Revenge

My husband brought home a child.

I raised him as my own, teaching him poetry, books, and proper etiquette.

I molded him into a noble young gentleman skilled in both letters and arms.

Years later, when he had risen to the highest ranks of court, he locked me away in a dark dungeon.

With both hands, he crushed my jaw. “My birth mother was Shuang’er, the woman you murdered.”

“A venomous woman like you thinks she deserves to be my mother?”

My husband stood by and watched, his palms pressed together in prayer.

“Shuang’er, may your spirit finally rest in peace.”

After being tortured to death, I was reborn.

Faced with the child my husband had brought home, I still smiled and said, “Of course. From now on, he will be my own son.”

Before the Second Young Master of Duke’s Manor was executed, the Old Madam wanted to leave him an heir.

She summoned all the maids to the rear courtyard and asked which of us was willing to make a trip to death row.

The girls exchanged uneasy glances.

If they wanted to climb into a young master’s bed, there were plenty of young lords in the manor to choose from. Why throw away their future on a man who was about to die?

I was the only one who stepped out of the crowd.

The others called me a fool for ruining my prospects when I had already been chosen for the First Young Master.

But what they didn’t know was that I had been lusting after the Second Young Master for ages.

He was going to die anyway. Once the deed was done, I would run.

After he was gone, I would burn plenty of spirit money for him to make amends.

But just as I was gleefully packing my bundle, news arrived that Second Young Master Jiang had escaped from prison.

I fled in a panic with the simple-minded young lady and the elderly Old Madam in tow.

Until one day, Second Young Master Jiang tracked us down with a sword in hand and bared his gleaming white teeth at me.

“Jinque, you and I have a score to settle.”

I was in the middle of feeding the pigs in my village when I suddenly saw a Danmaku.

[Is this bystander the villain’s younger sister?]

[She still thinks she’s an orphan. She has no idea that the villainous Chancellor is actually the brother she got separated from back then.]

[It’s a pity the villain lost to the male lead. He’s about to hang himself.]

[The villain only became an official to find his sister in the first place. If they could just meet once, maybe he wouldn’t have to die.]

What?!

I immediately sold my pigs to scrape together some travel money and rushed to the Capital overnight.

I knocked on the gates of the Prime Minister’s Mansion.

A pale man draped in a heavy cloak stood at the entrance, his gaze deep and haunting.

I lunged forward and threw my arms around his legs, wailing, “Brother! Wang Ergou from the village is trying to force me to marry him!”

When I was thirteen, I traded myself for a bowl of chicken soup. From that moment on, I knew I was born for this life. I used it to trade for one head after another.

On my first night inside the novel, the villain barged into my practice room.

Then he found himself staring at the male lead and the second male lead, already seated on meditation cushions.

After a long silence, he said, “Move over.

Make room for me.”

“There’s no room,” the male lead said.

“There really isn’t.”

I surveyed the cushions packed across the floor.

“I think we can squeeze in one more.”

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.”

His Majesty handpicked three women to enter the palace and help secure the phoenix throne for the woman he loved.

The first was the Grand Tutor’s daughter, steeped in the classics and celebrated throughout the capital for her brilliance.

The second was the general’s legitimate younger sister, peerless with bow and horse and proud to the bone.

The third was me, a woman without powerful kin or scholarly fame, armed only with hands that could manage a household and turn simple ingredients into exquisite food.

On the night before I entered the palace, Grandfather reminded me again and again to keep my head down and stay safe.

I smiled and agreed, yet as soon as I turned away, I wondered why I should.

The learned woman had no respect for her sovereign.

The horsewoman let her mount trample the palace steps.

As for the woman raised to the phoenix throne, she could not recognize a written character if it were as large as a grain measure.

Now that I had entered this game, I did not want safety.

I wanted to win.

Now that I had caught the emperor’s eye, I would not settle for a share of his favor; I would take it all.

After my husband’s favored concubine shoved me into a deep well, I miscarried. As crimson blood spread through the water, I heard a strange melody rise from the depths.

“Third Set of National Middle School Students’ Radio Gymnastics, Dancing Youth, begins now.”

After my sworn enemy and I both lost our memories, we lost control and ended up in bed together.

He was “gifted beyond measure,” and I was “shamelessly uninhibited.”

Physical desire and psychological disgust tore viciously at each other.

When my memories returned, I stared at my longtime nemesis, bare from the waist up, loving him and hating him all at once.

While enjoying his top-tier stamina, I maliciously recorded a video of him acting like my dog.

The shock brought his memories back.

After a brutal fight, we went our separate ways.

When we met again,

the wedding convoys of Hua Kingdom’s two great families ran into each other on a narrow road.

Song Jinbie and I regarded each other coldly, then brushed past without a word.

But late that night,

my newlywed husband was hanging upside down from the ceiling. Song Jinbie’s tone was lazy as he said,

“Become a widow, or marry me. Pick one.”

I likewise handed a hemp rope to his newlywed wife.

“Either tie it around yourself, or loop it around your husband’s neck.”

My legitimate elder sister and I joined the Wuji Sect on the same day, and our master taught her the Carefree Dao.

When it was my turn, Master gave me a sidelong glance and told me to seek my own Dao.

But I could not read, so I thought he wanted me to learn the way of theft.

Thirty years later, he emerged from seclusion, took one look at the boundless emptiness where our sect had once stood, and was struck dumb.

“Have the demons invaded?!”