Family Conflict

On the day the Xu family’s long-lost heiress returns, the adopted daughter everyone expects to humiliate discovers that the woman coming home is the girlfriend she just broke up with—and the two must fight a patriarchal dynasty and expose a twenty-year-old murder to stay together.

Ever since I was little, I had refused to let anyone get the better of me.

When my elder brother gave my sister perfume from across the seas, I cried until I got some too.

When Mother hired a palace matron to teach my sister court etiquette, I threw a tantrum until I was allowed to learn beside her.

When it came time to arrange our marriages, the family chose the finest husband imaginable for my sister.

Then came my turn.

“There is only one Crown Prince in the realm,” they told me.

“His full brother is imperial blood as well. You can marry him.”

In my last life, I refused to accept that.

Why should I settle when the two princes were born of the same mother?

So I devoted myself to serving the Empress and winning her favor.

At last, I got my wish and became Crown Princess.

But Pei Jin despised my competitive nature.

The moment he ascended the throne, he made my elder sister his empress instead and sneered at me.

“Why struggle for something fate never meant you to have?”

When I was reborn in the year of my coming-of-age ceremony, I stopped fighting.

“Prince Rui is a fine match too. Thank you for arranging it, Mother.”

On the eve of my wedding, my elder sister handed me a cup of fruit wine and drugged me unconscious.

I awoke half-dressed beside my brother-in-law.

My reputation was ruined overnight.

My fiancé broke off our engagement before dawn.

My parents were bitterly disappointed in me.

They bundled me into a little sedan chair and hurried me off to become Liang Yanxiu’s concubine.

My sister later died of illness.

Liang Yanxiu never made me his lawful wife.

The world praised him for his undying devotion to my sister.

I spent my life neglected and scorned.

As I lay dying, I overheard my parents whispering with my nephew, who had just placed first in the imperial examinations.

“Your mother was gravely ill and feared there would be no one to care for you after she died, so she drugged your aunt’s wine. Looking back, it was the right decision.”

My nephew’s voice choked with tears.

“Now that I have taken first place, Mother can finally rest in peace.”

I died in disbelief, the last breath torn from my lungs.

When I opened my eyes again, I was back at the banquet on the eve of my wedding.

My sister stood before me, smiling as she offered me that cup of fruit wine.

After Shen Linzhang fell from his horse and lost his memory, the House of Shen fell out of imperial favor.

Everyone avoided them as if they carried the plague.

Only I begged my father to let me marry into the Shen household at its most precarious hour.

Shen Linzhang had the mind of a child.

He understood nothing of worldly affairs; he knew only that I was his wife.

Three years later, the woman general who had guarded the frontier rode back to the capital.

The instant he saw her, Shen Linzhang was seized by a splitting headache.

A moment later, he abandoned me, vaulted onto a horse, and galloped after her.

When we met again, his eyes were clear.

He handed me a letter of divorce.

He said that I had been raised in the inner courtyard like a bird in a cage and had never seen how vast the world was.

He declared that the love of his life was a brilliant, valiant woman general like Feiying.

He spoke with easy arrogance, his chin held high.

Then I calmly accepted the letter.

This time, he was the one left speechless.

On the second day of the tenth lunar month, the great warlord Lu Zhi took a second concubine: Song Anran, the youngest daughter of the chairman of the Shanghai Chamber of Commerce.

Lu Zhi had made a name for himself in recent years.

He had won battle after battle, commanded a formidable army, and wielded immense power—but surely not so much that the chairman of the Shanghai Chamber of Commerce would deliver his own daughter to him as a concubine.

Oh, but it was.

My father did exactly that.

After my divorce, I married the woman I had cheated with.

She was gentle and considerate, the kind of woman who always knew how to make me feel valued.

Her only drawback was that she came with a son.

But that was all right.

I had promised to love her, and I would love her child too.

As for my ex-wife, apart from the three thousand yuan I sent in child support every month, we had nothing more to do with each other.

Until the day I saw a hanging chair at a friend’s house—a chair that had once belonged to me.

When I married into the Shen family, I already knew my husband had one great love.

She was the fisherman’s daughter who had saved him after he was gravely wounded while suppressing bandits.

They had sworn themselves to each other through life and death and privately pledged to marry.

But his mother threatened to take her own life and would only permit the woman to become his concubine.

On the eve of my wedding, Mother wept with worry and asked, “How will our Zhen’er ever live like this?”

How else?

He could play the devoted lover.

I would be the lady of the household.

Shen Yunfeng and I were merely two people traveling the same road toward entirely different ends.

For ten years, I was a corporate Head of Administration.

Then I woke up as the legitimate daughter of a marquis.

Only then did I discover that I had landed in a female-led power fantasy about a maid’s rise to glory.

Blessed with the heroine halo, the maid could do everything: manage a household, run shops, organize disaster relief.

Everyone adored her.

Even my own younger brother and fiance became devoted second male leads who protected her at every turn.

In the end, the senior maid became a legendary merchant queen known throughout the realm.

I, meanwhile, grew jealous of the heroine.

Spoiled and willful, I courted disaster at every step until everyone abandoned me and I died alone in a secluded estate.

After a long silence, my professional instincts kicked in.

Household management was simply a logistics support system.

Running shops was supply-chain management.

Disaster relief was an emergency response plan.

Well, wasn’t that convenient?

She was the all-conquering maid with fate on her side.

I was an administrator trying to stay alive.

And survival began with rules.

Only on my wedding night did I discover that I had not married the second son of the marquis’s residence—the man I had been introduced to before the match.

I had married the sickly eldest son, who had spent most of his life confined to bed.

The idea had come from Miss Liu, who entered the household on the same day as I did and was now the Second Young Madam.

Smiling sweetly, she asked, “I heard you and Eldest Brother fell in love at first sight, Sister-in-law. Are you happy now that you are married?”

Everyone expected me to cry, make a scene, and expose how the grooms had been switched.

Instead, I lowered my eyes and calmly served tea to my new parents-in-law before I spoke.

“A maiden treasures her reputation above all else. I did not dare look closely at my future husband that day. Only today have I learned what a true gentleman looks like.”

My parents-in-law’s worry turned to delight, and they praised me as virtuous and noble—the finest of wives.

What none of them knew was that I came from a merchant family.

I believed in fair trades, and I never forgot a debt.

For the little matter of deceiving me, I judged that a few lives would be payment enough.

To please his mistress, my father secretly switched Mother’s newborn daughter with hers.

He meant for his mistress’s daughter to take my place as the legitimate young lady of the family and grow up surrounded by wealth and privilege.

Behind Mother’s back, the mistress mocked her.

“A country woman like her will spend her whole life laboring only to hand the fruits to someone else.”

Even Father thought Mother ignorant and easy to deceive.

But Mother was merely uneducated, not witless.

Neither of them knew that a fire broke out in the rear courtyard on the day Mother gave birth—and that she switched me straight back.

Even as he faced death, Father could not understand how a country woman like Mother had brought about his ruin.