Hard-Working Protagonist

My youngest aunt was the most notorious woman in our entire family.

Grandma and Grandpa had worked hard to raise her, put her through school, and even arranged a marriage for her.

Yet she had cut them off and run away from home.

Mom was always telling me, “When you grow up, you must be good to your parents.

Don’t ever turn out like your aunt.”

Back then, nobody could have imagined that I would grow up to be even more ruthless than she was.

On a family reality show, superstar Lu Ling was the pampered heiress from Jiangsu, Zhejiang, and Shanghai, and award-winning actress Shen Fan was the Northeast’s eldest daughter.

Unremarkable me?

I was there to make them look good.

My family wasn’t helping.

In the trailer, their elders showered them with money or love.

My grandma kept telling me to quit showbiz.

“Girls should stay home.

They shouldn’t work.”

The internet tore into her.

[Another old relic.]

Then the full episode aired.

What Grandma had actually said was: “Why not just spend my pension?”

“By the time I’m gone, your dad should be retired.

You can spend his next.”

“I’ve been paying your social insurance at the highest contribution level.”

“By the time your parents are both gone, you’ll be collecting your own pension.”

The internet changed its tune instantly.

[People like this terrify me.]

[Don’t they say whatever you fear comes your way?]

Qiao Xiaohe knows from the beginning that Jiang Haozhi is a wealthy heir pretending to be a poor delivery worker.

Lonely and exhausted by debt, she accepts his false romance because even borrowed companionship feels like a gift.

But when the truth comes out, Haozhi discovers that his game became real for him long before Xiaohe was ready to choose herself.

Walking away gives her the chance to build a life where happiness is something she creates, not something she begs another person to provide.

I came second in the imperial examinations.

The first-place winner was the sort of swaggering hero who conquered everything in his path.

He spent his days drinking, writing poetry, and visiting brothels.

The third-place winner was the hero of an erotic novel.

He spent his days sleeping with princes and generals.

Once I became a censor, I worked overtime every day impeaching the two of them, until my face turned sallow and my eyes were ringed with blue.

Then I checked my pay at the end of the month: ten taels of silver.

Furious, I threw down my memorials, picked up my brush, and started a side business: Episode One: “The Third-Place Scholar Charms in Women’s Clothes; the First-Place Scholar Spends a Fortune for His Smile.”

I’d been devious since I was little.

In primary school, my parents planned a holiday with just my brother.

Right before they left, I slipped Mum’s phone into the dirty laundry and threw it in the washing machine.

The phone was a washout.

So was the holiday.

In high school, some girls formed a clique and froze me out.

I made a fake account, posed as a tall, rich, handsome boy, and flirted with every one of them.

When they confessed their feelings, I acted torn.

“You’re lovely, but your best friend has been so good to me too.”

“Honestly, I don’t know what to do.”

The clique fell apart from within.

They kept sabotaging one another until graduation.

But I’d never shown that side of myself to my boyfriend, Xu Lang.

Until he started constantly mentioning an innocent younger student.

“You have no idea how clueless Meng Yuan is.

She can’t even find her way around outside.

I’m afraid someone will sell her off and she’ll help them count the money.”

I knew what this was.

Xu Lang’s attention was wandering.

It wasn’t quite cheating, but it was unpleasant enough.

I said nothing.

Xu Lang was an only child whose family’s wealth ran to ten figures in yuan.

No one was getting between me and that prize.

Born into a family of household servants, Zhou Fanxing is chosen as a maid for a noble girl and discovers a gift for mathematics and astronomy that no woman of her station is meant to possess.

While her beautiful younger sister Mingyue climbs into the imperial harem and their mistress struggles with betrayal, Fanxing works in secret, knowing her discoveries can never bear her name.

Released from the palace into an ordinary merchant marriage, she keeps calculating the heavens as illness shortens her life.

At last, beneath a meteor shower she predicted decades in advance, the nameless servant finds the answer she has spent her life pursuing.

Three women—and the husband who loved her quietly—reveal what the stars meant to a genius the world refused to see.

Dad bought a new electric scooter.

My brother climbed onto the back seat, and my sister was lifted onto the footboard.

I ran behind them, grinning so hard my teeth showed.

Dad went around and around, but never once stopped to give me a turn.

When I could not keep up anymore, I went to ask Mom to speak for me.

Then I heard her talking about me.

“We only had her so we could use the cord blood for her sister, but who knew her sister had been misdiagnosed?”

“Oh, what a waste—all that suffering for nothing!”

I had just turned six that day, and the words I wanted to say stayed trapped behind my lips, so I never asked for a ride again.

For years afterward, I ran the road from home to school.

Then the provincial team recruited me, and I was interviewed.

Dad wheeled out that same electric scooter.

“It’s all thanks to me training her with this thing, because how else could she run so fast?”

On the night before she joins her boyfriend’s startup, Wen Xiyue receives a call from herself twelve years in the future.

He will become a billionaire, but she will spend those years running his errands and surrendering her own ambitions.

Her future self has one urgent warning: take the developer job instead.

This time, Xiyue chooses her own career—and refuses to let the man who wants her talent steal her future.

Before I even married my husband, I already owed his family a life.

His elder brother had died in an accident while working away from home to save up for my husband’s wedding.

On our wedding night, my husband dragged me to his brother’s grave and forced me to kowtow.

“If it weren’t for you, my brother wouldn’t be dead.”

“You’ll spend the rest of your life paying for it.”

After that, I worked in the fields all day and waited on his entire family at night.

Whenever he drank, he beat me.

I fled to my mother’s house.

She held me and cried all night.

The next morning, she pushed me toward the door.

“Go back.”

“Your sister-in-law doesn’t want you staying here.

There’s nothing I can do.”

“Just bear it.

Once he’s old and too weak to hit you, your life will be over anyway.”

But I didn’t want to bear it anymore.

After my childhood friend and I registered our marriage, his kept woman sneered at me.

“He doesn’t love you.

This is just an arranged marriage!”

I was speechless.

“It’s a business alliance.

Could you sound any more provincial?”

In this day and age, who worried about love in a marriage like ours?

The only use I had for her sugar daddy was to give me an heir carrying both families’ blood as soon as possible.

As for the man himself, I doubted even our housekeeper, Mrs.

Wu, wanted him home.