Revenge

On the first day after my wealthy birth family found me, my biological parents gave me a warning.

“Now that you’re back, don’t go thinking you can compete with Nian for anything.”

I surveyed the family’s opening show of hostility, smiled, and pulled out an employment contract.

“I think you two have misunderstood something: a parent-child relationship is a legal fact.”

“But asking me to play the sweet, obedient daughter while serving as your adopted daughter’s stepping stone would qualify as premium emotional labor.”

“It’ll cost extra.”

On the night before she joins her boyfriend’s startup, Wen Xiyue receives a call from herself twelve years in the future.

He will become a billionaire, but she will spend those years running his errands and surrendering her own ambitions.

Her future self has one urgent warning: take the developer job instead.

This time, Xiyue chooses her own career—and refuses to let the man who wants her talent steal her future.

Five hundred years after my death.

The people who had once benefited from my kindness had long since forgotten me.

Only my sworn enemy crouched at my grave, huffing and puffing as he dug for three whole days.

And dug me out.

As twelve bolts of tribulation lightning crashed down,

I saw Ye Yu’s face-unchanged from five hundred years ago.

The moment he saw me, his face lit up with excitement. “Shen Xi, come fight me!”

My gaze drifted past his shoulder

to the nervous members of the Righteous Path hurrying over behind him.

Those people had once been my master and fellow disciples.

They were also the ones who had killed me back then.

At the sight of them, I suddenly clutched my chest and collapsed into Ye Yu’s arms while he was watching the show.

In a soft, delicate voice, I said, “Big brother, this freshly reconstructed body is still so weak. Be a dear and take care of those small fry for me, will you?”

In an instant, I felt the body I was leaning against go completely rigid.

When I lifted my head again, the arrogant, untouchable Demon Lord was blushing so hard he looked ready to burst into flames.

I disguised myself as a man and spent twelve years in the barracks as a no-good soldier-only to suddenly learn that I was the Prefect’s true daughter.

The impostor daughter clutched my sleeve, sobbing as she shook it.

“Sister, I know I stole the place that should have been yours. I only beg you not to take away the love Father, Mother, and our brothers have for me.”

What she didn’t know was that I had no interest in stealing her love.

All I wanted was to get my brothers-in-arms some military pay.

The Emperor demoted me from consort to maidservant and ordered me to serve the woman he had always held in his heart.

I nodded and agreed. Then, in the mirror, a line of text suddenly appeared.

“Seeing High Immortal Yunyao in such a wretched state is so satisfying.”

“She probably has no idea we’re all using the Heaven and Earth Mirror to spy on her while she undergoes her love tribulation, right?”

The crown prince married me because I seemed content to ask for nothing.

He made me promise that when my elder sister changed her mind and returned, I would surrender my place as crown princess.

What did he know?

Asking for nothing could be the surest way to gain everything.

After the wedding, I wore myself out in his service, at court and within his household alike.

I even nearly “died” for him several times.

The day my sister returned, I kept our agreement: I took off the crown princess’s robes and handed over the phoenix seal.

He was the one who began to hesitate.

My mother was born into nobility, yet she threatened to die if she couldn’t marry my scoundrel of a father.

When I was three, my father broke the law and was thrown into prison.

My mother, holding my infant sister in her arms, climbed into the carriage back to the capital without so much as a glance behind her.

She left me alone in the howling wind and snow.

Eighteen years later, when we met again, my sister had already become the emperor’s favored consort.

Her contemptuous gaze was like a snowflake, landing coldly on my hands. “With all those calluses, can you even call those a woman’s hands?”

My husband was an emperor too powerless to rule.

Again and again, his ministers stopped him from deposing the empress, naming our son crown prince, or making me his empress.

After he died, the empress imprisoned me in the Cold Palace for twenty years, keeping my son alive only as long as I survived.

On the day death finally took me, a eunuch came to say that my son had been given poisoned wine as well.

History called me a temptress and a demon who ruined the realm, though I had spent my life urging mercy and never harmed a soul.

My husband and I once promised to find each other in another life.

Yet when that life came, I avoided the crown prince’s gaze and did everything I could not to be chosen—only to hear him tell his mother, “I choose Eldest Miss Song as my crown princess.”

When the chandelier came crashing down, Pei Yi pushed me toward death to protect another woman.

As I lay there, blood streaming from my head, I was so happy I could have bashed my skull against a wall.

The woman who had hijacked my body had finally failed her mission and been wiped out.

Having reclaimed control of my own body, I didn’t spare Pei Yi a single glance.

Yet, with bloodshot eyes, he blocked my path. “Is it… is it really you? Have you come back?”

After my twin sister was bullied at school until she jumped to her death, I took her place and infiltrated the campus.

During break, I received a blood-soaked note of intimidation:

[The prey has returned. The game continues.]

The signature was a Joker with a disturbingly twisted smile.

Everyone was waiting to watch me suffer.

But what they didn’t know was that the roles of prey and hunter had already been quietly reversed.

Because I was the sole heir to the Gu King of Nanjiang.