Past Trauma

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?

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!”

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.

The first time I stayed over at my boyfriend’s place, his ex-girlfriend suddenly burst into the bedroom in the middle of the night.

I could clearly feel his body stiffen. The room fell into a dead silence.

“Song Yuan,” she choked out, her voice so hoarse it was barely recognizable.

But he acted as if nothing was happening, pinning my wrist down and nonchalantly continuing to kiss me.

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.”

She Has Been in the Wind for Two Years

Synopsis: Two years after my wife passed away, I still received messages from her every day and ate the dinners she had “arranged” for me.

I thought she had never truly left-until one late night, when I followed a text begging for help back home and realized I had been living all along inside the Fengli she left behind for me.

After my sister passed away, Jiang Huaizhou treated me like her substitute.

He married me, yet he despised me.

Outside our marriage, he kept one lover after another.

He even mocked me, saying, “Even with Weiwei dead, you will never compare to her.”

He belittled me until I was worth less than nothing.

But then I remembered that there had once been someone who said to me:

“Yinyin, no one else matters. You matter most.”

I did something terrible back in middle school.

At the time, I didn’t think much of it. I was even relieved that no one ever found out.

But once I learned the full truth, the despair made me want to die.

A person as vile and shameless as me is surely bound for Hell.

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?”

Mom had a Leather Handbook that recorded every woman Dad kept on the side.

One of them, Aunt Wei, was marked in particular.

In Mom’s delicate handwriting, she had written: This is the little toy I’m leaving you. Enjoy this life to your heart’s content, my daughter.

After Mom died, that woman buzzed into my life like a fly.

And I swatted her straight down into hell.