Ancient China

In my last life, I saved He Yan, the young master of a marquis manor.

He took me as his wife, and for a time, our marriage was the talk of Shangjing.

But I had been born and raised in the countryside.

My manners were crude, and my reputation gradually soured.

He Yan, too, slowly grew distant from me.

I wept day after day, and before I even reached thirty, I died in misery.

Given a second chance, I swore I would never live that way again.

Only, after eating wild greens for three days straight, I realized I simply could not let go of the marquis manor’s soy-braised pork knuckle, sticky rice chicken, crab roe lion’s head meatballs, scallion-fried lamb…

The newly crowned top scholar accidentally swallowed the love gu I had meant for my absent husband.

To keep him alive, I had to share his bed every seven days until the antidote arrived.

What began as mutual resentment slowly turned dangerously tender—just as my husband, General Zhou Hanchuan, returned and recognized me as the woman he had never forgotten.

Now one man refuses to let me go, the other refuses to grant me a divorce, and I am trapped between two rivals who would sooner kill each other than give me up.

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 have a secret: eight years ago, I was married.

Originally, I planned to take that secret with me to the grave.

Then I ran into my former husband, Hang Lanque, in Shangjing.

I asked Hang Lanque, “Husband, didn’t you say you were going to the borderlands to repair city walls and earn money to buy me a hairpin?”

Hang Lanque replied, “Wife, didn’t you say you were going to the capital to dance and earn money to buy me a fine horse?”

Excellent. I am now prepared to send him to the grave along with this secret.

I grew up in the countryside until I was seventeen. Then people from the capital came and told me I was the young lady of a marquis’s household.

But the moment I arrived in the capital, they hurriedly married me off to a spoiled wastrel.

Later, that wastrel caused a disaster and had his family estate confiscated. I was the only one who tossed him a sickle and said,

“Husband, come home with me and farm the fields.”

After I transmigrated into a household-intrigue novel…

My mother-in-law demanded that I follow the rules and get up early to serve her tea.

I couldn’t get up. So that very night, I slipped her a sleeping pill.

Then I made sure she slept in with me until the sun was high in the sky.

I thought I was going to be severely punished.

But then floating comments appeared before my eyes: [Haha, this is the first time in decades that Madam Qin has slept this long. She’s feeling refreshed and in a great mood right now.]

[She never got enough sleep before. No wonder she had such a bad temper.]

[Modern technology really is amazing. It directly eased the insomnia and anxiety that Madam Qin spent a fortune trying and failing to cure for years.]

[The female lead really stumbled right into Madam Qin’s heart by accident.]

Me: ? Is this how it’s supposed to go?

I was a widow starved for a man.

While I was burning incense and praying for a good match, some villain broke into my boudoir.

I knocked him out with a vase.

Then I took a look and-oh. A beautiful man.

So I tied him up, hid him in my little courtyard, and had my way with him every day…

Later, he ran off.

When we met again, I knelt on the ground and stammered in terror, “Th-this humble woman greets His Royal Highness the Crown Prince…”

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.

I am the Empress.

The Emperor wished to take my maid as a concubine, claiming that any child she bore would be recorded under my name.

Later, the imperial physician informed me that I had been pregnant for a month.

I said to the Emperor, “In consideration of your many years without an heir, I shall have this child recorded under your name.”

Everyone in the capital said that a first-rank maid from the Prime Minister’s Residence was worth more than the daughter of a fifth-rank official.

As the personal maid to the prime minister’s daughter, I had followed the Fourth Young Lady since childhood, learning to read and write at her side.

I understood literature and ink, knew music, and was versed in arithmetic.

When I was nineteen, the merchant Wen Family of Qingzhou, eager to attach themselves to power, came specifically to ask for my hand-a mere maidservant’s-in marriage.

The Fourth Young Lady showed me grace, acknowledged me as her sworn younger sister, and married me off in splendor.

I had thought the inner courtyard of a merchant household would be simple. I never imagined its waters would run as deep as those of the Prime Minister’s Residence.

The Second Branch eyed the account books with envy, while the concubines banded together to put me in my place.

On the day I served tea to my elders, Concubine Zhou “accidentally” knocked over the teacup, and scalding water splashed across the hem of my newly tailored Su embroidery skirt.

I lightly brushed my fingers over the ruined twining lotus pattern on the fabric, then suddenly smiled.

Since some people insisted on throwing themselves onto the edge of a blade-

Then I would show them exactly what the methods of the Prime Minister’s Residence looked like.