Betrayal

I met someone named Chen Ye.

Everyone says he is loyal, kind, and a rare good person in this world.

But I think he is vulgar, hypocritical, and the most despicable and shameless scoundrel in the world.

Yet I kind of like him.

As the School Belle, I swapped souls with the fattest and poorest girl in the whole school.

We exchanged secrets, shared our lives, and tried hard to return to our original selves.

Until one day, she disappeared.

The teacher said her whole family had moved abroad.

I saw her again ten years later.

She was standing beside my Childhood Sweetheart, having become the CEO’s Wife.

On the day I died, Xiao Xu was about to make another woman his empress.

He came to the Cold Palace, hoping I would swallow my pride and yield to him. What greeted him was only my ice-cold corpse.

For reasons no one could explain, Xiao Xu broke down. He did one deranged thing after another, and every day he wept blood before my grave.

In the end, he got his wish and was reborn a thousand years later.

In the twenty-first century, Xiao Xu and I were classmates.

He was still dazzling. Still exceptional.

He was looking for me.

But he didn’t know that I had been reborn too, with all my memories intact.

My husband absolutely loathed his new graduate student.

He even went so far as to cause a scene in front of the Dean, demanding that she be transferred to another research group.

He claimed she was morally corrupt and a disgrace to academia.

That was, until the fire alarm went off. His custom-made suit was soaked through as he draped it over her head.

He pushed past me, carrying her in his arms like a princess as he rushed down the stairs.

After five years of marrying into my family, my penniless scholar husband passed the imperial exam-and suddenly decided I, his butcher wife, reeked of grease and blood.

For half a month, he hemmed and hawed and refused to do his husbandly duties.

So I used the silver I’d earned selling pork to buy him two ink sticks and a ream of fine paper, then scraped together the last of my coins for a tiny bar of scented soap.

When I made it home through the rain, the big yellow dog under the eaves had one of the meat dumplings I’d wrapped dangling from its mouth.

From inside the house came a coy, wheedling voice.

“Father, the magistrate’s daughter smells so nice. Not like Mother.”

“And these pastries taste better than meat dumplings too.”

I took all the bits and pieces I’d hidden against my chest and threw them out-along with the father and son.

When Zheng Huaishu signed the divorce papers, he held our son in his arms and glared at me with resentment.

All the neighbors in the village laughed at me for letting a future official go.

The very next day, the matchmaker introduced me to a fair, slender stutterer.

A little girl trailed behind him.

Father and daughter gave me timid looks.

I asked irritably, “How often can you do your husbandly duties?”

“And how much meat will you eat in a day?”

The stutterer’s face turned bright red. The matchmaker yanked his clothes down over half his shoulder, and he said in a slow, gentle voice, “As long as my child gets a mouthful of rice… as her father, I’ll do anything…”

After I went blind, lines of broken, disjointed text began to appear before my eyes.

[The princess is so pitiful. She injured her eyes saving her cousin, but right now, that very cousin is next door, rolling around in bed with the princess’s brother.]

[Too bad the princess can’t see. If she could, she should immediately bring people over and catch them in the act.]

My cousin had lost her mother when she was young.

The Empress Mother pitied her and had her enter the palace to serve as my study companion.

But several of my imperial brothers were always bullying her.

They liked seeing her teary-eyed, timid, and pitiful. I stood up for her, only to have my eyes injured by one of my imperial brothers.

I became blind. So it turned out that, behind my back, they had already become so intimate.

I did not go and catch them in the act as those lines wanted.

Instead, I had someone inform my other two imperial brothers.

My cousin was so pitiful. Surely she deserved a few more people to love her.

Later, I ascended the throne as Empress Regnant.

My cousin received the love of three of my imperial brothers.

All of us had bright futures ahead.

After Mom died, I began using the same manipulative tactics that the mistress once used to frame her, turning them against my father.

I watched as he was torn apart by public outcry. I watched him struggle to find words, his voice failing him. I watched as his eyes widened in shock, as if he no longer recognized me.

My heart felt heavy, yet I felt a surge of vindication. He doesn’t realize that without Mom, the Female Lead, his own halo as the Male Lead will eventually fade away.

We are both about to enter the world of ordinary people, a world full of stumbles and hardships.

When I married Pei Miao, everyone praised our union as a match made in heaven. Our honeymoon bliss lasted less than three months before I discovered he had a soulmate. Pei Miao cherished and adored her, even setting up a private residence for her outside our home. When I confronted him, he coldly rebuked me: jealousy was unbecoming of a virtuous wife. So I learned to be magnanimous, until I too stepped beyond the boundaries of marriage and forced him to taste the same pain he had given me.

I had been with my boyfriend for three years.

During that time, I discovered that his handle on every social media platform was July.

I assumed he simply had a deep-seated love for the romantic month of July, so I never pried into it.

It wasn’t until our wedding day, when his ex-girlfriend sent a gift, that I saw the name signed on the box-

Qi Yue.

In that moment, I finally understood. It wasn’t the month of July he cherished; it was Qi Yue.

My heart sank into an abyss…

Before the Divine Lord descended to the mortal realm to undergo his trials, he gave me his Little Carp as a love token.

To my surprise, the carp leaped out of the fish tank and followed him into the mortal world.

In my panic, I followed suit. Eighteen years later, amidst a vast expanse of heavy snow.

Standing atop the city walls, Crown Prince Wei fired an arrow that pierced straight through my bridal sedan.

“Yue Nu, it is you who are shameless, insisting on marrying me. I already have someone in my heart.”

The woman in red he held in his arms was that very Carp Spirit. I knew mortals could not see through her disguise.

To help him complete his trials, I stepped out of the sedan and entered the Wei Palace on foot.

Three years later, the Carp Spirit became pregnant, triggering a Heavenly Punishment.

Believing slanderous lies, Crown Prince Wei had me bound to the city walls to endure eighteen strikes of Heavenly Thunder in her stead.

At that moment, my heart turned to ash. I summoned Siming Jun. “Siming, it is time to return to the Nine Heavens.”