Revenge

I am a lactation consultant, specifically catering to wealthy socialites.

To gain my clients’ trust, I intentionally pretend to be blind.

I never expected that one day, when I arrived for a home visit, I would discover that my client had become a corpse.

And her husband was currently discussing how to dispose of her with another woman.

Seven years after my body was stolen from me, I finally succeeded in taking it back.

By then, “she” had already used my body to get married and become pregnant.

Without hesitation, I filed for divorce and terminated the pregnancy.

The news of my sudden divorce shot to the top of the trending searches, but I couldn’t have cared less.

My only priority was finding my lover, the man who had been left battered and broken in my absence.

The day she died, a heavy snowfall blanketed the capital, sealing the city gates.

When the eunuch came to report the news, I was drinking in Noble Consort Liu’s palace.

I simply said, “Understood.”

It wasn’t until that cup of plum blossom wine-the one meant for our reconciliation-seared through my chest that I finally understood.

She had waited ten years, but she was never waiting for me to have a change of heart. She was waiting for me to die with her.

I was a fake heiress.

When I was thirteen, my nanny suddenly told me I was her daughter, a fake heiress, and demanded that I take money from the Su family to support her and my biological brother.

I looked at her, then turned around and reported her.

My brother, who had achieved fame at a young age, had his hands ruined by someone.

He could no longer sit for the Imperial Examination.

Every business venture he attempted ended in failure.

He lost everything, falling into absolute ruin.

Left with no other choice, My brother married a woman with a hideous face.

But all of this-every bit of it-had been orchestrated by her.

The tragedies that befell my entire family All stemmed from her obsessive, twisted love for my brother.

Fortunately, I have been reborn.

We had been together for three years, yet my girlfriend still couldn’t forget her first love.

There was a locked room in her house-a promise she had kept for him.

As long as he returned, there would always be a place for him in her home.

For his sake, she abandoned me time and time again.

The final time, I left nothing but a single breakup text and vanished without a trace.

Yet, she acted as if she had gone mad, searching the entire world for me.

Eventually, in a cemetery, she finally discovered the truth behind everything.

With bloodshot eyes, she pointed at the person in the black-and-white photograph-someone who bore an eighty percent resemblance to her-and interrogated me.

“Shen Yu, tell me-” “Every time you looked at me, who exactly were you thinking of?”

During the year we fled the war, my mother saved a Princess Consort during labor, ensuring that both mother and daughter survived.

However, the barbarians arrived.

My mother told the Princess Consort to take us and flee first, while she stayed behind, sword in hand, to hold back the enemy.

With a single blade, she cut down countless foes, but in the end, she was simply outnumbered.

After her capture, she sought only the release of death.

Instead, they dislocated her arms and tore at her clothes, exposing her snow-white skin…

The Princess Consort and I were saved. However, the Princess Consort broke her word. She did not treat me like her own daughter.

Instead, she loathed my mother, claiming she had been rendered filthy and defiled by the barbarians.

Because of this, she made me her daughter’s personal maid.

When the Crown Prince ascended the throne, he installed his Crown Prince’s Secondary Consort as the Empress.

The reason was simple.

It was written in the Destiny Book that his first Empress would die from a hail of arrows piercing her heart.

On the day the imperial decree for the installation was issued, my elder sister-the Crown Princess Shen Chengyun-entered my palace with a beaming smile and gave a rather sloppy bow.

“This consort offers her congratulations to the Empress.”

She leaned in close, her bright red lips curling into a venomous sneer.

“Shen Ruoruo, you’d better cherish these few days of luxury. Don’t get too ahead of yourself, though. If you do anything to upset me… well, whether you receive an honorable posthumous title after you die will be entirely up to me.”

“Is that so?”

I took a step back and spoke in a low, steady voice.

“Then Sister had better make sure she doesn’t die before I do.”

Third Miss Liu did not have a very good reputation.

When she was fourteen, she threw a length of white silk over a roof beam and hanged herself, an act that stripped the primary wife of her power to manage the household.

The entire capital whispered that she was far too calculating for such a young age.

When she was seventeen, she sat atop a wall and tossed her silk pouch into the arms of a complete stranger.

Once again, the capital buzzed with rumors, claiming she was conducting a private affair and lacked any sense of shame.

Her father was so livid he was practically hopping mad, threatening to have her drowned in a pond. As soon as this news broke, General He grew anxious.

He was the capital’s most notorious man fated to kill his wife. And he had just accepted Third Miss Liu’s pouch.

I was born a beggar.

Maybe some wealthy young lady had made a mistake, or maybe some brothel woman had simply had rotten luck.

Either way, I came into this world. I grew up begging for bowls of slop.

At my most wretched, I even fought mangy dogs for food.

Later, to stay alive, I sweet-talked a human trafficker into selling me into the palace.

On the day I entered the palace, I saw the red sun rising at the edge of the sky.

It looked just like the duck egg yolk that had once gone rolling and wobbling to my feet in the Drunken Fragrance Pavilion.

I smacked my lips and savored the memory for a moment, then turned and stepped onto that long, long palace road.

From a beggar hated by all, I became a palace maid within the towering imperial palace.

That year, I was nine.