Female Protagonist

When I was young, I found the Crown Prince and took him with me as we spent three years begging for a living.

After the Crown Prince was restored to his position, the Emperor took me in as his adopted daughter.

Everyone assumed that I would be betrothed to the Crown Prince. Instead, the Crown Prince became engaged to the legitimate daughter of the Duke’s Mansion.

On my birthday, he remarked with a casual smile in front of the crowd, “How can one of noble blood be matched with a beggar?”

I raised my glass and sincerely wished him a life free of worries, year after year.

He did not yet know that I had accepted the decree for a marriage alliance.

In the years to come, there would be no more Ah Yu by his side.

The day I gave birth, the situation was critical.

I begged Zhang Shuai to sign the consent form for a C-section, but his mother wouldn’t allow it.

Through the door, he shouted anxiously, “Zhaozhao, try a little harder, you can definitely give birth naturally.”

In the end, I suffered an amniotic fluid embolism and both mother and child died.

When I opened my eyes again, I was back at fifteen.

Zhang Shuai stopped me at the entrance of the village: “Zhaozhao, I heard you’re going to Vocational School too?”

As Yan Zhengyang’s ultimate simp,

I had done square dancing with his grandma.

Played Go with his grandpa.

Played mahjong with his mom.

And with his dad…

Oh. Not his dad, actually.

I had mastered every trick in the book and was convinced Yan Zhengyang would never escape my clutches.

But a thousand pounds of devotion couldn’t compete with a few ounces of cleavage.

Ever since a curvy beauty moved in next door to him, everything changed.

In the dead of night, only after I let out a satisfied sigh did Wei Che gently roll off me.

He had been putting in so much effort lately that I figured he was probably about to leave me.

With a faint sigh, I turned over and went to sleep.

After all, everyone knew it.

I was the most useless kind of lovesick fool.

When the sky wanted to rain and a man wanted to leave, what could I possibly do about it?

Beg him bitterly? Threaten suicide and make a scene?

That was what a real lovesick fool would do.

But I was a fake.

A long time ago, I had already understood one simple truth-

Everyone despised a lovesick fool.

Pretending to be one, however, was the advanced strategy.

In my last life, I saved He Yan, the young master of a marquis manor.

He took me as his wife, and for a time, our marriage was the talk of Shangjing.

But I had been born and raised in the countryside.

My manners were crude, and my reputation gradually soured.

He Yan, too, slowly grew distant from me.

I wept day after day, and before I even reached thirty, I died in misery.

Given a second chance, I swore I would never live that way again.

Only, after eating wild greens for three days straight, I realized I simply could not let go of the marquis manor’s soy-braised pork knuckle, sticky rice chicken, crab roe lion’s head meatballs, scallion-fried lamb…

On the day of my wedding to my husband, a female warrior barged in.

She lifted my bridal veil, pinched my cheek with a grin, and praised, “What a tender little bride!” Then she drifted away as lightly as she had come.

From that day on, a black ink stain appeared on my face. No matter what I tried, I could not wash it off.

My husband despised me and never once set foot in my room again.

My mother-in-law resented me for occupying the position of mistress of the household while failing to bear any children.

Even my sister-in-law sighed over her brother’s miserable fate, saying he had married an ugly woman.

I became the invisible mistress of the Marquis’s Mansion.

I worked without complaint and managed the household affairs.

I raised the son adopted into our branch and devoted myself wholeheartedly to planning for the Marquis’s Mansion.

Only when I accidentally saw my husband and the female warrior admiring flowers together on a spring outing did I finally learn the truth.

My husband and the female warrior had fallen in love at first sight long ago.

Unwilling to be bound by the rules of the Marquis’s Mansion, the female warrior had abandoned my husband and left. Yet she could not bear to hand the man she loved over to another woman, so she used a secret drug to ruin my face.

And my husband had found the female warrior long ago. He had obtained the antidote, but under the spell of her tears and tenderness, he threw it away and promised her that his heart would never waver.

For her, he kept himself pure in the Marquis’s Mansion. Outside the estate, he lived in perfect harmony with her, and they had a son and a daughter.

Their son was given to me to raise so he could inherit the Marquis’s Mansion’s estate.

Their daughter stayed by their side to bring them joy, and in the future, they would recruit a husband to marry into the family for her.

All these years, they had lived in bliss. I was the only one who suffered.

I secretly drugged the female warrior with Soft Tendon Powder, then set the villa on fire. After notifying my husband and son to come put out the flames, I had them bound up like thieves and thrown into the burning villa as well.

Knowing I had committed a capital crime, I wrote a petition in blood and struck the Dengwen Drum, accusing the Marquis’s Mansion of favoring an outside mistress and abusing the lawful wife.

The Marquis’s Mansion was stripped of its title and demoted. I was sentenced to death.

The Empress pitied me and granted me a divorce before I died.

From then on, I was no longer a wife of the Lu family. I was only a daughter of the Li Family.

After my death, I saw the masses spit curses at the Marquis’s Mansion. I also saw them call me a venomous woman.

Right and wrong, truth and blame-let others say what they pleased. But my life had indeed been wasted.

When I opened my eyes again, I had returned to the day of my wedding.

The female warrior flew straight toward me with a cheerful grin.

I yanked my husband in front of me as fast as I could.

This time, it was my husband’s face that was stained with a large black mark.

The Sect Cannot Disband Today I was toiling away in the Accounts Office until the hour of the rat when a crisp notification suddenly rang out overhead.

“Ding! Detecting the imminent and simultaneous start of ‘The Stand-in Junior Sister’s Bitter Love,’ ‘The Yandere Junior Sister’s Imprisonment,’ ‘The Amnesiac Junior Sister’s Wife-Chasing Anguish Arc,’ and ‘The Salted Fish Junior Sister’s Flat Life.’

If no intervention occurs, the Guiyuan Sect will suffer a total collapse of its reputation due to a series of Love-Struck Mind incidents in three hundred days.

Its assets will be liquidated, and it will officially go bankrupt.” I looked down at the bright red debt of 1.03 million High-grade Spirit Stones recorded in the ledger.

Closing the book, I seriously wondered for the first time if the Heavenly Dao was specifically out to get me.

On the day Song Cheng and I got married, his ex-girlfriend showed up in a wedding dress to steal him away.

“Song Cheng, I’m only going to be this brave once in my life. Are you coming with me or not?”

I looked at the panic all over Song Cheng’s face and was just about to marvel that this kind of ridiculous soap-opera scene was actually happening to me.

Then Song Cheng grabbed the emcee’s microphone and shouted, “Who the hell are you? Did you wander onto the wrong set?

“Mess with my wedding again, and I’ll punch your left eye into your right socket.”

My husband is very rich, but I don’t love him.

In university, he once used every trick in the book to pursue my roommate Jiang Sizhu. He sent luxury gifts one after another, and even made a grand gesture by sending nine thousand roses downstairs from the girls’ dormitory. All the girls in our dorm benefited; we carried armloads of roses back to our rooms, as if we were moving a flower bed. Only Jiang Sizhu remained indifferent. She even warned Pei Lu not to come looking for her again.

“He’s very rich and not bad-looking. You really don’t want him?”

I had a face mask on and finally asked the question I could never understand.

With such a beautiful face, she spent every day hanging around that senior who worked odd jobs everywhere.

“No way, a stuffy old bore like him? If you’re so interested, go after him yourself,” Jiang Sizhu said with disdain.

I rested my chin on my hand, thought for a moment, then nodded.

“Fine.”

“I’ll go after him.”

While everyone else was fighting for the Emperor’s favor, I built an intelligence station in the cold palace.

Until the day he died, the Emperor never knew that the woman stirring up the hidden currents of his harem was someone whose name he could not even remember.

I died in Yongxiang Alley during my third winter there.

Not truly died-only the kind of death where your name is crossed out in vermilion ink on the registry.

They said Noble Lady Li, who had once worked in the imperial garden and was later favored by His Majesty for her beauty, had gone mad.

Because on the late Empress’s memorial day, I let my hair hang loose, went barefoot, and sang a rousing rendition of “Liangzhou Ci.”

In truth, I was not mad. I had simply calculated that the Chief Eunuch of the Directorate of Ceremonial would pass through the imperial garden that day.

Madness was the best pass in the cold palace, and the best armor.

On the day I moved into the West Third Institute, only one lame old eunuch came to lead the way.

The weeds in the courtyard rose past my knees, and the moss on the well curb was as thick as a velvet blanket.

My roommate, Attendant Li, had been thrown in here three years ago after offending the Imperial Consort.

When she saw me arrive, she did not even lift her eyelids. She only kept rubbing a length of hemp rope in her hands, its edges worn fuzzy.

I set my only bundle down on the crumbling earthen kang.

Inside were two sets of worn palace clothes, a bald writing brush, and half a ream of yellow paper.

The paper pasted over the window lattice had a hole in it the size of a fist. The north wind poured in with a howl, carrying the faint sound of pipes and flutes from far away.

I stared at that hole, but in my heart, a sliver of light slipped through.

In a madwoman’s world, there were the fewest rules.

Here, perhaps, I could live.