Character Growth

Three days after I married the Foolish Prince, he started making a fuss about moving out of the bedchamber.

I grabbed him and demanded to know why. Blushing, he stammered, “When Ah Heng sleeps with my wife, Ah Heng always wets the bed.”

My gaze slid downward, and realization struck me at once.

As I helped him, my own face burning, I couldn’t resist teasing him. “Only children wet the bed. Why is Your Highness just like a child?”

Later, the clingy fool recovered and became the cool, aloof prince he truly was.

Day and night, he pressed close to me, his breath warm against my ear. “Only children wet the bed, Princess Consort… Why are you just like a child?”

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?!”

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.

I am the unlucky princess who got thrown into the Cold Palace.

The people above gave me two choices: either become a eunuch’s palace wife, or marry a fool.

Without the slightest hesitation, I chose to marry the fool.

After all, he comes with an extra part. I’d be getting the better deal~

If I managed to ascend the throne, it was entirely thanks to my five short-lived older brothers.

Thanks to them, I now live like a beast of burden.

3:00 – Rise and wash up, then pay respects to the Empress Dowager.

4:00 – Morning lessons.

5:00 – Imperial Gate Audience.

7:00 – Breakfast.

8:00 – Handle state affairs and review memorials.

13:00 – Lunch.

14:00 – Riding and archery; inspect the princes’ studies.

15:00 – Handle state affairs.

17:00 – Free time.

19:00 – Evening lessons.

20:00 – Review memorials.

23:00 – Bedtime.

I am so done with this job!

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!”

In the unluckiest year of my life, a wandering Daoist priest came to town.

He gave my father an idea: have me worship a Household Guardian Immortal to suppress my bad luck, and maybe I would live past the age of ten.

My father was a rough man who had made his fortune in troubled times by the barrel of a gun.

He called his adjutant over and did the math for him. “One Household Guardian Immortal keeps her alive to ten, two keep her alive to twenty, and twenty keep her alive to two hundred. Right?”

The adjutant counted on his fingers. “Marshal, your math is absolutely correct.”

My father hardened his heart and rounded up all the pigs, cattle, and sheep from miles around as offerings.

“My damn girl is going to live ten thousand years!”

That year, my father rode into the old mountain forest on a pig with me and took eleven Household Guardian Immortal into our household.

He flew into a rage. “Damn it, that’s still one short of the twelve zodiac animals!”

Later, who knew where he bought a Daoist boy from, but that made the twelfth.

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.”

When a wealthy family came to the orphanage to choose a child, they wavered between me and Cheng Yun.

A barrage of comments scrolled before my eyes:

[The female supporting character is about to start acting pitiful again so she can get adopted.]

[Even if she does get adopted, she’ll just be abandoned later anyway.]

[She’ll spend her whole life hated by everyone, chasing what she can never have. Just another girl obsessed with competing against other girls.]

I silently lowered my head.

Because the “female supporting character” they were talking about was me.

Suddenly, two figures loomed over me.

A Northeastern couple who had never been mentioned in the plot looked down at me, their faces lighting up with surprise.

“Oh my goodness, look at this pretty little thing!”

“Sweetheart, your uncle and auntie are having pork and glass noodle stew at home today. Smells amazing. Wanna come back with us and have some?”

After Lin Min, a prodigy from Tsinghua University, dies in an accident, her soul takes over the body of Sun Shuyi, a bullied high school senior.

Faced with terrible grades, indifferent classmates, and a family in pieces, she relies on the elite abilities she once possessed to fight her way back to first place.

In this new body, she also begins, little by little, to repair Sun Shuyi’s life. As academic competitions, the college entrance exam, and the truth behind an old case draw ever closer, she must find her own rules for coming in first amid revenge, growth, and the chance to live all over again.