Ancient China

Pei Ling’an said he wanted to break off our engagement again.

This time, it was because I refused to give the golden hairpin I had won for my poetry to my younger cousin.

“The Shen Family has fallen. No matter which daughter I choose to marry, Shen Tongzhi wouldn’t dare say a single word against it.”

He rested his chin on his hand, looking at me with a faint, mocking smile. “Break the engagement, or give the hairpin to Yuchi. Shen Yusu, the choice is yours.”

Everyone was waiting for me to bow my head.

Just as I had done countless times before.

But this time, I only tightened my grip on the golden hairpin and said softly,

“Then let’s break the engagement.”

During the year we fled the war, my mother saved a Princess Consort during labor, ensuring that both mother and daughter survived.

However, the barbarians arrived.

My mother told the Princess Consort to take us and flee first, while she stayed behind, sword in hand, to hold back the enemy.

With a single blade, she cut down countless foes, but in the end, she was simply outnumbered.

After her capture, she sought only the release of death.

Instead, they dislocated her arms and tore at her clothes, exposing her snow-white skin…

The Princess Consort and I were saved. However, the Princess Consort broke her word. She did not treat me like her own daughter.

Instead, she loathed my mother, claiming she had been rendered filthy and defiled by the barbarians.

Because of this, she made me her daughter’s personal maid.

From the moment I was born, my Father Emperor could hear my inner thoughts.

[Whoa, so my Father Emperor is actually a brilliant and divine Emperor for the Ages!]

[It’s a pity he has a few stains on his record.]

[First, he’ll act on impulse and execute a great hero who served him well, only to cry afterward and curse others for not stopping him.]

[Then, he’ll execute the Chief Minister of the Court of Judicial Review, brewing a wrongful case that will shock the world for centuries, all while shifting the blame onto his ministers.]

[He’ll praise the Grand Preceptor as a ‘clear mirror’ in public, but after the man dies, he’ll raid his tomb and whip the corpse.]

[And the biggest death wish of all: he clearly loves my Mother Empress so much, yet he insists on making her give birth over and over again. When she eventually dies in childbed, he’ll be holding some other beauty while reminiscing about my mother. What a total scumbag.]

My Father Emperor’s brow twitched again and again. Finally, he couldn’t hold it together anymore.

“Quickly! Go and invite the masters from Huguo Temple!”

I was born cold-blooded.

When my mother died, I stood by her bedside without shedding a single tear.

In the front courtyard, lanterns and streamers were being hung to celebrate my father’s concubine’s birthday.

“Yuntan,” my mother said, “you are just like your father.”

A dying person always carries a certain air of decay.

She stared up at the canopy of her bed and sighed again.

“It is better to be like him… the heartless… always live longer…”

“Do not be like me, trapped in the word ‘love’ for a lifetime. It was a mistake…”

My mother was a loser her entire life.

I never expected that years later, the most reputable and upright gentleman in the capital, Xie Yijue, the Heir to Duke Zhenguo, would come to my door to ask for my hand in marriage.

He had one condition: He wanted to take my younger half-sister, Ji Zhi, into his household alongside me.

Changhui came here on a mission to save me.

When my grandmother passed away and the Crown Prince came to take me into the palace, I heard Xie Changhui’s inner thoughts.

[Don’t go. If you go, you will eventually fall in love with the Crown Prince and become a villain. You’ll commit heinous crimes and meet a miserable end.]

So, I refused the Crown Prince.

Later, when I encountered a sick youth on the road, I heard Xie Changhui’s voice in my head again.

[He is the blade you will use to kill. You love the Crown Prince, but he loves you. For your sake, he will slaughter countless people, only to die at the hands of the female lead.]

I picked up the boy and took him in as my younger brother.

Even later, when I finally met the female lead, I felt an unavoidable, murderous intent the moment I saw her.

Xie Changhui took my hand. “Shaohua, wake up. Think about who you are.”

Who am I? I am a daughter of the Song Family, the child of a founding official, and a future female general. I am certainly not some tool meant to spend my life plotting and fighting against others.

I was never born to be harmless.

At three, I stabbed the young master next door in the eye with a hairpin, simply because he had peeped at my mother while she was bathing.

At five, I set fire to a theater, merely because I saw the troupe buying and selling children.

At ten, I secretly brought people with me and crippled the censor’s grandson.

Who told him to harass my elder sister in the street?

There were countless incidents like these… Later, I married a good man.

Everyone in his family was kind and decent, and I nearly died of boredom in the inner household.

When I was reborn on the day the Emperor granted marriages to my elder sister and me, I decisively swapped marriages with her.

In my previous life, less than two years after my sister married into the Duke’s Mansion, she passed away like a withered flower.

My sister had been reborn too.

With tears in her eyes, she said, “Second Sister, the Duke’s Mansion is a death trap! You can’t marry into it!” I was thrilled. “But… Sister, I was born a bad seed.”

On the day His Majesty traveled south to Jiangnan, the Empress Dowager took a liking to Miss Xu of the Xu Family in Yangcheng.

“Such a lovely, fresh-faced child ought to become a daughter-in-law of our imperial family.”

As she said this, the Empress Dowager’s gaze seemed to drift, intentionally or not, toward Fu Yanli at my side.

Fu Yanli was the current Fifth Prince, and also my husband.

Later, on the day Miss Xu was to be invested as consort, I stood at the palace gates, clinging to a sliver of hope. “Not even I may enter?”

The guards at the gate all knew me. One by one, they lowered their heads, not daring to meet my eyes. “The Empress Dowager said it wouldn’t matter if anyone else came, but Your Highness, as Crown Princess… you absolutely cannot enter the palace today.”

I nodded, returned to the manor, and picked up the bundle I had packed long ago.

The capital blazed with lights. All at once, I remembered Fu Yanli from that year, when everyone had turned their backs on him.

He had held me tightly, refusing to let go no matter what. “Jianxi, even if I die, I will never betray you.”

After disguising myself as a man and joining the army in my husband’s place, I failed to endure the loneliness and kept a lover on the side.

When the war ended and I returned home, I discovered that my husband had taken a concubine too.

Well, now I didn’t feel guilty anymore. We were even!

But then I saw that beautiful concubine.

I was utterly stunned.

Can someone please tell me why my lover had become my husband’s concubine?

I was fighting someone in the street when Young Madam took a liking to me on the spot.

She gave me fifty taels of silver and asked if I was willing to become her husband’s concubine.

They say a debt of recognition should be repaid with one’s body. Fair enough.

But was this really the way to repay it?

Still, I was desperately short on silver, so I gritted my teeth and agreed.

Only after entering the manor did I learn that my husband was introverted, my mother-in-law was tyrannical, and my sister-in-law was insufferably arrogant.

Young Madam hadn’t bought me back to serve anyone at all.

She had brought me into this family to be King Yan.

Meng Yuanxi and I were rescued from the fire at the same time.

But after we woke, her talent shocked the world, and her policy essays stirred the hearts of all who read them.

Even my fiancé, the Crown Prince, wanted to break off our engagement for her sake.

She said that in this world, she was destined to be the winner.

But I only said lazily, “After getting the chance to do it all over again, you still haven’t improved at all…”