Child Protagonist

In her previous life, Jin Bao was a little zombie king. After transmigrating, she became weak and helpless, beaten by an aunt and uncle who weren’t even related to her by blood.

By a twist of fate, she was bought by the Marchioness of Loyalty and Bravery. One moment, she had just become the legitimate daughter of the Marquis’s Mansion; the next, the entire household was destroyed, its property confiscated and the whole family sentenced to exile.

Jin Bao awakened a random Heavenly Eye, granting her glimpses of the past and future.

On the road to exile, while others gnawed on tree bark and dug up grass roots to survive, the people of the Marquis’s Mansion picked up gold, unearthed ginseng, and ate fluffy white steamed buns with roasted meat.

The path of exile was fraught with danger: assassinations, ambushes, plagues, swamps…

Guided by Jin Bao’s Heavenly Eye, they quietly defused every crisis, then turned around and sent their enemies a delightful surprise package.

Everyone believed the bitterly cold Northern Frontier was nothing but barren wasteland.

But Jin Bao led her family to build a city there, reclaim the land, open trade routes, and train soldiers.

When chaos engulfed the realm and the people were plunged into misery, the world finally realized that the great city of the Northern Frontier, once dismissed as a savage, desolate land, had become the only sanctuary under heaven.

A Little Spirit Mushroom has been reborn as a human-weak, pitiful, and recently orphaned with no home to call her own.

To get a bite to eat, a place to stay, and to settle her karmic debts, the Little Spirit Mushroom diligently (not really) became the personal maid of a powerful patron.

When her master worked, she slept. When her master had pastries, she stole them. When her master drank tea, she tasted it first. When her master was targeted by assassins, she was the first to run.

The Little Spirit Mushroom successfully annoyed her master and was punished with reflection against a wall.

But later, her master couldn’t bear to punish her anymore.

Finally, through her efforts, her patron helped her complete her revenge.

Her mission accomplished, the Little Mushroom prepared to retire, secretly asking her master to grant her a small territory where she could live out her days in peace.

However, once the Little Mushroom grew up, her master dragged her off to become the Empress.

The Little Mushroom sighed; being an Empress was even harder than being a mushroom.

I was born only five minutes before my little sister.

Yet she was prettier than me, fairer than me, smarter than me.

The only thing I had ever beaten her at was being healthy.

I could roll around in the mud throwing a tantrum and still not get sick.

My sister, though, was allergic to pollen in spring, mosquito bites in summer, and cold air in autumn and winter.

When I was nine, all I did was pet a stray cat.

My sister said she felt so awful she could not breathe.

That day, Mom beat me half to death.

With red-rimmed eyes, she asked me, “Were you trying to kill your sister?”

“If she dies, you’ll be the only child in this family!”

So later, Mom sent me to live in a nursing home.

She said it very seriously: “This way, your sister will be the only child in the family.”

In my last life, Xie Wujiu stormed the capital, and blood ran like rivers before the palace gates. In this life, before he could fall into darkness, I forced him into a private school and made him recite The Analects every day.

Only later did I understand: asking a starving person to speak of benevolence and righteousness can itself be cruel.

I am a bastard born of a concubine, yet I carry a face that could topple a kingdom.

When I was nine, a local thug tried to snatch me to make me his bride.

Mother risked her life to save me.

The next day, she took me through the streets and alleys of the capital for three hours, until every passerby had memorized my face.

Then she carried me to the gates of the Marquis of Pingyang Manor, knelt, and cried out:

“I, Lady Liu, a humble concubine, bore this girl for the Marquis on the ninth day of the twelfth month nine years ago in Apricot Blossom Alley, west of the suburbs. The neighbors can all attest to it.

“I know my lowly station and dare not ask for a title. I can only trade my death for the Marquis to acknowledge this child and raise her within the household!”

With that, she slammed her head against the stone lion at the gate and breathed her last.

My mother exchanged her life for my place in the Marquis’s household.

And she let the entire capital know that I am a bastard born of a kept woman.

I’m the daughter of the heroine in an angsty novel.

When I was four, I finally understood those strange bullet comments:

[The heroine is still desperately staying up late, working to make money and support her daughter. She has no idea she already has cancer. If this drags on, her child is going to lose her mother!]

[If either the male lead or the female lead had just spoken up, there wouldn’t have been a “running away while pregnant” plot at all.]

[Their daughter is the real pitiful one. Her mother dies when she’s only six. The male lead never even learns the heroine died after giving birth to his daughter, and he spends the rest of his life alone.]

[And the most miserable one is our Xiao Bao. She obviously has a rich dad, yet she still gets sent to the orphanage…]

Mom was going to die?

I stared at my gentle, beautiful mother in shock. No way!

They may not speak up, but I do!

On a warm afternoon, outside an office building, I spotted a man in a sharp suit and threw my arms around his leg.

“Dad, send money! I need to save Mom!”

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.

My father was famous throughout the surrounding villages for being a good man.

One freezing winter during a famine, he gave the last of our rice to a mother and child passing by.

After they left, they told everyone they met that my family still had grain.

The starving refugees, driven mad by hunger, came to our door to steal it, only to find an empty rice jar.

Humiliated and enraged, they forced my three-year-old sister into their arms and carried her away.

“If there’s no rice, then your daughter will do!”

I ran after them. In the end, all I found in the ruined temple was my sister’s mangled remains.

When I returned home, my father wailed through his tears, “I was trying to save people! It’s not my fault… That was just her fate!”

He saved someone else. In the end, my sister died, and I died too, in the bitter winter when I was fifteen.

When I opened my eyes again, I saw my father handing the freshly cooked rice to that mother and child.

I picked up the flower hoe beside me and stepped up behind him.

After my mother got divorced, she became the fiercest woman in the village.

She often cursed at me, “If I didn’t have you dragging me down, I would’ve remarried some rich man long ago.”

Behind her back, the villagers gossiped, “She can’t get anyone to marry her, so she uses her daughter as an excuse.”

My father mocked her even more. “With your mother’s firecracker temper, and since she can’t even give birth to a son, the only man who’d want her is one with four sons who can’t find wives.”

Later, a small business owner really did want to marry my mother.

Then my father regretted it. “Yufen, let’s get married again. The three of us can live a proper life together.”

Dad didn’t like me. I knew this from a very young age.

Because I wasn’t the boy he wanted.

To have a son, he sent me away, saying, “Sons are the roots, and I don’t lack daughters.”

Never having been loved, I was upset about it for a long time.

But when it came time for him to need support in his old age, he said, “Sons are unreliable; daughters are the most caring.”

“Second Sister, when Dad gets old, it’ll all be up to you!”