Love Triangles

“Sis, you can have the female lead role!”

At the wedding venue, I clutched the hand of the male lead’s unattainable first love, sobbing my heart out.

“Whoever wants it can take it. I sure don’t!”

After transmigrating into a docile-wife romance and learning that I was expected to give the male lead eighteen children, I immediately started looking for someone to take my place.

Who would’ve thought that the frail first love, who’d always seemed one breath away from death, would sit bolt upright from her sickbed and cry: “If you don’t want it, then I don’t want it either!”

As if by tacit agreement, our gazes both turned toward the trembling third female lead.

On the day His Majesty traveled south to Jiangnan, the Empress Dowager took a liking to Miss Xu of the Xu Family in Yangcheng.

“Such a lovely, fresh-faced child ought to become a daughter-in-law of our imperial family.”

As she said this, the Empress Dowager’s gaze seemed to drift, intentionally or not, toward Fu Yanli at my side.

Fu Yanli was the current Fifth Prince, and also my husband.

Later, on the day Miss Xu was to be invested as consort, I stood at the palace gates, clinging to a sliver of hope. “Not even I may enter?”

The guards at the gate all knew me. One by one, they lowered their heads, not daring to meet my eyes. “The Empress Dowager said it wouldn’t matter if anyone else came, but Your Highness, as Crown Princess… you absolutely cannot enter the palace today.”

I nodded, returned to the manor, and picked up the bundle I had packed long ago.

The capital blazed with lights. All at once, I remembered Fu Yanli from that year, when everyone had turned their backs on him.

He had held me tightly, refusing to let go no matter what. “Jianxi, even if I die, I will never betray you.”

My husband brought home a young woman.

I waited for her to bow and pay her respects, but she started shouting that “all people are born equal.”

I suggested she become his concubine, and she clung to my husband, demanding “one man, one woman, for one lifetime.”

My husband told me to be more accommodating toward her.

I was silent for a long while.

Then I kicked him straight into the sewage ditch.

“You’re the one who’s born equal to dogs. The two of you can go be a pair of dogs for life!”

Meng Yuanxi and I were rescued from the fire at the same time.

But after we woke, her talent shocked the world, and her policy essays stirred the hearts of all who read them.

Even my fiancé, the Crown Prince, wanted to break off our engagement for her sake.

She said that in this world, she was destined to be the winner.

But I only said lazily, “After getting the chance to do it all over again, you still haven’t improved at all…”

I was He Xingxiao’s kept canary. In bed, I slacked off with a terrible attitude.

After a while, I’d start whining that it hurt, that I was tired.

But when it came to shopping, I could speed-walk for miles, spending his money like my life depended on it.

Then one day, I saw a row of floating comments: [The vicious supporting female character’s good days are almost over. The beloved, universally adored heroine is about to meet the male lead.]

[She’ll scheme against the heroine again and again, and the male lead will gradually grow disgusted with her.]

[The male lead hasn’t even dumped her yet, but she’ll run off with his money and a fake rich heir. In the end, that fake rich heir will steal all her savings, harvest her kidney, and she’ll die miserably in a rental apartment.]

[She deserves it! Only a kind, non-materialistic good girl like the heroine deserves a tycoon’s love!]

I did not want to lose this job that paid three hundred thousand a month.

From then on, I stopped slacking.

In bed, I performed like I’d been injected with pure adrenaline, refusing to leave even the tiniest opening for the heroine.

He Xingxiao looked at me with a smile that wasn’t quite a smile.

“Are you trying to make me die in bed so you can inherit everything I own?”

The boy I’d secretly loved was expelled from school for protecting his childhood sweetheart.

Years later, I became the most famous talent manager in the industry and ran into him waiting tables at a restaurant.

He had long since forgotten me, but I still wanted to give him a chance. I asked him, “Xie Xingyun, do you want to be an actor?”

He came with me.

It took me three years to transform him from a waiter carrying plates into the entertainment industry’s hottest new star.

Then the childhood sweetheart he’d protected all those years ago came looking for him.

My mother waited for my father her entire life.

Even when illness confined her to her deathbed, she never got the snowy stroll among plum blossoms he had promised her.

So when Second Young Master Cui and I took a liking to each other, I told him I would wait for him only three times.

The first would honor the joy of our meeting.

The second would honor the bond of truly knowing one another.

The third would honor the love we had shared.

After the third, our ties would be severed, and we would have nothing more to do with each other for the rest of our lives.

Second Young Master Cui agreed with a smile, saying that such a fine match was a blessing from Heaven and that he would never dare cast good fortune away.

Later, he rescued a young woman.

For her sake, he made me wait again and again.

The final time, he sent word that our wedding would be postponed and that we could discuss it again after he had safely brought the young woman back.

I gave a cold laugh and asked, “Whether I marry, and whom I marry, is no concern of yours, Young Master Cui.”

The wedding went ahead as planned after that.

Only the groom had changed.

Anyone who tried to steal my betrothed was certainly detestable.

But anyone who tried to steal Cui Zhaoyu’s bride was, in my eyes, utterly adorable.

After the Qin Family was confiscated, Qin Shuyu’s place as Crown Princess fell to me.

The Crown Prince could not bear to see his childhood sweetheart reduced to an official courtesan. After much maneuvering on his part, Qin Shuyu transformed overnight into a maid in the Crown Prince’s study, serving him with sleeves of red and the scent of ink.

As his lawful wife, I naturally had the magnanimity to tolerate others. I had no intention of making things difficult for her.

But on the night of our wedding, just as the Crown Prince was about to consummate the marriage with me, a bleak, mournful flute melody suddenly sounded outside the hall.

When the song ended, Qin Shuyu’s shattered voice drifted in after it:

“The past is a heartbroken poem; I pine for you, my lord, yet you never know.”

I was the CEO’s white moonlight, but I had gone dark.

“So you can fly overseas for business, but you can’t come overseas to see me? Is it that you can’t afford a ticket, or that you can’t make the time?”

“You keep saying I’m your white moonlight, then turn around and find a substitute. If your feelings are that cheap, don’t ever tell anyone you liked me.”

“I don’t want a man who’s been tainted. Don’t come looking for me again.”

I married a pig butcher in my young mistress’s place. On our wedding night, I said, “From now on, you slaughter the pigs and I’ll sell the meat. As husband and wife, we’ll work together and make a good life for ourselves. When we have children, we’ll send them to school and do our best to free them from the fate of becoming butchers.”

Then my rather handsome husband pressed a hand to his forehead and laughed.