Arranged Marriage

The Han army captured Luoyang. My husband, His Majesty himself, knelt at the rebels’ feet, trembling like a lamb waiting for slaughter.

“The Empress is in Jiaofang Hall. Please, don’t kill me…”

I had been married to him for five years and had given birth to our daughter, Princess Heqing.

Yet at the moment of crisis, he offered me up without the slightest hesitation.

In the tenth year after I married Pei Yan, he made my legitimate elder sister his empress.

Then he ordered me to feed a gu with my own body to cure her poison.

“Yuanyuan, it is only a Forget-Sorrow Gu. Wouldn’t it be nice to forget all your worries?”

It did sound nice.

So, right in front of him, I swallowed that Forget-Sorrow Gu. Just as he wished, I began to “forget sorrow.”

I forgot how he had demoted me from wife to concubine.

I forgot the bowl of abortifacient medicine he had bestowed upon me.

I forgot that I had once loved him more than life itself.

Later, bewildered, I asked my maid,

“His Majesty is so strange.

“I smiled at him, didn’t I? So why was he still crying?”

My younger sister eloped with a penniless scholar, and her cold-hearted fiancé broke down my door, demanding that I take her place.

I was so scared I clutched my waistband and begged for mercy.

“Brother-in-law, how can you blame this on me?”

The two cinnabar moles beneath his eyes were as red as blood, and his tone was utterly indifferent.

“An elder sister is like a mother. In other words, every grievance has its culprit, and every debt has its debtor.”

“So, are you coming with me on your own, or am I dragging you away?”

Th-thrilling. Was this the domineering forced-love plot they wrote about in storybooks?

The weak could not fight the strong, so I was just about to get out of bed when I realized my sister had run off wearing the only pair of padded winter pants in the house.

Left with no choice, I lay right back down.

“Forget it. It’s freezing out, so let’s not move.”

“If you’re going to seize me, then seize me. Hurry up, while the blankets are still warm…”

“…”

-A laid-back heroine who sleeps through the abduction x an action-oriented hero who carries on abducting while she sleeps.

On the day I was deposed and consigned to the Cold Palace, Yan Yuheng came personally to see me off.

Before the palace gates were locked, he asked whether I hated him.

I touched the old gold hairpin hidden in my sleeve and smiled. For three years as Empress, I learned to speak like her, to carry myself like her, and to love him the way she once had.

But even as I was dying, he never understood: I was never like Shen Zhaotang. I had only acted too well.

The way I went from a Little Beggar to the Heir Apparent’s fiancée felt like a dream.

That day, I was crouched on the ground, gnawing on a coarse corn bun while watching two nobles argue.

They were like a pair of fighting roosters. It made for excellent dinner entertainment.

The Girl in Red sneered. “I would rather marry a fool or an idiot than ever marry a useless good-for-nothing like you!”

The Brocade-clad Youth roared back, “I would rather marry a chicken, marry a duck…” Halfway through, he pointed at me.

“I’d rather marry this Little Beggar than ever marry you!”

The Girl in Red looked at my dazed, foolish expression and laughed from sheer anger.

Her voice went taut as she said, “Fine! If you don’t marry her, you’re a cowardly bastard!”

On the day my elder sister died of illness, I took my nephew to the Marquis’s Mansion to claim kinship.

The Second Young Master of the Marquis’s Mansion was in the middle of his wedding, and the place was bustling with celebration.

When the Marchioness saw the jade pendant I brought out, she nearly fainted.

She hid behind a screen and, suppressing her anger, said, “If the Chancellor’s Daughter finds out about the evil deed he committed, this marriage will be ruined!”

An old nanny offered her advice in a low voice.

“Madam, don’t panic. Back then, the Second Young Master said that woman had been drugged and never saw his face clearly.

“It was only because he left in such a hurry that he dropped this family heirloom jade pendant and gave someone leverage over him.

“Since this woman has come looking for us, we can simply pin the whole matter on the Eldest Young Master.”

I had possessed astonishingly sharp hearing since childhood, so I heard every word of their little conspiracy.

In truth, whether it was the Eldest Young Master or the Second Young Master made no difference to me.

It did not matter who became my husband.

What mattered was that my nephew would have a good place to study.

The Marquis Manor Clan School had a great scholar of the current dynasty presiding over it.

It would not waste his natural gifts.

After stepping into a giant footprint out in the wilderness… I got pregnant.

It was such an outrageous thing that, naturally, my mother refused to believe it.

She slapped me across the face right off the bat and demanded to know which man I’d been sneaking into the woods with.

I clutched my cheek and didn’t dare make a sound.

In an attempt to salvage a little dignity, Mother had me put on a Heaven’s Headdress, implying that this child had no father and was a gift from the heavens.

Who would have thought that, as dusk approached, people really did descend from the sky?

Every last one of them was bristling with righteous fury, their eyes red-rimmed, looking even more wronged than I did.

“My Lord was born divine. He is the King of the State, and the Universal Lord besides. How could he possibly have anything to do with some village woman from the countryside?”

“Speak. What exactly did you do?!”

Thinking back to that enormous, awe-inspiring footprint from last night, I was completely bewildered.

“Me? I just… shivered on top of it?” -After Stepping on the God’s Footprint This story is adapted from the ancient myth of “the Jiang Maiden conceiving after stepping in a footprint.”

Basically, it’s a story about the female lead raising a child, the male lead also raising a child, or the two of them raising a child together.

My fiancé returned from the front, and with him he brought a woman.

She wore a long crimson robe, a curved saber fastened at her waist. She rode in through the city gates on horseback, bold and dazzling, like the wild azaleas that set the mountains ablaze in spring.

“So this is the kind of girl Ning Zhen likes.” She folded her arms and looked me over, one brow lifting. There was no telling from her tone whether she was pleased or displeased.

Ning Zhen only glanced at her helplessly. “A childhood promise can hardly be taken seriously.”

What a fine thing to say-a childhood promise could hardly be taken seriously.

I had waited three years for him, only to be given those words.

At the family banquet, my father brought home an illegitimate daughter.

She wore a little formal dress that didn’t quite fit and hid timidly behind him.

“Hello, Sister.” My father patted her on the head.

“Good girl. Your sister has a bad temper, so sit next to Dad.”

As she passed by me, she accidentally stepped on the hem of my dress and tripped in front of everyone.

My father shot me a glare. “She’s your younger sister. Don’t bully her.”

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.