Orphans

Chapter 0 During the sentimental retrospective at our wedding, my husband took one look at the screen before his eyes turned bloodshot.

He grabbed a chair and began smashing the display in a blind frenzy. Standing on the wedding stage, I laughed until tears streamed down my face.

I was the one who played that video. I had been waiting for this moment for a very long time.

I lost my mother at seven and my father at ten, leaving me with only Grandma to depend on.

Grandma made a living sewing and doing laundry for others, while I spent my summers farming and my winters heading into the mountains.

We managed to scrape by.

When I was fourteen, I had a dream.

In that dream, I was a princess.

After being brought into the palace, I engaged in a life-and-death struggle against the Impostor Princess.

In the end, we were both killed by the transmigrator, becoming nothing more than stepping stones on her path to power.

On the day my mother divorced, she held me in her arms and tore down the notice from the Marquis Mansion.

The Marquis Mansion was looking for a successor wife, which also meant finding a stepmother for the Young Heir.

A crowd of young women in the prime of their youth, as beautiful as flowers, stood at the mansion gates. They were waiting for the Old Madam to look them over, hoping to enter the household and live a life of comfort.

My brother and father mocked Mother for her wishful thinking.

“Mother has no shame, trying to remarry at her age while dragging along a burden like my sister.”

“Sang Zhi, do you think the Marquis Mansion taking a wife is like buying someone at the village entrance? Do you think being a successor wife or a stepmother is easy?”

I knew I was the one holding Mother back from remarrying, and I sobbed until I was out of breath. “M-Mother, Tao Tao is a burden. Don’t worry about Tao Tao anymore.”

Mother knelt down, gently wiping away my tears as she comforted me earnestly. “Tao Tao isn’t a burden. Tao Tao is Mother’s most precious treasure.”

Matron Deng, the steward of the Marquis Mansion, held the register and lifted her chin arrogantly. Her sharp eyes coldly swept over the group of anxious, quiet young women. Suddenly, she spotted Mother, who was wiping my tears and speaking in a soft, gentle voice. She gave a nearly imperceptible nod.

“Write her name down as well. She actually looks like a mother.”

After my Imperial Mother Consort died, I was given three foster mothers in succession.

Of those three foster mothers, some were deposed, and the others were ordered to die.

In the end, I landed in Beauty Lin’s care.

For three years, she and I lived together in peace, without incident.

Until she offended the wrong person and was thrown into the Office of Punishment.

My heart gave a jolt. Oh no. It looked like I was going to have to change foster mothers again.

Worse still, this time, she was the only one I wanted.

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?”

During the year we fled the war, my mother saved a Princess Consort during labor, ensuring that both mother and daughter survived.

However, the barbarians arrived.

My mother told the Princess Consort to take us and flee first, while she stayed behind, sword in hand, to hold back the enemy.

With a single blade, she cut down countless foes, but in the end, she was simply outnumbered.

After her capture, she sought only the release of death.

Instead, they dislocated her arms and tore at her clothes, exposing her snow-white skin…

The Princess Consort and I were saved. However, the Princess Consort broke her word. She did not treat me like her own daughter.

Instead, she loathed my mother, claiming she had been rendered filthy and defiled by the barbarians.

Because of this, she made me her daughter’s personal maid.

The first time I killed someone, the blade was dull.

I was fourteen that year. It was winter, and the north wind whipped against my face with a stinging bite.

Three bandits had scaled the wall of my grandfather’s courtyard, intent on stealing the last half-sack of millet he had hidden in the cellar.

My grandfather was blind. Hearing the commotion, he called out my name: “Shen He, Shen He!” He was using my alias.

My real name is Shen Heyi, and I am a girl. But the bandits didn’t know that, and Grandfather pretended not to know either.

He just kept calling, his voice urgent and hoarse, sounding like an old crow being strangled by the neck.

I fished out that Bone-Cleaver from beneath the stove.

Its edge was curled and nicked, so dull it couldn’t even slice through sheepskin cleanly.

But a human neck is softer than sheepskin.

I didn’t think about that day again for a very long time-not until I met Xie Changgeng.

After announcing his marriage at a concert, the top-tier singer suddenly broke down in tears.

It was because he had just received news of my death.

Zhou Yan. We met at six and said our goodbyes at twenty-four.

I never had the courage to tell you that I truly, deeply loved you.

When I was thirteen, I traded myself for a bowl of chicken soup. From that moment on, I knew I was born for this life. I used it to trade for one head after another.

I was born a beggar.

Maybe some wealthy young lady had made a mistake, or maybe some brothel woman had simply had rotten luck.

Either way, I came into this world. I grew up begging for bowls of slop.

At my most wretched, I even fought mangy dogs for food.

Later, to stay alive, I sweet-talked a human trafficker into selling me into the palace.

On the day I entered the palace, I saw the red sun rising at the edge of the sky.

It looked just like the duck egg yolk that had once gone rolling and wobbling to my feet in the Drunken Fragrance Pavilion.

I smacked my lips and savored the memory for a moment, then turned and stepped onto that long, long palace road.

From a beggar hated by all, I became a palace maid within the towering imperial palace.

That year, I was nine.