Court Official

I was in the middle of feeding the pigs in my village when I suddenly saw a Danmaku.

[Is this bystander the villain’s younger sister?]

[She still thinks she’s an orphan. She has no idea that the villainous Chancellor is actually the brother she got separated from back then.]

[It’s a pity the villain lost to the male lead. He’s about to hang himself.]

[The villain only became an official to find his sister in the first place. If they could just meet once, maybe he wouldn’t have to die.]

What?!

I immediately sold my pigs to scrape together some travel money and rushed to the Capital overnight.

I knocked on the gates of the Prime Minister’s Mansion.

A pale man draped in a heavy cloak stood at the entrance, his gaze deep and haunting.

I lunged forward and threw my arms around his legs, wailing, “Brother! Wang Ergou from the village is trying to force me to marry him!”

I was born a beggar.

Maybe some wealthy young lady had made a mistake, or maybe some brothel woman had simply had rotten luck.

Either way, I came into this world. I grew up begging for bowls of slop.

At my most wretched, I even fought mangy dogs for food.

Later, to stay alive, I sweet-talked a human trafficker into selling me into the palace.

On the day I entered the palace, I saw the red sun rising at the edge of the sky.

It looked just like the duck egg yolk that had once gone rolling and wobbling to my feet in the Drunken Fragrance Pavilion.

I smacked my lips and savored the memory for a moment, then turned and stepped onto that long, long palace road.

From a beggar hated by all, I became a palace maid within the towering imperial palace.

That year, I was nine.

Marquis Dingbei, Lu Chenzhou, had three wishes in life. First, a smooth career in court. Second, a prosperous household. Third, to marry the woman he loved. The first two were within easy reach. Only the third remained beyond him-unattainable, forbidden, inescapable. They said another man’s wife was not to be taken. But what if that woman was the wife he had divorced in his previous life?

I am the most indolent concubine in the Imperial Harem.

The Emperor is currently reading my Annual Slacker Report.

“This year, your name tag was flipped nineteen times. Of those, you were intercepted thirteen times. You actually served in the bedchamber six times, during three of which the Emperor couldn’t perform.”

“This year, you knelt over a thousand times. You called the Noble Consort a ‘bitch’ over ten thousand times, but the number of times you actually said it to her face was zero.”

“Do you remember the Mid-Autumn Banquet?”

“The talent you performed was balancing a pot of wine on your upturned backside, which resulted in half a month’s stipend being docked.”

“This year, your rank and salary have seen no change from last year. In fact, this situation has persisted for three years now.”

“Your keyword for this year is ‘Trash.’ Please keep it up next year.”

Oh no. Am I about to be slacked all the way into the Cold Palace?

I spent ten years in the imperial harem testing rouge, and not once did I fail to detect a single trace of poison.

That was until Consort Hua dropped dead after applying the “Drunken Beauty Red” I had personally verified.

It was then that a newly arrived talented lady told me: what truly kills isn’t the rouge, but the intent to murder.

The day His Majesty bestowed a marriage upon me, my entire household wept like we were holding a funeral.

Mainly because I was a woman disguised as a man attending court, and even my Adam’s apple was drawn on.

There was no way I could make the princess happy!

But the princess who bowed with me to Heaven and Earth was a full head taller than I was.

Tentatively, I reached toward a place I really should not be touching.

In a rough voice, the princess confirmed, “Yes, I have a peepee.”

I entered the palace to plead guilty, but His Majesty said that spending one son to make four generations of my family work loyally for him was an excellent bargain. Me: ?

The transmigrated woman and the Seventh Prince were thrown into the Cold Palace together.

Her mission was to win over the Seventh Prince and get rid of me, the main villain.

But she couldn’t bring herself to do it.

So I picked up a brick and smashed it down hard on the unconscious Seventh Prince.

Once he stopped making a sound, I raised the brick with an icy expression. “Now I’m the Seventh Prince. You can win me over instead.”

You are a village girl from the mountains.

By a twist of fate, you save the Crown Prince from an assassination, and you leverage that debt to demand he marry you.

But he disdains your plain looks and gently refuses many times.

You settle for the next best thing and ask him to appoint you as an official.

Since you were five, you’ve decided you will rise above your station in this life.

If you become a consort, you’ll be like Wu Zetian.

If you become an official, you’ll be like Sima Yi.

The Noble Consort resorted to every conceivable means to secure a baby boy, plotting to pass off another woman’s son as her own so she could regain the emperor’s favor.

On the day she gave birth, she sent her men to a secluded village, where they murdered a young couple and abducted their swaddled infant.

I survived by hiding inside a rice vat.

But what she didn’t know was that the village was called Half-Ghost Village.

Once its residents turned fifty, they began aging in reverse.

The baby her men had taken was my Great-grandfather.

The Emperor’s beloved Noble Consort, his one true love, was dead.

His one true love?

It was almost laughable.

And yet, the rumor had spread throughout all of Dayan.