Reincarnation

My eldest sister hated what she called pampered wives more than anything.

At a palace banquet, she sneered at the empress.

“A true strong female lead would have seized the throne and made herself empress regnant long ago.

Strip away the fine words, and the empress is still just a pampered wife who climbed to power through a man, isn’t she?”

One remark from her condemned the entire Song family.

On the day our estate was confiscated, Prince Chen offered my eldest sister a hand.

If she would only beg for mercy, every woman of the Song household could be spared enslavement.

Instead, she lifted her chin and declared, “Even if every woman in my family is made a slave, I will never beg a man for pity like some pampered wife!”

Prince Chen stormed away in fury, and our entire family was exiled into bondage.

On the road north, my second brother risked his life and led men to free us.

My sister only scoffed.

“Only pampered wives need men to save them!”

She deliberately raised the alarm, and my brother died beneath a storm of arrows.

Yet that very display of “independence” caught the eye of a prince from an enemy kingdom.

When he wanted to take me as a concubine, I had no choice but to agree if I wanted to live.

My sister said, “I’m marrying him for love.

If you become his concubine, you’re nothing but a pampered wife fighting another woman for a man’s favor!”

She ordered me to kill myself.

I had endured enough.

I lunged at her, determined that we would die together.

When I opened my eyes again, I had returned to the day the Song estate was seized.

Prince Chen was holding out his hand to my sister.

She looked at him with disdain.

“I will never be a pampered wife who depends on a man!”

As disappointment crossed his face, I reached out and caught hold of his belt.

“She doesn’t know a good thing when she sees it, Your Highness.

Perhaps you might take a look at me instead.”

When my elder sister was preparing to marry Marquis Ding’an,

she caught the eye of the Crown Prince.

Our entire family was overjoyed.

To give the marquis’s household an explanation, they pushed me out in her place on the day of the wedding.

After we were married, Marquis Ding’an despised me.

Again and again, he mocked me to my face:

“Crude and vulgar. You don’t compare to your sister in the slightest.”

“You can’t even read an account book. Astonishingly stupid.”

I felt wronged too. I smashed my rouge and powder at him and cursed,

“My sister is the Crown Princess now. If you’re so capable, go steal her back, you coward!”

And so we spent our entire lives at each other’s throats.

When I opened my eyes again, I had returned to when I was sixteen and not yet married.

My elder sister looked at me with smiling eyes and coaxed,

“Little sister, would you like to marry into the marquis’s household and become the Marchioness?”

In the twelfth year after my rebirth, the first thing I did upon leaving the Xie estate was visit my grave from my former life.

It lay alone in the wilderness, with Qingming as cold as winter and weeds growing ten feet high.

I added a shovelful of fresh earth and told myself, “Ah Lan, don’t look back. Keep walking.”

Shen Qi had secretly loved my elder sister for years.

When she and I fell into the river together, he mistook me for her and pulled me out first.

My sister was swept away and drowned.

Knowing none of this, I fell hopelessly in love with him.

I made such a scene about marrying him that he gladly agreed.

After the wedding, however, he alternated between warmth and coldness.

At times he treated me tenderly.

At others, he looked at me as if he hated me to the bone.

Once bright and willful, I withered day by day and lived in misery.

Only as I lay dying did I discover the truth…

He was kind whenever I reminded him of my sister.

He was cruel whenever he remembered that he blamed me for her death.

After I was reborn, I climbed onto the bank by myself and watched him rejoice at having my sister back.

Then I turned and walked toward the most exalted man in the realm.

The day I was cast aside for jealousy, more than half the capital applauded.

My mother-in-law wept and complained that I controlled her son, forbidding him from drinking and from taking concubines, making him the laughingstock of the city as a henpecked husband.

What no one knew was that my husband, Qi Chong, used that “henpecked” reputation as an excuse to turn away people asking to borrow money, dodge social obligations, reject beautiful spy-concubines sent by political rivals with ill intent, and rise smoothly through officialdom.

In the end, I alone bore the infamy of being a shrew and a jealous wife. I angered my father to death, and I myself fell gravely ill and died.

When I opened my eyes again, I had returned to the first year of my marriage to Qi Chong.

At a banquet, Qi Chong didn’t dare refuse the beautiful spy sent by his superior, and pushed me forward instead. Lifting his cup, he put on a troubled expression and said,

“I like the beauty very much.

“But if I bring her into the household, my wife will be upset again.”

What he didn’t know was that I took the beauty’s hand, then turned back to him with a gentle, magnanimous smile.

“Since my husband is so fond of her, and I’ve already checked that your birth dates are compatible, why not bring her into the household today?”

Qi Chong’s face filled with shock. He froze where he stood.

I have a secret.

From the moment I was born, I carried memories of my previous life.

I buried that secret deep in my heart and never dared reveal the slightest trace of it.

Until the year I entered the palace as a maid.

The other maids warned me never to provoke Shen Ruyun, Imperial Consort Shen.

They said she was a vicious, ruthless woman, and that countless eunuchs and palace maids had died by her hand.

I did not believe it.

Because I had once seen Shen Ruyun’s portrait.

And I recognized her.

She was my daughter from my previous life.

When I died, she was only ten years old.

I wanted to understand why that sweet, sensible child had become such a wicked ghost now…

After I died, my boyfriend’s grief moved God.

God gave me a chance to be reborn, sending me back to my boyfriend in a stranger’s face.

If he fell in love with me again, I could come back to life.

But when I returned to him, he already had a new girlfriend.

After dying a hero, I used the merit I had earned in life to make a wager with the King of Hell.

I would be turned into seven different animals, and if I could get my family to recognize me every time, I would be allowed to return to life.

If I failed, I would stay in the underworld and work there without complaint.

The first animal I became was a giant southern cockroach.

At my elder sister’s engagement banquet, the man who was meant to become my brother-in-law suddenly turned to propose to me instead.

“Wrong. I wish to marry the Second Miss.”

Everyone was thrown off by this turn of events, not knowing how to react, but once they recovered they forced a smile and congratulated me.

Only my elder sister came to find me late at night. “In a past life, he and I spent over fifty years together. It was only after I married him that I learned there was another woman he loved.”

“For those fifty years, we fought constantly because of that woman, until we grew to despise each other. If you don’t want to marry him, sister can help you reject this match.”

But I declined her kindness and still intended to marry him.

I have no romantic feelings for him. Whether he loved one woman or several was something my elder sister cared about; I did not.

My husband was upright and restrained, a gentleman praised by court and commoners alike.

He took no concubines and kept no maidservants in his chamber, so everyone believed he cherished me.

Only I knew the woman he loved was the Empress.

I had resigned myself to it, until the year rebels stormed the capital, seized our only daughter, and forced him to surrender the Empress and the Crown Prince.

Before the two armies, he shot our daughter dead with an arrow and said, “Since ancient times, loyalty to the realm and love for family cannot both be preserved.”

My hair turned white overnight. In despair, I dragged the Empress down with me.

When I opened my eyes again, I had returned to our wedding night.

Facing his still, emotionless face, I smiled sweetly.

“Since you love each other so much, I will make sure your love story is sung throughout the world.”