Found Family

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.”

Chapter 0

After my Taoist temple went bankrupt, I opened a Haunted House.

Every ghost inside was personally captured by me.

Until today.

A tourist grabbed one of my ghost NPCs and wailed:

“Mom! I missed you so much, Mom!”

Oh no!!!

When my Adoptive Father first saw me, I was eating a bowl of spoiled rice.

Hungry flies were fighting me for the food, and I couldn’t even spare a hand to shoo them away.

Later, he took me home. He threw me a party for my seventh birthday.

He said, “Xiao Jue, today is your new beginning. From now on, this day will be your birthday every year.”

Everyone smiled at me. Only my Adoptive Mother roared after the banquet had ended, “She’s your illegitimate daughter, isn’t she?”

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?”

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.

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.

On her seventieth birthday, Song Xiaotao found an unconscious young man in her vegetable patch. Judging by her years of experience cracking melon seeds and shooting the breeze at the village entrance, this fellow was clearly trouble. Yet, she brought him home anyway. Song Xiaotao had seen off her last living relative ten years ago. Even if he brought a calamity that wiped out her entire household, she was the only one left to go. When the young man came to and saw Song Xiaotao’s wizened face, his vision swam, and he nearly blacked out again. Heavenly Bodhisattva, why was his Love Tribulation partner an old woman?!

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.

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?

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.