Female Protagonist

I was a coward by nature, timid as a quail.

Mother taught me the secret to making a living when you were poor— Do whatever people ask.

I never forgot.

At fourteen, my sister-in-law sold me to a brothel.

As she was leaving, she wiped away her tears.

“Xiaoqiao, I truly can’t bear to part with you.”

So I begged the madam to take her in too.

At seventeen, one of the girls stole my money to run away with a man.

When I caught her, she sobbed, “Xiaoqiao, cut off my hand!”

That night, blood covered the floor.

At twenty, I had saved enough to buy my freedom.

I gave every last coin to Lü Buyu.

We had been lovers for six months, and he had promised to take me away.

Instead, he used the money to redeem Qingyue, who had only just arrived.

He knelt before me.

“Xiaoqiao, she’s so pitiful.

I can’t watch her sink into this mire.”

“Or you could just kill me.”

For twenty years, I hated Shen Rou for stealing my husband.

I outlived her, rich and honored, yet on my deathbed I remembered that she had been only fifteen.

Given another life, I returned determined to expose her scheme and send her far away to a better fate.

But when I reached the pavilion, the hand sprinkling powder into the incense burner belonged to my husband.

When my mother married Wang the Mute, she was already carrying me.

Everyone in the neighborhood had advice for him.

Some told him to get rid of the bastard with a strong dose of medicine.

Others told him to write a divorce letter and throw my mother out.

Wang only smiled, turned around, and sent for the best midwife for miles.

Then I was born.

My husband found my long-lost cousin in a brothel, dying of a venereal disease.

She took one look at my happy life and decided I had stolen it from her.

I was never an impostor: my mother had given me to my grieving aunt in adoption when I was five.

For nine years, I had been made to soothe a woman who resented my happiness.

Now my husband expected me to sacrifice myself for my cousin too.

I was done paying for everyone else’s guilt.

This time, I would take what they owed me—and leave with my daughter.

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.

A scandal spread through the household about Xue Rao, our family’s adopted daughter, and my eldest brother.

She had him so thoroughly bewitched that for days he neglected his younger siblings.

My second brother was furious and went to confront her.

Before long, he too was constantly visiting her waterside pavilion, with no thought for anyone else.

I decided to see this scheming creature for myself.

Gauze curtains veiled the pavilion, and laughter filled my ears.

Xue Rao greeted me with a smile.

“Why, Third Miss.

Which brother have you come to see?”

They called me a witch who bewitched men’s minds, and put me to the sword.

Later, they tried everything they could to bring me back to life.

It turned out that the prodigy I had supposedly bewitched had gone mad.

He meant to slaughter the whole world and send it to the grave with me.

My beautiful, wealthy roommate and Beijing’s golden boy had a love life that was one long melodrama.

To make him jealous, she crooked a finger and stole the childhood friend I’d known for over ten years.

The golden boy came to find me.

“I’ll give you a hundred.

Get that mediocre childhood friend of yours away from her.”

Every novel I’d read about bringing an arrogant man to heel flashed through my mind.

I flicked my hair in what I hoped was a seductive gesture and said, “Give me two hundred.

Then pretend to be my dog and drive her crazy.”

“I guarantee she’ll never dare bring up breaking up with you again.”

He looked stunned.

“Two hundred?

Are you robbing me?”

I was stunned too.

“You can’t spare two hundred yuan?”

Suddenly, he went quiet.

To gain the protection of a powerful family, I tried every trick I knew on a distant cousin whose connection to me was tenuous at best.

My impeccably aloof cousin merely said, “Have some self-respect.”

Later, when I decided to set my sights elsewhere, he regretted it.

Cui Zheyu pinned me against a wall and kissed me, his dark eyes unreadable.

“You think you can stir up my feelings and then run?

Too late.”

The system told me I could only go home by becoming the male lead’s girlfriend.

After five years of groveling, his affection score was still stuck at fifty.

So I asked him one more time—and pushed him off a rooftop when he said no.

Every death resets the world.

Every loop takes us farther into the past.

If winning his heart will not set me free, perhaps killing him will.