Female Protagonist

I transmigrated into the mistress of the Marquis’s Mansion, and my stepson was the devoted second male lead.

When he grew up, he would try to take the female lead by force and spend fortunes on her without blinking.

As for the male lead, he would sow discord, frame him, and set him up at every turn.

In the end, the male and female leads would join forces to defeat him.

He would flee into monastic life and never marry.

And the Marquis’s Mansion, implicated because of him, would be raided, stripped of its title, and tragically exiled.

After transmigrating, I looked at the tiny little thing in front of me, pretending to be obedient.

He wanted to grow gloomy and brooding? Absolutely not.

He was going to become sunny if it killed me. He wanted to squander money?

Absolutely not. I had to raise him into a stingy, family-minded model of virtue.

I was definitely going to protect the vast fortune of the Marquis’s Mansion.

Later, everyone said I threw money around like dirt and lived in arrogant, extravagant luxury.

My stepson refuted them.

“Nonsense. My mother is the most frugal, capable, virtuous, and dignified woman there is. She sponsored so many scholars with money she saved up herself. Could you do that?”

Someone said my methods were ruthless and that I acted like a man.

My stepson’s face turned cold.

“My mother is gentle, virtuous, and the very soul of benevolence. She clearly could have just robbed you outright, yet she still gave you a chance to compete fairly. You’re the one who was useless. Utter trash.”

Even his father couldn’t stand it anymore.

“Son, open your eyes and take a good look. Your mother is not the kind of person who lets herself be wronged.”

My stepson flew into a rage.

“Father, don’t force me to turn against you. You can say whatever you want about me, but you absolutely cannot say that about my mother.”

From the moment I was born, my Father Emperor could hear my inner thoughts.

[Whoa, so my Father Emperor is actually a brilliant and divine Emperor for the Ages!]

[It’s a pity he has a few stains on his record.]

[First, he’ll act on impulse and execute a great hero who served him well, only to cry afterward and curse others for not stopping him.]

[Then, he’ll execute the Chief Minister of the Court of Judicial Review, brewing a wrongful case that will shock the world for centuries, all while shifting the blame onto his ministers.]

[He’ll praise the Grand Preceptor as a ‘clear mirror’ in public, but after the man dies, he’ll raid his tomb and whip the corpse.]

[And the biggest death wish of all: he clearly loves my Mother Empress so much, yet he insists on making her give birth over and over again. When she eventually dies in childbed, he’ll be holding some other beauty while reminiscing about my mother. What a total scumbag.]

My Father Emperor’s brow twitched again and again. Finally, he couldn’t hold it together anymore.

“Quickly! Go and invite the masters from Huguo Temple!”

In my first life, I married Shen Yan, and everyone envied me for securing such a fine match.

Shen Yan won fame while still young, rose swiftly through the ranks, introduced new reforms, became Grand Chancellor, and wielded immense power as he guided a boy emperor.

But that glory belonged to Shen Yan alone.

No one knew how much bitterness I swallowed behind the gates of his illustrious household.

When I was given another life, I waited until Shen Yan’s name was renowned throughout the realm, packed my belongings, wrote a letter of divorce, and sat smiling outside our gates to await him.

“Congratulations on your triumph, my lord. I ask to leave your household of my own accord. From this day forward, may each of us be free.”

My eldest sister hated what she called pampered wives more than anything.

At a palace banquet, she sneered at the empress.

“A true strong female lead would have seized the throne and made herself empress regnant long ago.

Strip away the fine words, and the empress is still just a pampered wife who climbed to power through a man, isn’t she?”

One remark from her condemned the entire Song family.

On the day our estate was confiscated, Prince Chen offered my eldest sister a hand.

If she would only beg for mercy, every woman of the Song household could be spared enslavement.

Instead, she lifted her chin and declared, “Even if every woman in my family is made a slave, I will never beg a man for pity like some pampered wife!”

Prince Chen stormed away in fury, and our entire family was exiled into bondage.

On the road north, my second brother risked his life and led men to free us.

My sister only scoffed.

“Only pampered wives need men to save them!”

She deliberately raised the alarm, and my brother died beneath a storm of arrows.

Yet that very display of “independence” caught the eye of a prince from an enemy kingdom.

When he wanted to take me as a concubine, I had no choice but to agree if I wanted to live.

My sister said, “I’m marrying him for love.

If you become his concubine, you’re nothing but a pampered wife fighting another woman for a man’s favor!”

She ordered me to kill myself.

I had endured enough.

I lunged at her, determined that we would die together.

When I opened my eyes again, I had returned to the day the Song estate was seized.

Prince Chen was holding out his hand to my sister.

She looked at him with disdain.

“I will never be a pampered wife who depends on a man!”

As disappointment crossed his face, I reached out and caught hold of his belt.

“She doesn’t know a good thing when she sees it, Your Highness.

Perhaps you might take a look at me instead.”

Sold into a marquis’s estate during a famine, Zhaozhao—renamed Yunzhu—spends her youth believing loyalty and patience will one day buy her freedom.

Every mistress promises to release her after one more sacrifice, yet each great household uses her body, devotion, and silence to preserve its women and heirs.

When survival hardens the obedient maid into a ruthless mother, she must decide how far she will go to seize the fortunate life everyone insists she already has.

The day I decided not to get married, Chen Shuo was at the market buying a bass.

He sent me a photo and asked, “This one’s nine hundred grams.

Too big?

Mum said you liked it steamed.”

I stared at the fish lying in its plastic basket for ten or fifteen seconds, then replied, “Chen Shuo, let’s not register our marriage next week.”

He probably thought I was stressed about the wedding again.

After a while, he replied, “Sure.

We can push it back.

You’ve been busy with your project lately anyway, haven’t you?”

I said, “I don’t mean push it back.”

There was nothing from him for two minutes.

“What do you mean?”

I put my phone facedown on my desk and didn’t answer.

At 4:27 that afternoon, I was sitting in a windowless meeting room with a final account for a construction project worth forty-seven million yuan spread out before me.

The printer kept spitting out paper next door.

The air vent hummed overhead.

My supervisor, Wei, was arguing with the contractor’s people over a hundred and seventy thousand yuan in additional works claims.

Everything was ordinary.

So ordinary it hardly seemed like the afternoon a woman had decided to cancel her wedding.

No one had been caught cheating.

There had been no slap, no other woman, no sudden revelation of anyone’s true colours.

Chen Shuo hadn’t betrayed me.

He was, by most standards, a decent man.

He didn’t smoke, didn’t throw money around, wasn’t violent, and had no interest in going out for what men called “a night with the boys.”

If you drew up a job specification for a suitable husband, he’d score eighty-five out of a hundred.

So everyone asked me, “Then why on earth won’t you marry him?”

That turned out to be the hardest question to answer.

Because when an adult truly wants to leave a relationship, there often isn’t one devastating piece of evidence against the other person.

Just one small bill after another.

And suddenly you realise that, for seven years, every one of those bills has had your name on it.

The day my interview results came out, I came across a post: “How lethal can a white moonlight really be?”

The top-voted answer had only been posted a little while ago.

“I’ll tell my own story. He had a crush on me in high school, and we ran into each other a few days ago while I was job hunting.”

“Even if I’m not as capable as the others, he’ll still make me the one-in-ten-thousand choice.”

Attached was a graduation photo of them at eighteen.

The girl wore a white dress, her slim back quiet and well-behaved.

The boy had his head turned, looking at her intently, his profile clean and… familiar.

My phone trembled faintly. It was the message rejecting me after the interview.

Only then did I understand. She was Xie Qingyue’s white moonlight-and what she had killed was my future.

I would rather be a tree waiting for spring than a bird that turns back.

I could allow my feelings to fall apart completely.

But my future, my freedom, my life-none of them could afford the slightest mistake.

On a family reality show, superstar Lu Ling was the pampered heiress from Jiangsu, Zhejiang, and Shanghai, and award-winning actress Shen Fan was the Northeast’s eldest daughter.

Unremarkable me?

I was there to make them look good.

My family wasn’t helping.

In the trailer, their elders showered them with money or love.

My grandma kept telling me to quit showbiz.

“Girls should stay home.

They shouldn’t work.”

The internet tore into her.

[Another old relic.]

Then the full episode aired.

What Grandma had actually said was: “Why not just spend my pension?”

“By the time I’m gone, your dad should be retired.

You can spend his next.”

“I’ve been paying your social insurance at the highest contribution level.”

“By the time your parents are both gone, you’ll be collecting your own pension.”

The internet changed its tune instantly.

[People like this terrify me.]

[Don’t they say whatever you fear comes your way?]

Meng Yuanxi and I were rescued from the fire at the same time.

But after we woke, her talent shocked the world, and her policy essays stirred the hearts of all who read them.

Even my fiancé, the Crown Prince, wanted to break off our engagement for her sake.

She said that in this world, she was destined to be the winner.

But I only said lazily, “After getting the chance to do it all over again, you still haven’t improved at all…”

The Noble Consort told me she had traveled here from another world, and that we were all characters in a novel.

She was the heroine, I was the wicked second female lead, and the emperor was the hero.

She was determined to win him over.

Sure enough, she took his undivided favor, then my authority over the palace women.

She even wanted my throne as empress.

“What do you have to rely on but a man’s affection?”

I had finally had enough.

This woman from another world had no power whatsoever.

How dared she reach for my position?

“A sparrow is still a sparrow.

Even if I gave up this phoenix’s nest, could you hold it?”

My ancestors had helped found the dynasty.

My great-grandfather had saved an emperor’s life and received the extraordinary honor of burial in the imperial mausoleum.

My father had inherited the title of duke, and my elder brother was now a chancellor of the first rank.

“You call this ‘palace intrigue,’ do you?

Then let us see what you have to pit against me.”