Past Trauma

My lady was injured and lost her memory. She forgot everyone, yet she remembered my husband.

My husband was once a beggar.

During a heavy winter snowfall, he lay by the roadside, covered in blood and filth.

Passersby all steered clear of him, but my lady alone ordered her carriage to stop and took him in.

From then on, he stayed in the manor to tend the horses for her.

My lady often visited him under the pretext of checking on the horses.

I saw the deep, lingering affection in their eyes with my own.

But how could a young lady of her status ever marry a horse slave?

Heartbroken, she told him:

“I cannot marry you.

“But I will find someone to take care of you in my stead.”

My lady personally betrothed me to him.

Later, the lowly horse slave found his way back to the imperial capital and reclaimed his identity as a prince.

I, in turn, became his legitimate consort.

On the day of the investiture, I was waiting.

I knew.

Sooner or later, my lady would come back to reclaim what was originally hers.

I was known for being a good girl. During our five years together, no matter how Liang Yansheng played around behind my back, I obediently endured it all.

Until that day, when I found a pair of stockings and a set of lingerie in his hotel suite that didn’t belong to me.

He didn’t show a hint of guilt at being caught. Instead, he just gave a lazy smile. “Be a good girl and go check out of the room for me.”

His friends were all placing bets on how long I could hold out this time.

Liang Yansheng rested his chin on his hand, sounding indifferent. “She’s such a good girl. She’ll settle down in a couple of days.”

He expected me to be just like before, begging him with puppy-dog eyes not to leave.

What Liang Yansheng didn’t know was that once a good girl like me reaches marriageable age, we always listen to our parents.

And so, while he was riding high on his own arrogance, I gathered my courage and asked the handsome man at my blind date: “If the child takes my last name, can you accept that?”

I’ve read so many novels about the “crematorium” trope-where the husband has to crawl back and beg for forgiveness-but I never expected to find myself starring in one.

Except there’s no chasing, only the crematorium.

Because I’m actually dead.

I’ve become a ghost, watching the man who betrayed me. Seven days after my death, he finally seems crushed by a delayed sense of grief. In the home I can never return to, he howls in agony, acting as if life is no longer worth living.

You want to know how I feel?

I just stand there blankly, carefully admiring every inch of pain etched onto his face.

I listen intently to his desperate wails, triggered by my departure.

Beyond the desolation and heartache in my soul, a massive wave of schadenfreude suddenly wells up within me.

A joyful, blissful sense of schadenfreude.

It’s a sensation so sharp it borders on thrill. I cover my mouth and begin to laugh.

Zhou Xingzhi was disfigured while saving the woman he truly loved. In the hospital, I cried my heart out, my sobs echoing through the halls.

I kept pestering the doctor, asking over and over if his face could be fixed.

Everyone thought I was hopelessly in love with him.

Only Zhou Xingzhi’s younger brother handed me a tissue, a smirk playing on his lips. “Sister-in-law, my brother’s face is beyond saving.” “You might as well choose me instead. After all, my face looks much more like Wei Qiao’s now than my brother’s does.”

On the day we got divorced, Song Zhiyuan and I nearly came to blows right there in the Civil Affairs Bureau. When the clerk asked for the reason behind the split, he had the audacity to claim he had seven girlfriends on the side. I laughed out of sheer frustration. Seven girlfriends? So you really don’t get a single day off all week, huh? I shot him a sideways glare. “Working seven days a week without a break-can your body even handle that?” Song Zhiyuan sneered. “You’re not my wife anymore. It’s none of your business whether I can handle it or not.” Beside us, the clerk actually gave him a thumbs-up. “A real man. Impressive!”

My sister has hated me for twenty years. She once told me to my face that it would be better if I just died.

So, just as she wished, I was diagnosed with stomach cancer.

The tattoo on the back of Wei Yan’s neck was the initials of his ex-girlfriend’s name.

The only reason he had spared me a second glance in that vast sea of people was because my eyes and brows bore a striking resemblance to hers.

Three years after Lin Wan’s death, I found the record of her seven years of love for me tucked away in an old cardboard box.

The last page still carried the smell of medicine, where she asked if, in the next life, I could be the one to love her first. That night, I finally understood that the cruelest thing I had ever done was to let someone waste away to death without ever once looking back at her.

It has been ten years since I died.

After a decade, I have finally seen the first person to come and pay their respects at my grave.

It is a man, limping as he walks toward me.

It is my father.

When Nan Mu was very young, he met someone who told him: never, under any circumstances, become friends with Wen Miao.

As the years passed and he was on the verge of forgetting that warning, he met a girl. Her name was Wen Miao.

Even more shocking than the genius girl Wen Miao winning the nation’s highest award in physics was the fact that she was murdered in the Biology Research Lab like a common lab rat-with her very skull sliced open.