Pregnancy

Chapter 0

I am the mistress of the Marquis’s Manor, serene and detached as a chrysanthemum.

Aside from me, there are two favored concubines in the household.

As the main wife, my daily duties include chanting sutras in the ancestral hall and mediating the disputes between those two concubines. Among them:

The second, Jiaoniang, was born a courtesan, with a naturally seductive air.

The third, Wenniang, is a sweet girl from a modest family, gentle and understanding.

As for my husband, Marquis Wenchang Gu Jinyan, he is accustomed to sleeping with the second and sharing his heart with the third.

With me, however, things are so tepid we may as well be brother and sister.

Three months after marrying into the Marquis Manor, I became pregnant.

A maid brought me a bowl of medicinal soup, claiming it was a gift from the Empress Dowager to help stabilize my pregnancy.

I took the bowl but didn’t dare to drink it.

In my previous life, not long after I drank it, I fell into a coma.

When I finally woke, I was trapped in a sea of flames, and both mother and child perished.

At that moment, the maid urged me, “Please drink it quickly, Madam. Refusing a gift from the Empress Dowager is a punishable offense.”

On the night before our engagement, my fiancé got a call from his first love.

He left without a word and vanished for the entire night.

Calmly, I packed my things and called him to break up.

But when the call connected, a stranger answered.

“Who are you looking for?”

I contacted my fiancé’s parents, but they told me they were DINKs. They had no children, and they didn’t know me.

Everyone around me had forgotten that my fiancé had ever existed.

I touched my slightly swollen belly, horror crashing over me.

“Then who is the father of this child?”

I followed an underworld Big Brother for six years.

But on my birthday, he brought home a girl.

He was covered in blood, and the pretty, delicate girl was hiding in his arms.

From then on, the man who had indulged my every whim never looked at me again.

Everyone thought I loved Xu Chang but could never have him, and that I was heartbroken beyond words.

I only smiled and toyed with the watch on my wrist.

I was an undercover police officer planted inside Huaxi’s largest criminal gang.

I’d stayed by his side all these years for one reason: to treat him to a taste of prison food. So how could I possibly… fall in love with him?

After we made love that night, I drifted off to sleep.

My husband, who never liked saying sweet words, suddenly said: “Honey, I love you.”

I opened my eyes.

That tone was all too familiar.

It was exactly the tone he used when he’d done something guilty.

I was pregnant.

But I only wanted the baby, not the baby’s father.

With my belly about to become impossible to hide, I simply blocked him.

The very next day, though, he showed up outside my apartment and stopped me at my door.

When I saw his gaze settle on the swell of my stomach, I played it cool.

“What are you staring at? I just gained weight.”

At that, he looked at me like I was an idiot.

“Don’t worry. I don’t need any child support, and I won’t use this baby as an excuse to bother you. All you need to do is disappear completely-”

Before I could finish, he cut me off. “No.” “I want this child too.”

“Sis, you can have the female lead role!”

At the wedding venue, I clutched the hand of the male lead’s unattainable first love, sobbing my heart out.

“Whoever wants it can take it. I sure don’t!”

After transmigrating into a docile-wife romance and learning that I was expected to give the male lead eighteen children, I immediately started looking for someone to take my place.

Who would’ve thought that the frail first love, who’d always seemed one breath away from death, would sit bolt upright from her sickbed and cry: “If you don’t want it, then I don’t want it either!”

As if by tacit agreement, our gazes both turned toward the trembling third female lead.

While the concubines of the harem fought for favor, the Empress was wondering when the emperor would finally die.

The emperor and I had been married since our youth, but ours was a match arranged without either of us having any say.

After all these years, we had only ever treated each other with distant courtesy.

And as my son grew older by the day, I found myself hoping more and more that His Majesty might depart this world sooner rather than later-if only so all my years of diligently managing his harem would not have been in vain.

I am a mushroom. But my master doesn’t see it that way.

Whenever I tell him I’m a mushroom that gained sentience, he just lets out a long, heavy sigh.

Aside from that, he’s very good to me. He cooks for me, buys me clothes, watches boring arthouse movies with me…

On every late night I spend curled up in the corner, after he gets home from working overtime, he quietly carries me back to bed.

He even told me he wanted to have a child with me. At that, I clutched my stomach and burst out laughing.

“Please. How could a human and a mushroom possibly have a baby?”

We reproduce by spores. Have you never heard of reproductive isolation?

…

Until one day, I stared at the pregnancy test with two bright lines on it and completely short-circuited.

After discovering yet another mistress Jiang Chengning was keeping outside the estate, I asked for a divorce.

He looked at me coldly and did not say a single word to make me stay.

I went to another town and rented a house. That very night, some lecher crept into my bedroom.

In my panic, I smashed his head in and killed him. His family was determined to make me pay with my life.

But I did not die. I spent a month in prison. When I was finally released, the daylight was so blinding I could hardly open my eyes.

Jiang Chengning’s face was a blur before me.

“Yingying is a woman living all alone out there, and surviving is as difficult for her as it was for you. Now that you’ve experienced it yourself, can you understand her?”

This time, I did not raise my voice and argue as I used to. I only stayed silent. His voice softened.

“I never truly wanted to divorce you. I only wanted to teach you a lesson. From now on, don’t make trouble with me over Yingying again. She has not had it easy.”

I nodded obediently. Jiang Ying had not had it easy.

And Jiang Chengning could just as easily make sure I did not have it easy either.

I returned to the Jiang Family and became his wife again. Once more, he brought up taking Jiang Ying as a concubine.

This time, I agreed. Not only did I feel sorry for Jiang Ying, that poor woman-I went on to feel sorry for one woman after another.

Only much later did Jiang Chengning realize something was wrong and demand to know why I no longer cared about him the way I used to.

I sighed and explained, “None of them have had it easy.”