Character Growth

It was the eighth year of my unrequited love for Shen Sui, and he still refused to acknowledge me as his fiancée.

He had me pulled from the red carpet just to please his Little Canary.

In front of the media, the same mouth that had kissed me a thousand times claimed that we were nothing more than ordinary friends.

Later, I looked him in the eye and said seriously:

“Don’t pull away. Otherwise, we won’t look like ordinary friends.”

His eyes rimmed with red, and his voice trembled as he spoke:

“I’m just an ‘ordinary friend’ to you?”

On the day His Majesty traveled south to Jiangnan, the Empress Dowager took a liking to Miss Xu of the Xu Family in Yangcheng.

“Such a lovely, fresh-faced child ought to become a daughter-in-law of our imperial family.”

As she said this, the Empress Dowager’s gaze seemed to drift, intentionally or not, toward Fu Yanli at my side.

Fu Yanli was the current Fifth Prince, and also my husband.

Later, on the day Miss Xu was to be invested as consort, I stood at the palace gates, clinging to a sliver of hope. “Not even I may enter?”

The guards at the gate all knew me. One by one, they lowered their heads, not daring to meet my eyes. “The Empress Dowager said it wouldn’t matter if anyone else came, but Your Highness, as Crown Princess… you absolutely cannot enter the palace today.”

I nodded, returned to the manor, and picked up the bundle I had packed long ago.

The capital blazed with lights. All at once, I remembered Fu Yanli from that year, when everyone had turned their backs on him.

He had held me tightly, refusing to let go no matter what. “Jianxi, even if I die, I will never betray you.”

My stepmother had been my mom’s best friend, and she had always doted on me.

She spoiled me so thoroughly that Dad became utterly disappointed in me and turned to grooming his stepdaughter instead.

After Dad died, my stepmother swallowed up the inheritance and threw me out of the house.

I died on the streets one snowy night.

When I opened my eyes again, my stepmother was secretly stuffing money into the hands of my soon-to-be second-year high school self.

“Don’t worry about your dad. I support you studying music and chasing your dreams.”

The world is one giant slapdash production, and I somehow drift through it anyway.

My father is a financial tycoon, but I can barely handle addition and subtraction under ten. My mother is a gorgeous award-winning actress, while I look perfectly ordinary. My brother held his first solo art exhibition at four, while at five I was still toddling after him babbling nonsense.

Even our maid, Wang Ma, and our butler, Uncle Chen, turned out to be retired legends hiding in plain sight.

Thankfully, all of them adored me. I slowly made peace with being ordinary.

Then one day, a genius girl who had gone viral online showed up at our door and demanded that I give her back her place as the real daughter of the Su family.

Wonderful. The worry that had been hanging over me for years finally dropped dead.

In the year I was desperately poor, I deliberately fed two of my fingers into the factory machinery and had them crushed, all for the thirty thousand yuan my grandmother needed for surgery.

The factory manager frowned with such pain that he wanted to compensate me eighty thousand yuan. I was too guilty to take it, so I only asked for thirty thousand.

Years passed. My grandmother had been gone for many years.

Then I saw a trending news report: the factory from back then had been swallowed by a fire.

The factory manager had died of a heart attack. His wife had vanished.

Their twelve-year-old son had been sent to an orphanage.

Looking at those helpless, terrified eyes on the screen, I poured the medicine I had been about to swallow down the drain.

Then… let me live once more.

For that thirty thousand yuan from back then.

After being reborn, I met Song Shixing again.

He was slumped at the end of an alley, covered in wounds and barely clinging to life.

I knew that in three years, he would become the ruler who stood at the pinnacle of the world.

And I would be his empress. Power and riches would all be within my grasp.

But this time, I didn’t want to save him.

Song Shixing, in this life, I don’t want anything to do with you ever again.

Chapter 0

“Jiejie, I’m bored of this.” Qi Sen rolled over and got up from the sofa, chin raised as he spoke to me with an arrogant attitude.

I froze, instinctively covering the buttons of my shirt. “Okay.”

“Okay?”

“It’s too late now, a taxi is too expensive,” I said, reaching for the bag tossed by the table and pulling out my phone to check the time. “You can leave tomorrow morning.”

I am the pampered little fake heiress who was driven out to the countryside.

To go from the young lady of Marquis Manor to a carpenter’s eldest daughter-there is simply no living like this!

In order to return to the noble circles of Capital City, I set my sights on the scholar next door.

Standing on a ladder, I waved my handkerchief coquettishly over the wall.

“Hey~ I heard you’re my fiancé?”

The man chopping firewood with his upper body bare slowly turned to look at me.

In an indifferent voice, he said, “I am Lin Jiaoyue’s fiancé.”

Everyone said I was blessed by fate.

Born behind vermilion gates, I rested my head on jade and wrapped myself in brocade.

At three, I began my education, studying essays on how to govern the realm.

At five, I held an abacus, calculating the empire’s grain and coin.

At twelve, I debated the scholars in the clan school and, though I was a girl, took first place above them all.

At fifteen, during my coming-of-age banquet, warlords from three regions offered mountains and rivers as my betrothal gifts.

And yet, I chose the hardest road of all.

The day I eloped with a lowly soldier who guarded the city gate, the entire city laughed at me for debasing myself.

After one night of passion, I was stricken from the Yin Clan’s rolls, my spotless reputation ruined.

No one knew that the soldier was the last surviving bloodline of the imperial house.

They were fighting for the realm.

What I was fighting for was the right to take history’s iron brush in hand and rewrite the world with a name that could not be questioned.

It was the fourth year of my relationship with Fu Jingsen.

He had grown tired of my dullness and lack of change.

A young, trendy girl had successfully seduced him, leaving him infatuated.

Yet, he told his friends,

“It’s just a little fling to try something new.”

“When it comes to marriage, of course, you still choose a Good Girl like Shen Ci.”

With the wedding fast approaching, everyone urged me to consider the bigger picture.

However, Chen Xu, the most notorious playboy in our social circle, stopped me. “Hey, Good Girl, do you dare to be rebellious for once?”

At the wedding three days later, Fu Jingsen stared at the hickey on the side of my neck. He was so furious that he couldn’t even hold his bouquet steady.

I gave him a faint smile.

“Just trying something fresh. Why are you so angry?”

“Only after trying it did I realize how boring you actually are. You don’t have nearly as many tricks as he does.”