Forced Marriage

Shao Yuhan lost his memory in a car accident, forgetting the fact that he had once forced me into a relationship through sheer coercion.

As soon as his family found out, they wasted no time in helping him divorce me.

In less than half a day, I found myself standing in a different city, dazed, holding a divorce certificate in one hand and a massive check in the other.

After being subjected to Shao Yuhan’s obsessive, forced love for so long, I felt a strange sense of displacement the moment I finally gained my freedom.

I settled down in this new city and began a quiet, ordinary life.

One day, while out buying groceries, someone suddenly covered my mouth and nose.

When I opened my eyes again, I was in a dark yet familiar basement. A man’s cold, clear voice rang in my ears.

“Be my woman, and I can give you everything you want.”

… Very well. It was exactly the same as back then.

For three nights in a row, my maid said the same thing in her sleep:

“It seems one of the chickens in the backyard is missing.”

I simply assumed she was exhausted from her daily chores and thought nothing of it.

That was until we encountered a landslide on our way to the Capital. My maid was killed in the disaster, but I was rescued by soldiers who arrived just in time.

Trembling and lost, I sought out the commanding officer, intending to reveal my true identity as the daughter of the Provincial Commander.

He glanced at the maid’s clothes I was wearing and suddenly asked:

“Are the hens still brooding lately?”

I was beaten and driven out of the Chancellor’s Mansion with clubs.

As I lay dying of illness in the pouring rain, a scholar picked me up and took me home.

He didn’t mind my filth, nor did he mind my stupidity.

He cared for me in silence, acting even more like a mute than I did.

Once my injuries had healed, I prepared to bid the scholar farewell.

He went out to buy supplies for my journey, but he did not return that night. When I finally found him, I discovered that someone had broken both his legs and left him on the street to die.

He saw me and looked dazed for a moment, his face tinged with regret.

“Zhizhi, why haven’t you left? You should have gone.”

I wanted to ask myself that too-why hadn’t I left? Perhaps it was the few scraps of conscience I had left that made me unable to walk away, unable to avoid the trouble.

I dragged him home and nursed him with care. Before long, he recovered.

Neither of us ever mentioned my departure again. Later, his name appeared on the golden roster.

He was named the Top Graduate during the palace examinations, and he was on the verge of achieving fame and fortune.

Yet, he knelt and pleaded with His Majesty to thoroughly reinvestigate the case of the deposed Crown Prince from years ago.

His Majesty was furious. He threw him into the Imperial Prison and ordered his exile to the frontier.

I had no money and couldn’t get into the Imperial Prison.

I could only wait at the city gates, hoping to run into him and ask what on earth had happened.

But I waited through several dawns and dusks, and he never came.

Later still, I entered the palace as a study companion for the Fifth Princess.

Only then did I learn that a scholar in the Imperial Prison that year had died to prove his resolve, smashing his head against the blood-stained walls of the cell. Naturally, there were no guards to escort a prisoner out through the city gates.

But the Song Duhe I knew was never a reckless man, and he certainly wasn’t one to choose death so easily.

It was my fifth year since transmigrating from a smut novel into ancient times.

My body had been feeling worse and worse.

Then one day, I coughed up a mouthful of blood from my heart.

I knew that if I did not have a man to relieve me, I would die when my body burst apart.

Just then, lines of floating comments suddenly appeared before my eyes.

[The Male Lead has been afflicted with Lust Poison tonight. What a shame the Female Lead hasn’t appeared yet. The Female Supporting Character will have to detoxify him instead.]

The Male Lead was my eldest brother, a man as pure as a clear breeze and bright moon, cold and aloof.

But I was neither the Female Lead, nor the Female Supporting Character, nor Female Character N.

I was only an adopted daughter with the role of Background Character A.

Being Background Character A meant I could do anything.

So under cover of night, dressed in nothing but a layer of gauze,

I secretly slipped into my brother’s room.

For the ten years my parents were away at war, I was fostered on a country estate and grew up rough around the edges.

I was nothing like the gentle, refined Shen Miaoyi, who had grown up beside them.

She was the daughter of their fallen comrades and had followed my parents to the frontier from the age of six.

“Miaoyi may not be our daughter by blood, but she is dearer to us than one.”

I resented her for stealing my parents.

I resented her for keeping them to herself for ten years without sparing me even one.

So, for once, I fought back and stole her marriage to the Young Prince.

But after Shen Miaoyi married another man, her life turned miserable.

The Young Prince felt guilty and secretly helped her.

A rift opened between us.

I fought back one more time and refused to speak to him until the day I died.

Kneeling beside my bed, he said he regretted it.

“Ningshu, please don’t leave me alone.”

“Once you recover, we can go back to the way we were and ride side by side again…”

I did not want that life anymore.

When I opened my eyes again, I was back on the day my parents were arranging a marriage for Shen Miaoyi.

This time, I spoke first.

“The Young Prince likes powder blue. Sister Miaoyi would look perfect in it.”

Li Furong spends three years saving Xie Qingheng through exile, only to be dismissed before his powerful friends as nothing more than a loyal servant.

When the man who promised her a future breaks his word and forces her into a nameless place in his household, she turns every lesson in survival against him.

Trapped among noblewomen as dangerous as the men who command them, Furong must decide how much of herself she will sacrifice to win the one thing she has always wanted: a life that belongs to her.

Gu Lin is a notoriously timid player who survives the Infinite Horror Game only by hiding behind her powerful boyfriend, Li Jingchi.

When a harmless slogan mutates into a world rule and hurls her into an SSS-rank wedding instance, she wakes beside a charred, many-armed entity that insists she is its wife.

To escape, Gu Lin must decode the rules, confront the man who sacrificed her, and decide whether the monster she fears is truly more dangerous than the humans she once trusted.

I married the childhood sweetheart my elder sister refused to wed after his family fell on hard times.

From the day we married, I devoted myself to running our home.

We treated each other with courtesy.

When Ling Yan placed first in the imperial examinations, everyone congratulated me.

My years of hardship had finally paid off.

Then word came that he had offered a lavish betrothal gift to take my sister as a wife of equal standing.

His words spread through every street: “The eldest Miss Su is radiant and precious.

She deserves to be cherished.

Now that I have won the highest honors, I will never let her suffer the slightest hardship.”

A gifted man and a beautiful woman.

A match made in heaven.

I was the one who deserved to suffer.

That very night, I, the wife who had shared his poverty, packed my bundle and made room for my sister.

I went far away and vanished without a trace.

The newly crowned top scholar searched for his first wife until he was nearly mad, and at last found her in an out-of-the-way corner.

Looking at Ling Yan’s reddened eyes, I asked in bewilderment, “Why were you looking for me?

We never had feelings for each other.”

He stared at me.

Tears rolled from his eyes, but he laughed in anger.

“You’re saying you don’t love me?”

On our wedding night, my husband apologized to me.

He said that to defend his true love, I had to take my own life.

“Tell me-poison, a dagger, a noose, or the river? Which do you choose?”

I asked, “Can I choose to die of pleasure?”

That dog of an emperor ordered me to marry a young eunuch, and I didn’t even blink before agreeing.

Yet, on the night of the wedding, I was tied up and hauled into the emperor’s bedchamber before I even had the chance to remove my bridal veil.