister’s mangled remains.

When I returned home, my father wailed through his tears, “I was trying to save people! It’s not my fault… That was just her fate!”

He saved someone else. In the end, my sister died, and I died too, in the bitter winter when I was fifteen.

When I opened my eyes again, I saw my father handing the freshly cooked rice to that mother and child.

I picked up the flower hoe beside me and stepped up behind him.

The first thing Lu Xiangzhi did after becoming the top scorer in the imperial examination was divorce his wife.

“The Shen family woman is virtuous enough, but far too dull.”

He married a woman from a brothel, while I remarried a spoiled heir.

Lu Xiangzhi believed I had only married that ignorant, good-for-nothing dandy out of spite.

He thought a Shen family woman valued wifely virtue above all else, while that dandy was too unruly to be managed.

It would not be long, he assumed, before the man grew tired of a dull woman like me.

He waited half a year, yet never heard that I had been cast aside.

When Lu Xiangzhi finally could not resist coming to see me, I was holding a discipline ruler and tapping my dandy husband’s head with it, rather helplessly saying, “The teacher explained it three times. You still don’t understand?”

My dandy husband wrapped an arm around my waist and grinned like a shameless rogue.

“I don’t. I want a kiss.”

I was a peasant woman whose child had died. At night, my breasts would swell until the pain was unbearable, but I was afraid my husband and mother-in-law would scold me, so I could only go out to the ridges between the fields alone to relieve myself.

I never expected to come across a man lying gravely wounded by the roadside.

He kept rasping, “Thirsty… so thirsty…”

I couldn’t help myself, so I let him have a mouthful of milk.

Later, I went to the General’s Mansion to serve as the Young Master’s wet nurse.

The Young Master was naughty and refused to drink.

I glanced at the Young General beside me and teased him.

“Young Master, if you still won’t drink, I’ll give it to your elder brother instead.”

That night, in a daze, I heard the Young General talking to the Young Master.

“Little ancestor, are you drinking or not? At least make a sound!”