Character Growth

I was my birth parents’ third child.

While my birth mother was pregnant with me, the village fortune-teller swore I would be a boy.

They could hardly wait.

They hid from place to place throughout the pregnancy and finally brought me into the world in the bitter cold of the twelfth lunar month—

a girl.

My mother was a farm girl who couldn’t read a single character, yet she still supported my father all the way until he passed the provincial examination.

On the day my father married the Prime Minister’s legitimate daughter, my mother obediently became his equal wife.

My father thought my mother loved him, which made her easy to control.

My father’s principal wife thought my mother, born and raised in the countryside, could never be a match for her.

And so, beneath their contempt, my mother played the fool while hiding her claws, raising me into someone whose worth was beyond measure.

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…

Qiao Xiaohe knows from the beginning that Jiang Haozhi is a wealthy heir pretending to be a poor delivery worker.

Lonely and exhausted by debt, she accepts his false romance because even borrowed companionship feels like a gift.

But when the truth comes out, Haozhi discovers that his game became real for him long before Xiaohe was ready to choose herself.

Walking away gives her the chance to build a life where happiness is something she creates, not something she begs another person to provide.

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.

After my husband’s favored concubine shoved me into a deep well, I miscarried. As crimson blood spread through the water, I heard a strange melody rise from the depths.

“Third Set of National Middle School Students’ Radio Gymnastics, Dancing Youth, begins now.”

The friends of the Crown Prince of the Beijing Circle were always laughing at me for being a hick, saying I wasn’t even worthy of being a stand-in for his white moonlight.

They even predicted that I’d be packing up and leaving in less than a month.

I panicked and immediately summoned my seven older sisters for emergency training in the art of being a white moonlight substitute.

Even if I got fired, there was no way I was letting such a cushy gig fall into an outsider’s hands!

Then, a year later, the white moonlight returned to the country. The moment the crown prince saw her face-he threw up.

Trembling, he said, “I’m sick of it. So sick of it. For the rest of my life, I never want to see that face again!”

My rich-girl deskmate introduced me to a summer part-time job: tutoring her younger male cousin.

She said he had masochistic tendencies.

The harsher I was with him, the better he listened.

So I raised my Meow Combo Punch.

“Dharma Cultivation Sanda!”

I disciplined that cousin straight into the advanced class.

The rich girl stared at the school bully in shock.

“Which cousin of mine have you been tutoring?!”

After my fiancé, Xie Zhao, left on a long journey, I wrote him two letters asking him to make a decision.

The first was about my stepsister, who wanted my betrothal goose and had been crying and throwing tantrums over it.

The second was about his younger brother, who had taken a fancy to me and was being far too attentive and far too hard to shake off.

Xie Zhao had never liked my meek, timid nature to begin with. He had always wanted to call off this engagement.

So on the very day I sent the second letter, he had an old man bring me a message:

“Since she wants it, just indulge her.

“She’s young and doesn’t know any better. Surely you do?”

W-who was he talking about?

Seeing that I suspected him of delivering the wrong message, the old man lost his temper too.

“From ancient times to now, I’ve heard of giving away a wife, but never of giving away a betrothal goose!

“Besides, Second Young Master Xie is half a month younger than your sister.

“He obviously means for you to marry someone else!”

The woman who lived across from us was beautiful, with a captivating, mature allure.

Every man in the building was bewitched by her. Only my husband scoffed.

But when the elevator suddenly plunged,

he completely forgot about me and our daughter. He turned around and pulled her tightly into his arms.

So tightly it was as if he wanted to press her into his own body.