Clever Protagonist

The first thing I did after being reborn was hurry back from the country estate to my father’s residence.

A young woman was kneeling inside.

Gloom shadowed her eyes; she was small and frail, her clothes patched over patches.

She was the daughter my father had conceived in a single night’s dalliance years ago.

In my previous life, she had married the tyrant in my place.

After winning his favor, she poisoned our entire family.

I spent twelve years as a ghost.

At first, I hated her bitterly.

Once I pieced together the truth, I could only pity her.

“Father, Mother.

I’ll marry him.”

I helped my younger half sister to her feet.

“His Majesty asked for me by name.

There’s no reason someone else should suffer in my place.

I’ll go.”

By the time Mother found me and brought me back to the palace, I was a farm girl.

My every gesture betrayed my lack of breeding.

People laughed at me.

She already had a brood of children, each precious as gold and jade.

She could scarcely be bothered to glance at me, while the girl who had taken my place was the darling of her heart.

Later, Mother went from empress to sovereign.

She simply sent me to a bitterly cold fief and left me to fend for myself.

After several years of frontier winds, just as my heart was giving up hope, an imperial edict arrived.

Mother commanded me to return to the palace and fulfill my duties as a loyal subject and a dutiful daughter.

But I already knew she was merely short of a princess to marry off for peace.

My subordinate was so excited that he sprayed spittle as he spoke.

“My lady, this summons gives us every right to return.

We will never have a better chance.”

For the first time, I did not tell him to be quiet.

I fled to Linjiang with my five-year-old sister.

We were close to starving when we met the kindhearted Steward Zhou.

“My mistress has been bedridden for a long time,” he told me.

“She wishes to adopt a daughter, someone to ease the loneliness of having no children.”

“Both your birth charts are compatible with hers.

One of you can be the young lady, but the other must be a maid.”

“Well, child?

Which will you choose?”

In my last life, I sold myself and sacrificed my dignity to keep my mother and younger sister alive.

Once my sister grew up, she despised me for it.

“If you hadn’t been involved with Master Su, how could such a wonderful marriage have fallen through?

Young Master Su liked me so much.

He was going to marry me.”

She had forgotten that Master Su was my first patron.

That night, I had swallowed my shame and gone to him only to pay for a doctor when she was burning with fever.

I, too, had a childhood sweetheart who had promised to marry me.

Later, Mother helped my sister poison me.

I died in agony in our own home.

Their tears fell on my face.

“The rest of us have to live.

We had no choice.”

When I was given another life, I woke on the very day of my sister’s fever.

Before my mother died, she left me a pair of love-gu.

She wanted me to use them on the young General Li when he returned to the capital in triumph.

He was the husband she had chosen for me after painstaking consideration.

And so I spent three years trailing after Li Wujin.

The cold, stern young general held me beneath the moon and said he would ask the emperor to grant us a marriage.

The next day, a eunuch arrived at our house with imperial decrees.

One was for me.

One was for my elder sister, the legitimate daughter.

She would soon marry Li Wujin.

I was promised to his deputy.

To raise the bride price for my brother, my parents sold me to a system.

I would be sent into a historical romance novel.

Complete its mission, and I would receive 300,000 yuan.

The good news was that the system offered me a special ability.

The bad news was that it was called “Guaranteed to Bear Sons.”

When I frowned, the system spoke.

[Host, the ability I’ve given you is exceptionally useful in ancient times.]

Only after I arrived did I learn that the novel was called The Leased Wife.

Its heroine was hired out to wealthy households to bear them sons, one after another.

The silver she earned paid for her husband’s examinations and official career.

In the end, he rose to prominence, and she emerged triumphant, an officially titled lady.

The system told me: [There are only two mandatory conditions for completing the mission—] [First: retain your status as a leased wife and give birth to three sons.]

[Second: help your husband become an official of the first rank.]

[Fail either condition, and you will be erased.]

[You have no more than ten years in this world, Host.

Good luck.]

I listened, my eyes darkening.

“Nothing else matters?”

The system was in a hurry to collect its next host.

[Correct.

Nothing else matters.]

I gave a cold laugh.

An idea was taking root.

If I wanted to return to the modern world, I had no choice but to complete the mission.

But if I had to swallow my disgust and do these things, I would not suffer the humiliation for nothing.

I would use it to climb into power and destroy this vile practice of wife leasing.

Even if it was only a fictional institution in a novel.

It was feudal, twisted, and brutal, built on women’s blood and tears.

It should never have existed.

I won my husband, Yang Dongye, with thirty wontons.

His family had fallen on hard times, and I was a notorious old maid: plain, fiery-tempered, and perfectly capable of keeping a household standing.

He wanted someone capable; I wanted someone young and handsome.

After several happy years, his family was exonerated—and his former fiancée came running from the capital.

The whole capital knows Zhao Qingzhi as a jealous woman.

Only young General Pei dares to marry her, declaring that a man who can catch tigers and kill bandits has no reason to fear a fiery wife.

After the wedding, he proudly tells his friends he has tamed her.

But one friend knows the truth: the maid Zhao Qingzhi had beaten was her father’s illegitimate daughter, and the story behind her jealousy is far more painful than the rumors suggest.

Humiliated by the correction, the young general decides to prove who rules his household.

The next day, he brings that very maid home.

On my first day in the palace, I told my own fortune.

A west wind slipped along the foot of the wall, lifting three dead leaves.

Two fell into the gutter; one landed on my shoe.

I studied that leaf for a long while and reached a conclusion: Don’t compete.

Stay alive.

Excellent.

I decided on the spot that, from that day forward, I would be a layabout with principles.

I was born with a honeyed tongue.

I knew how to win people over.

As a child, I coaxed my father’s wife from despising me into loving me as her own.

After I married, I charmed my icy mother-in-law into treating me like her own daughter.

But it didn’t work on my husband.

He had a woman he loved and could not have.

In two years of marriage, he had never so much as touched a finger of mine.

Once again, at my mother-in-law’s bidding, I took a nourishing soup to his study and tried to coax him into sharing my bed.

He shoved me away in disgust and flung the soup aside.

“Wen Xiaoxiao, spare me your honeyed words and hidden knives.”

“I’d sooner die than touch you.”

Oh, well.

There really was nothing I could do.

If he wouldn’t be charmed, I would simply have to charm someone else.