Past Trauma

I married a man three years my senior, and everyone said he was head over heels for me.

But not long after our wedding, he cheated.

He smoked, he drank, he got into fights, and he even kissed other women right in front of my face.

He did everything I hated most.

Duan Yi took a drag from his cigarette, looking down at me through hooded eyes. “What? Regretting it now?” Clutching the divorce papers in my hand, I took the glowing, red-hot cherry of his cigarette and ground it hard into his palm.

“Duan Yi, you ruined me. You should have died back when you loved me most.”

Duan Yi acted as if he had just heard the funniest joke in the world, his shoulders shaking with laughter. “That actually hurts.”

It has been three years since I transmigrated into this brothel.

I have mastered the arts of seduction, and no one knows better than I how to make a man lose his very soul in ecstasy.

But then, I overheard a group of new girls gossiping.

“It’s hilarious. Our Flower Queen really thinks she’s living in ancient times.”

“A refined Female Doctor, tricked into working as a whore for three years. These rich people really know how to have a good time.”

“Do you think she’d go insane if she found out this was all orchestrated by her ‘Young Marquis’?”

“Shh! Every actor who comes in here has signed a life-and-death waiver. Who would dare let her know?”

I froze in place, as if plunged into a pit of ice.

Could it be that these three years of transmigration were nothing more than a scam?

Before I could regain my composure, the Young Marquis’s cold voice suddenly rang out from behind me.

“Fudong, what are you doing here?”

Dad didn’t like me. I knew this from a very young age.

Because I wasn’t the boy he wanted.

To have a son, he sent me away, saying, “Sons are the roots, and I don’t lack daughters.”

Never having been loved, I was upset about it for a long time.

But when it came time for him to need support in his old age, he said, “Sons are unreliable; daughters are the most caring.”

“Second Sister, when Dad gets old, it’ll all be up to you!”

After an argument with Zhou Mingyu, I jumped from the thirtieth floor with my five-month-old daughter in my arms.

When I opened my eyes again, time had actually returned to yesterday.

On this day, because the baby wouldn’t stop crying, Zhou Mingyu snapped at me for the first time: “Chen Ran, you don’t have a mother yourself, so it’s no wonder you don’t even know how to take care of a child!”

Our relationship had always been good, so I thought he hadn’t meant it; I blamed it on my own volatile temper and for taking things too hard.

But time continued to flow backward, and I discovered that this wasn’t the first time Zhou Mingyu had said such things: During my postpartum recovery month, he joked, “If your mother were still alive, my mother wouldn’t be so exhausted.”

On the day I was hospitalized to give birth, in response to the nurse’s questions, he said with a smile, “Her mother passed away, so who else could be her caregiver but me?”

At our wedding, he held my hand and vowed, “Chen Ran, I will definitely take good care of you in your mother’s stead!”

… It turned out he had always cared about the fact that I didn’t have a mother.

But the strange thing was, why didn’t I have any memory of my mother at all?

Had she ever truly existed?

If time continued to flow backward, would I eventually see 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.

The boy I loved died in the prime of his life.

So, I traveled back twenty years, giving everything I had to bring him even a single glimmer of hope.

Gu Zhixian, you probably won’t believe me, but I’m your future wife…

Gu Zhixian, the future you is a wonderful, kind-hearted person.

Gu Zhixian, we’re going to have a precious child in the future. They’ll have your eyes and my eyebrows.

So, please don’t give up on yourself, okay?

The boy I loved believed me.

As the clock prepares to strike midnight, it’s time for me to go.

I’m sorry. I lied to you. I am not your wife.

And in our future, we will never meet again.

I bought a eunuch off the street. On his very first day in the manor, he started throwing his weight around.

When the others refused to follow his orders, he turned right around and complained to me.

Everyone waited for him to be put in his place, but instead, I said, “From now on, whatever Pei Yunchuan wants, you give it to him.”

He was about to gloat over his newfound power, but he hadn’t even let out a laugh before I continued with my announcement.

“He is the man I am going to marry.” He froze, his voice shrill as he shrieked, “You deranged lunatic, what kind of nonsense are you spouting?”

I was married to Chi Ni for three years.

It wasn’t until after his death that I discovered his morbid, obsessive longing for me through his diary.

“I’m so jealous of the Young Lady’s dog. I want her to put a collar on me, too.”

“I dreamed of the Young Lady. When I woke up… I was wet again. I am a sinner.”

Clutching that diary, I was reborn into a time ten years in the past.

These were Chi Ni’s most wretched, downtrodden days.

He looked at me with a cold, detached gaze, like a wild dog that couldn’t be tamed.

I curled my finger at him with a beaming smile. “Smile for me, or I’ll kiss you until your lips are raw.”

The cold indifference he had fought so hard to maintain instantly crumbled.

I got bitten by a dog, went to get a rabies shot, and ran into my ex-boyfriend. On my inner thigh, there wasn’t just a bite mark; there was also a tattoo of his name. He let out a derisive snicker. “Still haven’t had it removed?” “Is my name really that unforgettable to you?”

The day I was escorted onto the Sacrificial Altar, Emperor Pei Yuheng personally pressed his seal onto the list of my crimes.

The entire court decried me as a Nation-Wrecker Sorceress, yet only I knew that his life was something I had reclaimed from the King of Hell, one blade-stroke at a time.

However, every time I saved him, he would forget a little more of me.

By the end, he couldn’t even remember the lantern he once held when he promised to marry me.