Past Trauma

Three months after I moved into Old River Bend, the old lady next door died. While I was helping clear out her belongings, I found a diary.

The first page read: “My daughter died three years ago. The person living next door to me is a ghost.”

But I knew there was something wrong with her daughter from the very first day, because I’m a ghost, too.

Synopsis While working the night shift at the hospital morgue, a man on the autopsy table who had died from blood loss suddenly opened his eyes and called out my name.

Only later did I learn that he was a vampire who had lived for two hundred years, and I was the one he had been searching for through seventeen lifetimes-the only person who could both save him and kill him.

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?”

My ex-boyfriend turned my ashes into a necklace and hung it around his son’s neck for eighteen years.

For those eighteen years, my soul remained trapped by the boy’s side.

Then one day, out of the blue, the boy told me something.

He said he wanted to marry me.

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?”

It took me three thousand years to become an Upper Immortal, and another thousand years to find her reincarnation.

But on the day of our grand wedding, her memories of her past life suddenly awakened.

She held a sword to my throat, claiming that I had personally sealed her within Purgatory for eight hundred years.

During those eight centuries, her soul was scorched by Karmic Fire by day, and she cried out my name by night.

Now that she remembers, her first priority is to make me pay for it in blood.

While sorting through my mother’s belongings, I found a crumpled notebook tucked under her pillow.

Four words were scrawled unevenly across the title page: “The Kill List.”

The first name on the list was the obstetrician who had delivered me.

The date noted beside it was the day I was born.

The second name was my father’s.

The date was the day he died in a mining accident.

The third name belonged to a stranger.

The date noted was yesterday.

The police told me that this person really did die yesterday, but my mother was buried over a month ago.

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.

My boyfriend asked me to help him shut down his computer.

That was when I saw his chat logs.

A girl named Qingqing had messaged him: “So, when are you coming to marry me?”