Arranged Marriage

In my tenth year as a beggar, I was so hungry I had wrapped myself around a tree and started gnawing on its bark when a young lord in brocade appeared and promised to take me to Chang’an to live in luxury.

Tears filled my eyes at once.

I knew this plot: he had to be some poor boy I once saved, now rich and powerful and eager to repay me.

I hurled myself at him and cried, “Husband!”

The young lord nearly did the splits trying to escape.

“Shut your mouth,” he shouted, “I’m your real brother!”

The night I went to collect Prince Jing’s corpse, I saw my own jade bracelet and sleeping robe inside the coffin. My husband, returned from the dead, choked me and said, “Lanyin, die once in my place.”

When I opened my eyes again, I had returned to three months ago. This time, I will be the one collecting their corpses first.

Before I married into the Eastern Palace, I secretly kept a man in Jiangnan behind the Crown Prince’s back.

He had broad shoulders, a narrow waist, and worked hard in bed.

His only flaw was that he bragged far too much.

He was plainly a rough country man, yet he spoke of imperial treasures with utter disdain.

He claimed the Cloud-Mist tea reserved for the imperial family tasted like swill and that he used it to feed his cattle.

Rubies worth a fortune, he said, had been nothing but marbles to him as a child.

Even when I decided to leave him, he kept boasting.

Kneeling at my feet with both arms wrapped around my legs, he begged, “Weiwei, don’t go. I’ll make you Crown Princess!”

I rolled my eyes at him. “I have no interest in being Crown Princess.”

He stared at me in shock and muttered, “Weiwei, how are you even better at bragging than I am?”

Later, I married into the Eastern Palace. I heard the Crown Prince had long cherished another woman in his heart.

Though he had lost his memory, he had remained chaste for her.

He told me coldly, “I do not love you. Expect nothing from me.”

I blinked at that familiar face. Even after he crouched down to wash my feet, he still could not make sense of it.

With an adorably baffled look, he asked, “What’s going on? How come I’m so good at taking care of you?”

I am the best cook in the capital. No one has ever said my food was bad.

That is, until my noble ex-fiancé-the one who broke off our engagement-ate a meal I prepared.

“This tastes awful. It’s a good thing I didn’t marry you.”

I calmly packed away the bowls and chopsticks. “It’s your Last Meal Before Execution. You’re still being picky?”

That’s right. I am a cook who specializes in delivering the Last Meal Before Execution to death row prisoners.

Everyone knew that Fu Shengchao, the titan of the Beijing Circle, loved his wife more than life itself.

On the day she died in a car accident, his hair turned white overnight.

From then on, he grew more and more violent, and his relationship with his son became increasingly distant.

Father and son ended up treating each other like enemies.

Later, Fu Shengchao finally relented and agreed to find his son a stepmother.

I was among the candidates.

When our cooking skills were tested, everyone else presented delicacies fit for a banquet. I served a plate of stinky tofu.

When our talents were tested, everyone else showed off music, chess, calligraphy, and painting. I performed a set of tai chi.

When our knowledge of Fu Shengchao was tested, everyone else praised his abilities and glorious past achievements.

I leaned in and said, “CEO Fu, you have a mole on your left butt cheek.”

Fu Shengchao: “…”

That very night, I was kept behind.

Fu Shengchao pressed a gun to my temple, his expression cold.

“Talk. Who sent you?”

I dropped to my knees at once, but my eyes darted to the side.

Over there, a female ghost who had been dead for ten years was flying around in a panic. “That shouldn’t have happened! Everything I taught you was right!”

Bullshit! She also said her husband was cold on the outside but kind on the inside, and easy to coax!

Nan Jinping was an unfavored concubine-born daughter of the Nan Family.

To escape the fate of being sent by the principal wife to become a powerful nobleman’s concubine, she searched everywhere for a marriage that might keep her alive.

At the Bamboo Grove Elegant Gathering, she provoked Wang Yu, the aloof and distinguished legitimate son of the Langya Wang Clan; later, during the turmoil at Hong’en Temple, a twist of fate led her to save his life.

After that, as the world descended into chaos and friends and family were scattered, Nan Jinping rushed from place to place to save her maid, Xiao Mei, and ventured deep into danger to find Wang Yu.

Under the crushing weight of life and death, and of social rank, the two gradually developed feelings for each other.

When the realm was thrown into upheaval and the glory of the old clans collapsed, she finally went from a concubine-born daughter at the mercy of others to someone capable of choosing where she belonged.

On the second day of the tenth lunar month, the great warlord Lu Zhi took a second concubine: Song Anran, the youngest daughter of the chairman of the Shanghai Chamber of Commerce.

Lu Zhi had made a name for himself in recent years.

He had won battle after battle, commanded a formidable army, and wielded immense power—but surely not so much that the chairman of the Shanghai Chamber of Commerce would deliver his own daughter to him as a concubine.

Oh, but it was.

My father did exactly that.

I used every trick in the book to marry my wife.

In front of others, she refused to acknowledge me. Behind closed doors, she kept me at an even colder distance.

I knew she hated me.

But I could live with being hated by her.

Until one afternoon, at the dining table, she suddenly said to me, “He’s back from overseas. We… should spend some time apart.”

I froze.

From the day my wife and I met until now, seven years had passed.

And I still hadn’t managed to warm her heart.

Looking at her indifferent face, I was suddenly overcome with exhaustion. “Okay.”

She had always been efficient and decisive. That very night, the villa was emptied out, leaving only me behind… She had even taken the housekeeper with her.

I drank beneath the moon until dawn, yet my mind only grew clearer.

I had waited all these years. Suffered all these years. What right did I have to give up now?

Who the hell did some bastard back from overseas think he was, daring to compete with me?!

On the night of my wedding, the Queen ordered her guards to pin me down and force those Glass Slippers back onto my bleeding feet. She said that if the shoes were not sated by my blood before the thirteenth bell toll of midnight, she would carve out my heart to feed the mirror. The entire hall waited for me to become a Princess Consort, but only the groom, Su Zhichuan, leaned in and whispered into my ear, his voice trembling and hoarse. He said, “Don’t believe in fairy tales. Kill me before dawn, or you’ll be the one who dies.”

My husband—an arranged match—and my boyfriend had swapped bodies.

But I didn’t know.

All I knew was that my husband had been very happy lately.

Something about finally being official.

My boyfriend wasn’t nearly so brooding anymore, either.

He kept saying things like, “As long as it’s the man I am now that you love.”

Until one day.

My boyfriend asked me when I was getting divorced.