Found Family

When a wealthy family came to the orphanage to choose a child, they wavered between me and Cheng Yun.

A barrage of comments scrolled before my eyes:

[The female supporting character is about to start acting pitiful again so she can get adopted.]

[Even if she does get adopted, she’ll just be abandoned later anyway.]

[She’ll spend her whole life hated by everyone, chasing what she can never have. Just another girl obsessed with competing against other girls.]

I silently lowered my head.

Because the “female supporting character” they were talking about was me.

Suddenly, two figures loomed over me.

A Northeastern couple who had never been mentioned in the plot looked down at me, their faces lighting up with surprise.

“Oh my goodness, look at this pretty little thing!”

“Sweetheart, your uncle and auntie are having pork and glass noodle stew at home today. Smells amazing. Wanna come back with us and have some?”

Before my father, Zhao Yong’an, left to join the army, he said that if he died out there, my mother was allowed to remarry the village hunter.

But though the hunter had a crippled leg, he was the fiercest man around. They said he could kill a tiger with a single punch, and that he had even beaten his previous wife to death.

If my mother married him, it would be no different from sending her to her death.

Three years later, sure enough, news came that Father had died.

Grandmother and the clan elders took twenty taels of silver from the hunter and forced my mother to be sold off to him.

After I transmigrated into a household-intrigue novel…

My mother-in-law demanded that I follow the rules and get up early to serve her tea.

I couldn’t get up. So that very night, I slipped her a sleeping pill.

Then I made sure she slept in with me until the sun was high in the sky.

I thought I was going to be severely punished.

But then floating comments appeared before my eyes: [Haha, this is the first time in decades that Madam Qin has slept this long. She’s feeling refreshed and in a great mood right now.]

[She never got enough sleep before. No wonder she had such a bad temper.]

[Modern technology really is amazing. It directly eased the insomnia and anxiety that Madam Qin spent a fortune trying and failing to cure for years.]

[The female lead really stumbled right into Madam Qin’s heart by accident.]

Me: ? Is this how it’s supposed to go?

The year my parents died in an accident, I was a sophomore in high school.

My relatives had their eyes on the inheritance and compensation money they left behind, and they kept coming by to harass me.

Finally, I knocked on the door of my Tattooed Neighbor.

“Hey, are you in the underworld?”

If you read a lot of historical romance novels, then I’m sure you’re familiar with this scene: An assassin draws his blade and lunges at the male lead.

At the critical moment, the female lead rushes forward and takes the stab for him.

She collapses into his arms, and he cries her name in panic…

When I transmigrated, this exact scene was unfolding.

You think I was the female lead? Nope.

And of course, I wasn’t the male lead either. I was the assassin.

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.

On the day of my hairpin ceremony, my brother-in-law, tipsy from wine, barged into my room.

That same night, my mouth was gagged and I was taken to the Marquis’s Mansion.

My legitimate elder sister told me she could not bear children and needed to borrow my womb.

A year later, I gave birth to a son.

My legitimate elder sister brought me to the Bamboo Garden, where four old maids covered my mouth and buried me in a pit they had dug long before.

Before I died, I kept wondering what the point had been of someone like me coming into this world.

But I never imagined that I would be dug up again.

The person who found me was small and thin, yet he staggered along with me on his back for ten miles.

He covered me with the only clothing he had and gave me a chance to live.

An old man took me in. From that day on, I changed my name and became someone else.

Five years later, my wonton shop opened in Capital City, and I happened to run into my legitimate elder sister and her family being sold off.

She begged me to save her son.

But I pointed to the young man kneeling off to the side and said, “I’ll only save him.”

In my third year as a palace maid, I encountered a child.

Floating above her head were the words: Villainess Supporting Character.

I wondered to myself, just how wicked could a seven-year-old child be?

That was until I saw her shove a palace maid to the ground.

Beat the eunuchs. And ruthlessly berate the head governess.

Only then did I realize she was absolutely right to hit them.

I had been wanting to thrash those people for a long time myself.

This wasn’t some Villainess Supporting Character; this was my angel baby.

Later, she asked me, “Don’t you hate me?”

I replied, “Of course not. I like you as much as there are stars in the sky, grains of sand in the desert, and drops of water in the ocean.”

Blushing yet acting with her usual haughty pride, she tucked her hand into my palm.

“You will attend to me tonight.”

The celebrity Zhu Yuan is dead. I still hate her. She always made me feel as wretched and hidden as a rat scurrying across the street.

And yet, I found her third gift. It was a plain music box sitting in the hospital corridor.

I casually handed it to the child in the neighboring bed.

She was dying, too.

Three months after I moved into Old River Bend, the old lady next door died. While I was helping clear out her belongings, I found a diary.

The first page read: “My daughter died three years ago. The person living next door to me is a ghost.”

But I knew there was something wrong with her daughter from the very first day, because I’m a ghost, too.