Family

I had plans to go sing karaoke with my best friend that night, but my five-year-old daughter just would not go to sleep.

Left with no choice, I took her with me. Once we were in the private karaoke room, I ordered a couple of model guys to look after her.

Halfway through my song, the door to the room was shoved open.

My husband-my marriage-of-convenience husband-came in looking like he was here to catch me cheating.

“Su Xu, look at you getting bold. You actually dared to bring our daughter along while you ordered random men-”

Before he could finish, he finally saw what was happening inside.

His five-year-old daughter was currently sitting there with an arm around each of the two model guys. “…”

Everyone said I was blessed by fate.

Born behind vermilion gates, I rested my head on jade and wrapped myself in brocade.

At three, I began my education, studying essays on how to govern the realm.

At five, I held an abacus, calculating the empire’s grain and coin.

At twelve, I debated the scholars in the clan school and, though I was a girl, took first place above them all.

At fifteen, during my coming-of-age banquet, warlords from three regions offered mountains and rivers as my betrothal gifts.

And yet, I chose the hardest road of all.

The day I eloped with a lowly soldier who guarded the city gate, the entire city laughed at me for debasing myself.

After one night of passion, I was stricken from the Yin Clan’s rolls, my spotless reputation ruined.

No one knew that the soldier was the last surviving bloodline of the imperial house.

They were fighting for the realm.

What I was fighting for was the right to take history’s iron brush in hand and rewrite the world with a name that could not be questioned.

The owner of an antique shop came to me with a job: help him transport a batch of aged wine.

The wine had been hidden away in a deserted village for sixty years, sealed in massive jars, each one half as tall as a man.

On the day the cellar was opened, the fragrance carried for miles. Even the workers moving the jars felt light-headed from it.

But the young man selling the wine looked deathly pale. The moment he took the owner’s money, he refused to stay even one minute longer and hurried off.

That night, one of the workers secretly opened a jar.

When he was found the next day, his head was stuffed inside the wine jar. By the time they dragged him out, he was already dead.

After I entered the horror game, my severe nearsightedness made everything blurry.

I treated the Blood-Dress Ghost Loli as my own daughter, cherished the Big Boss as my husband, and honored the Old Weirdness as my parents.

The first time we met, I grabbed the Big Boss’s abs and exclaimed:

“Great physique, but it’s a pity you’re a bit short.”

The Big Boss laughed angrily, reattached the severed head to his neck, and ground his teeth:

“I’m 1.86 meters tall. Take another look now?”

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?”

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.

Madam Shen was unable to bear children, so she wanted to buy a respectable concubine to carry on the family line for Eldest Master Shen.

A respectable concubine received two taels of silver every month, and even got to eat white rice with braised pork.

The moment I heard the news, I immediately told my mother to take me into the city to sign up.

My mother smacked me on the head and snapped, “I’ve given birth to three children, and you’re the stupidest of the lot!”

The first time criminal investigator Lou Xiao met Qiao Xia was at a wedding that had descended into total chaos. Years later, the two reunited on a blind date. From testing each other and misunderstanding each other to slowly drawing closer, one clumsy but sincere, the other clearheaded and independent, they learned, little by little, amid entanglements with people from the past, the pressure of work, and sudden danger, to put their love into words and to make room for each other in their future.

Today was the Qixi Festival, and the campus forum thread “How Are You Spending Today?” shot straight to the top of the discussion rankings.

The comments underneath were pure chaos.

On a sudden whim, I left one too.

“In Xie Yi’s arms.”

Then Xie Yi-the famously abstinent, untouchable teacher-replied to me.

“You said you’d be in my arms. Where are you?”

Me: ! ? ?

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.