Female Protagonist

The year I turned seventeen, my wealthy birth parents brought me home.

They hemmed and hawed before saying, “You also have a twin brother and a younger sister, but they…”

Judging by their attitude, I understood at once.

My brother and sister probably weren’t going to welcome me.

But in the next second, the door was pushed open, and a flamboyant figure strode in.

His hair was dyed a bright red, and he said with cheerful swagger, “So this is my little sis, huh? I dyed my hair red just to celebrate you coming home. Festive enough for you?”

Behind him followed a little girl with side-swept bangs, holding pomelo leaves, a peachwood sword, and yellow talismans.

“Sis, I got these from a master specially for you. They’ve even been consecrated. They’ll drive away all your bad luck!”

“…”

Every family has its own difficult story. Mine had two volumes.

While I was at work, a line of comments drifted over my head: [Huh? Is this player pouring tea for the boss?]

[No way! This is a super SS-rank horror instance!]

The blood-red words swept past overhead, radiating an eerie, ominous air. Not far away, my boss sat with his gold-rimmed glasses on, head lowered as he read the newspaper, just like always.

I stopped looking at the “comments” and, bracing myself, picked up the cup of hot tea. “B-Boss, your tea is ready.”

The man in front of me didn’t take it.

Instead, he stared at me with an unreadable expression.

“Why are you so nervous?”

“Did you see something I can’t?”

After stepping into a giant footprint out in the wilderness… I got pregnant.

It was such an outrageous thing that, naturally, my mother refused to believe it.

She slapped me across the face right off the bat and demanded to know which man I’d been sneaking into the woods with.

I clutched my cheek and didn’t dare make a sound.

In an attempt to salvage a little dignity, Mother had me put on a Heaven’s Headdress, implying that this child had no father and was a gift from the heavens.

Who would have thought that, as dusk approached, people really did descend from the sky?

Every last one of them was bristling with righteous fury, their eyes red-rimmed, looking even more wronged than I did.

“My Lord was born divine. He is the King of the State, and the Universal Lord besides. How could he possibly have anything to do with some village woman from the countryside?”

“Speak. What exactly did you do?!”

Thinking back to that enormous, awe-inspiring footprint from last night, I was completely bewildered.

“Me? I just… shivered on top of it?” -After Stepping on the God’s Footprint This story is adapted from the ancient myth of “the Jiang Maiden conceiving after stepping in a footprint.”

Basically, it’s a story about the female lead raising a child, the male lead also raising a child, or the two of them raising a child together.

Over the weekend, while I was out grocery shopping, someone shoved a red envelope into my hand.

Inside was a note: [Three years of your life have been borrowed. If you pass this on or drop it in a merit box, your entire family will perish.]

Clutching the 900 yuan, I chuckled and chased after the person.

“Are you sure you want to try life‑borrowing from me?”

She shot me a glare, barked “Psychopath!” and spun around to bolt.

I couldn’t help but smile. To think someone actually had the nerve to try life‑borrowing from one of the Living Dead.

On the eve of my wedding, my biological father, stepmother, and fiancé conspired to commit me to a mental asylum.

My crime? Being so “insane” that I attacked someone with a knife.

Three years later, I was discharged with a ten-billion-dollar inheritance that requires only my signature to claim.

Everyone expects me to still be a lunatic, but this time, I’m going to make them pay.

While I am at my most lucid, I will reclaim the lives, the money, and the truth they owe me, one debt at a time.

At exactly midnight, there was a sudden knock on the dormitory door.

I thought it was just the dorm warden doing rounds, but then a cold, mechanical voice rang out in my ear- [Ding-The Zombie invasion has begun. Your first WeChat meme sticker is now your life-saving artifact.]

My three roommates were: an Avatar, Briar, and an Armor Hero.

Trembling, I tapped on my phone… My first meme sticker was my ex-boyfriend’s grinning face.

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.

In the second year of the famine, just before my father was about to sell me at the human market, my mother secretly ran back to her maiden home.

The night she returned, she was covered in blood.

There was a hole in her belly, and one of her legs was gone.

She handed my father the tripod cauldron she had carried on her back.

“Take it. With this, you won’t go hungry. Don’t sell Ah Yu.”

The tripod cauldron was not very large, but it was packed full inside.

With one tug, a snow-white leg came out.

If you threw in a piece of cloth, an identical piece of cloth would come out.

If you threw in a chicken, another chicken would come out too.

My father was so overjoyed he nearly went mad.

He never noticed that, before my mother breathed her last, she said one final sentence to me.

At Yuchi Wei’s wedding, I once fired an arrow that pierced through the bride’s red veil, killing her on the spot.

I did it because that woman was a spy.

In the aftermath, Yuchi Wei was moved to tears of gratitude. He promoted me to be his personal lieutenant.

Because of that proximity, he eventually discovered my secret-that I was a woman disguised as a man.

Five years later, on our wedding night, he walked into the room carrying a funerary urn he had cherished for years.

“I want you to experience the same thing I did back then,” he said. “To taste the bitterest pain at the moment of your greatest joy.”

Only then did I realize he had deeply loved that spy all along, and his heart had never changed.

He gouged out my eyes and crippled my hands so that I could never fire an arrow again.

Amidst a world of bloody light, I set the house ablaze, dragging him down to death with me.

When I opened my eyes again, I had returned to the day of Yuchi Wei’s wedding.

“General, do you think the woman who just stepped out of the bridal sedan could be that spy?” my subordinate whispered.

I stopped him, my expression indifferent.

“We are only here today to offer our congratulations. We will not discuss official business.”

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?