Female Protagonist

My father was the richest man in Great Zhou, and I was his only daughter.

To protect me, he arranged for me to marry into Marquis Manor with an enormous dowry.

On the day of my engagement, I had a dream.

I dreamed that Marquis Manor looked down on me for being born to a merchant family, while the Young Marquis doted wholeheartedly on his talented cousin.

After my father died, my dowry was swallowed up completely.

To make his cousin his legitimate wife, the Young Marquis bribed the midwife to murder me while I was in childbirth.

When I woke from the dream, the Young Marquis walked into my family’s jewelry shop with his cousin in tow.

“Since you’re going to marry into Marquis Manor, you ought to shed that stink of money. Marquis Manor can’t afford that kind of embarrassment.

“Give this shop to my cousin. Consider it a greeting gift from you, her future sister-in-law.”

I looked at his smug, superior face and let out a cold laugh.

Then I turned and ordered the steward to throw him out.

“What kind of down-and-out household starts eyeing a wife’s dowry before she’s even married in?

“Your highborn Marquis Manor has worse manners than a farming family!”

I can see the final moments of the deceased through their eyes, a gift that has helped the government solve countless cases.

Everything changed when the body of a drowned man was brought in.

Looking into his eyes, I saw him strangling me just before he died.

And on those hands, he was wearing the Jade Bracelet that had been buried with me.

My father was famous throughout the surrounding villages for being a good man.

One freezing winter during a famine, he gave the last of our rice to a mother and child passing by.

After they left, they told everyone they met that my family still had grain.

The starving refugees, driven mad by hunger, came to our door to steal it, only to find an empty rice jar.

Humiliated and enraged, they forced my three-year-old sister into their arms and carried her away.

“If there’s no rice, then your daughter will do!”

I ran after them. In the end, all I found in the ruined temple was my sister’s mangled remains.

When I returned home, my father wailed through his tears, “I was trying to save people! It’s not my fault… That was just her fate!”

He saved someone else. In the end, my sister died, and I died too, in the bitter winter when I was fifteen.

When I opened my eyes again, I saw my father handing the freshly cooked rice to that mother and child.

I picked up the flower hoe beside me and stepped up behind him.

I’m the Sea Queen, and I’m all about living in the moment. (“Sea Queen” refers to a playful woman who has many boyfriends and enjoys a carefree lifestyle.)

Body and mind-I never shortchange myself.

One boyfriend isn’t enough; if one won’t do, I’ll make it two.

On a luxury cruise, I ran into true love again.

But even a Sea Queen can misjudge people. I realized I’d been scammed.

After seeing through the con, I thought I’d make it through the trip safe and sound.

I never expected a far bigger plot-one that would tear me to pieces.

Along the way, the killer gave me ten chances to save myself.

By the time I understood what was happening, there was only one left.

The first thing Lu Xiangzhi did after becoming the top scorer in the imperial examination was divorce his wife.

“The Shen family woman is virtuous enough, but far too dull.”

He married a woman from a brothel, while I remarried a spoiled heir.

Lu Xiangzhi believed I had only married that ignorant, good-for-nothing dandy out of spite.

He thought a Shen family woman valued wifely virtue above all else, while that dandy was too unruly to be managed.

It would not be long, he assumed, before the man grew tired of a dull woman like me.

He waited half a year, yet never heard that I had been cast aside.

When Lu Xiangzhi finally could not resist coming to see me, I was holding a discipline ruler and tapping my dandy husband’s head with it, rather helplessly saying, “The teacher explained it three times. You still don’t understand?”

My dandy husband wrapped an arm around my waist and grinned like a shameless rogue.

“I don’t. I want a kiss.”

It has been three years since I transmigrated into this brothel.

I have mastered the arts of seduction, and no one knows better than I how to make a man lose his very soul in ecstasy.

But then, I overheard a group of new girls gossiping.

“It’s hilarious. Our Flower Queen really thinks she’s living in ancient times.”

“A refined Female Doctor, tricked into working as a whore for three years. These rich people really know how to have a good time.”

“Do you think she’d go insane if she found out this was all orchestrated by her ‘Young Marquis’?”

“Shh! Every actor who comes in here has signed a life-and-death waiver. Who would dare let her know?”

I froze in place, as if plunged into a pit of ice.

Could it be that these three years of transmigration were nothing more than a scam?

Before I could regain my composure, the Young Marquis’s cold voice suddenly rang out from behind me.

“Fudong, what are you doing here?”

On the day my boyfriend and I got our marriage license, the lottery ticket I bought won fifty million.

Double happiness had come knocking.

Who could have known that very night, he would brutally murder me?

As I lay dying, I heard him call another woman, practically giddy with excitement.

“Baby, we’re rich! Get over here and help me cut up the body.”

“Can you believe she actually asked me before she died if I’d ever loved her? Of course I loved her. Loved using her as an ATM and a fuck buddy, hahaha.”

I died. My body was dumped into a pit latrine and a garbage dump, left to be gnawed on by maggots, mosquitoes, and flies.

When I opened my eyes again, I had been reborn on the day I won the lottery and got my marriage license.

My boyfriend was opening the door. He looked back and smiled at me. “Honey, tonight is going to be very exciting. Are you ready?”

Seven days before the grand wedding, the legitimate daughter of the Marquis Manor, who had gone to offer incense and pray for blessings, vanished at Xiangguo Temple.

The matriarch made a prompt decision.

Taking over a hundred manor servants who had signed death contracts, she surrounded Xiangguo Temple, sealing it off into an impenetrable fortress to suppress the news.

The Old Marquis entered the palace overnight to submit a memorial, claiming that my legitimate sister had made a great vow to pray for the Imperial Family and plead for rain to alleviate the suffering of the common people before her wedding.

On the day of the grand wedding, she would be married off directly from Xiangguo Temple.

A room full of maids and older servant women, along with me, a concubine-born daughter, knelt huddled together, everyone trembling like leaves.

Because we knew that if my legitimate sister wasn’t found in one piece within seven days… We would all die.

I transmigrated into a sweet romance novel as the vicious female supporting character.

The story went like this.

The male lead loved his wife with all his heart.

But his wife fell ill, and her days were numbered.

Right then, his wife’s younger sister-that is, the original owner of this body-climbed into his bed.

His wife was magnanimous.

Not only did she not blame her sister, she even asked the male lead to marry her after she died.

Left with no choice, the male lead could only pinch his nose and agree.

And all of that was merely the setup for the entire sweet romance.

The real story was this: the male and female leads meet, and the female lead slowly gets the male lead to open his heart, helps him move on from the pain of losing his wife, and finally, happy ending!

As for the original owner, that eyesore, after being abandoned by everyone and cold-shouldered by her husband, she jumped off a building and killed herself, successfully clearing the way for the female lead.

Li Xiuyi was my fiancé.

Yet, at his own birthday banquet, he announced that he was marrying another woman.

Everyone turned to look at me, their eyes filled with uncertainty.

Amidst the awkward atmosphere, I was the first to start clapping.

I even presented a ring as a blessing.

“I wish you a long and happy marriage, and may you be blessed with a child soon.”