Revenge

You are a village girl from the mountains.

By a twist of fate, you save the Crown Prince from an assassination, and you leverage that debt to demand he marry you.

But he disdains your plain looks and gently refuses many times.

You settle for the next best thing and ask him to appoint you as an official.

Since you were five, you’ve decided you will rise above your station in this life.

If you become a consort, you’ll be like Wu Zetian.

If you become an official, you’ll be like Sima Yi.

After eight years of marriage, divine physician Huo Yunqiao discovers that her beloved husband has betrayed her to protect the junior martial sister who has always hated her.

Bound to a System that will send her home only if she dies by the male lead’s hand, Yunqiao chooses to drink the poisoned prescription he writes for her—and spends her final days exposing every lie, reclaiming her dignity, and forcing those who wronged her to face the ruin they made.

I was born with a rebellious streak. The more someone tells me not to do something, the more I insist on doing it.

When my older sister demanded I give up my spot in the dance competition and shoved me down the stairs, I carved up her face.

When my younger brother framed me for stealing money, and my parents slapped me across the face in the middle of the street without even asking what happened, I burned both their wallets.

When my parents refused to let me study out of province, I moved thousands of miles away just to spite them.

Later, my sister brought home a handsome, wealthy brother-in-law.

She warned me not to act like a slut in front of him.

That very night, I put on a pair of black Balenciaga stockings and red-bottom heels, then rubbed my leg against my brother-in-law’s under the table.

After being reborn, I met Song Shixing again.

He was slumped at the end of an alley, covered in wounds and barely clinging to life.

I knew that in three years, he would become the ruler who stood at the pinnacle of the world.

And I would be his empress. Power and riches would all be within my grasp.

But this time, I didn’t want to save him.

Song Shixing, in this life, I don’t want anything to do with you ever again.

The Supreme God cultivated the Path of Ruthlessness. He was without desire or longing, stern and impartial.

To prove that she held a place in the Supreme God’s heart, the Fairy Maiden deliberately slaughtered Meng Family Village.

Kneeling on the ground, she wept like a rain-drenched blossom. “Your disciple has committed a grave sin. Master, please punish me. Grind my bones to dust and scatter my ashes.”

The Supreme God stared blankly at that beautiful face. In the end, he could not bring himself to do it.

He summoned the Nine Nether Yin Fire to burn the village and destroy all evidence, then ordered his disciple to return and copy scriptures in repentance.

I crawled out from a mountain of corpses and a sea of blood, selling my soul to the Evil Demon for one thing alone: revenge.

The Evil Demon’s voice was beguiling. “What do you want?”

I looked back at the roaring flames behind me. “I heard that a thousand years ago, the Supreme God killed his wife to prove his Dao. Give me a face identical to his dead wife’s.”

Under the short video I posted, a girl tagged her boyfriend to come watch.

“Everyone move, my husband likes this kind of thing. Let him see it first!”

I tapped into her profile picture and froze.

She was the girl who had bullied me in high school.

I would know that face even if it were reduced to ashes.

I didn’t sleep all night. I went through every video she’d ever posted, then tapped on the boyfriend she’d tagged.

I sent him a private message.

“Are you there?”

In the fifth year since he took me for himself, the powerful young heir finally grew tired of me.

He handed me a bank card with a lazy smile. “Your childhood sweetheart isn’t actually dead.”

“Go find him.”

I stared at the address in my hand for a long time—so long that he lost patience, hauled me out of bed, and drawled, “I’ll give you a ride. Move your things out after today.”

He had just pulled on his coat and started looking for his car keys when his phone rang.

On the other end, his childhood friend was sobbing anxiously. “If you break up with her, what’s going to happen to Xu Xinghe and me?”

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?

My younger sister was blessed with heaven-defying luck, while I was a walking disaster.

Only later did I learn that she had bonded with a system.

She could choose one person to suffer misfortune and turn that misfortune into luck for herself.

I was the unlucky person she chose.

Then I bonded with a system too.

Mine had only one function: rewrite.

My sister remained lucky, but the people paying the price became my father, my mother, my brother, her boyfriend…

And she successfully turned herself into a jinx despised by everyone equally.

At twenty-five, I arranged for Bighead Xiao to take his first concubine.

Her dowry was an entire city.

At twenty-six, I arranged the second.

Her dowry was ten li of granaries.

At forty-two, he took his eighteenth.

There were so many women that I could no longer remember their names.

And I had gone from a farmer’s wife to the founding empress of Great Zhao.