Found Family

In my second year at the army brothel, I became pregnant.

Every soldier who had ever entered my tent fought to claim the child as his own.

Chen Shitou had come to me only once, yet he dropped to his knees and begged, “Miss Yang, I’m about to go into battle with the vanguard. My parents have no child but me. I need to leave them something to remember me by.”

Later, I went to his hometown and met two of the kindest parents in the world.

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.”

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.

I have been able to breathe underwater since I was little, and I often hide at the bottom of the river to play with the fish and shrimp.

When I am seven, the county magistrate begins sacrificing young girls to the River God in exchange for favorable weather.

The family of each chosen girl receives five taels of silver and two sacks of rice.

Every time, I rescue the girl and secretly hide her in the mountains beside the river.

When I am sixteen, my parents bind my hands and feet while I sleep.

“Yuniang, your brother is old enough to take a wife.”

“This year, it is your turn to be sacrificed to the River God!”

The Sect Cannot Disband Today I was toiling away in the Accounts Office until the hour of the rat when a crisp notification suddenly rang out overhead.

“Ding! Detecting the imminent and simultaneous start of ‘The Stand-in Junior Sister’s Bitter Love,’ ‘The Yandere Junior Sister’s Imprisonment,’ ‘The Amnesiac Junior Sister’s Wife-Chasing Anguish Arc,’ and ‘The Salted Fish Junior Sister’s Flat Life.’

If no intervention occurs, the Guiyuan Sect will suffer a total collapse of its reputation due to a series of Love-Struck Mind incidents in three hundred days.

Its assets will be liquidated, and it will officially go bankrupt.” I looked down at the bright red debt of 1.03 million High-grade Spirit Stones recorded in the ledger.

Closing the book, I seriously wondered for the first time if the Heavenly Dao was specifically out to get me.

On the very first day I hung up my sign offering a “Protection Charm for a Happy Marriage,” the handsome guy from next door came to make a wish: he wanted to be a normal person.

That night, he collapsed beneath the Torii of my home, drenched in blood that shimmered like liquid gold.

My small shrine, which hadn’t seen a single offering in three months, had suddenly picked up a deity on the verge of being reclaimed by the heavens.

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?”

I grew up without a father or a mother.

When the widow at the east end of the village lost her son, I ran over and asked if she wanted to be my mother.

When I saw how strong the rough woodsman at the west end was, I asked if he wanted to be my father.

That was how the three of us pieced together a family.

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.

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.