Second Chance

Young General Yan was having a spat with the girl who held his heart.

During the night banquet, he had hidden a stem of Evening Magnolia.

He declared that whoever found that flower would become the General’s Wife.

The noble ladies all turned their heads, scanning the room to see where the Evening Magnolia had landed. I remained silent.

I simply used my foot to quietly kick away the flower lying behind my seat.

A moment later, Yan Ci’s nonchalant voice rang out. “I wonder which lady has picked up my flower?”

Mengyu was the last daughter of the Gu Family still waiting to be wed. Her two older sisters had both married poorly.

One had been wed to a scion of a prominent family who was riddled with venereal disease.

The other had married a rising star from a humble background who favored his concubines and mistreated his wife.

When it was finally her turn, the prospects were even worse.

She was bound by a betrothal made back when the Gu Family had yet to find success-a childhood engagement to a poor scholar.

With a fierce mother-in-law, a spiteful sister-in-law, and a spineless husband awaiting her, even Mengyu’s parents felt too ashamed to ask her to go through with it.

Yet, Mengyu spoke with gentle composure. “There is no need for you to be troubled, Mother, Father. From what I can see, all men in this world are the same. What difference does it make who I marry?”

On our wedding day, my husband suddenly ascended to godhood.

Just like in my previous life, he offered me a mountain of heavenly treasures out of guilt.

Back then, I refused to take them, stubbornly insisting on following him.

Later, in the boundless, lonely Immortal Realm, I endured endless suffering.

It ended when the goddess who loved him tricked me into jumping off Reincarnation Cliff.

As my body perished and my soul flickered out, Xie Yunji didn’t even spare me a single glance.

When I opened my eyes again, my husband had become a god once more.

He still feared I would cling to him, his brow furrowed with impatience. “I carry a divine mandate; I cannot be tethered by the private feelings of one person.”

“You are a mortal. How could you possibly enter the Immortal Realm?” I stared at him for a long time before finally speaking.

“I’m not going to the Immortal Realm anymore. You can go.”

It had been three months since I completed my mission and logged off.

The System tracked me down, looking frantic and disheveled. “You have to go back! Your husband has lost his mind!”

I calmly continued washing my cat. “Oh, please. He was never normal to begin with.”

“He’s in the black market right now, trying to sell your son!”

I cursed under my breath and slammed the teleport button.

A moment later, I found two White Tigers-one large, one small-huddled in a corner of the black market.

The large one was covered in blood. Next to his paw sat a small sign. It read in bold letters: SELLING SON EARLY TO FUND FATHER’S FUNERAL.

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.

I waited bitterly for Qu Huang for three years, only to receive a letter of divorce.

When the message arrived, I was still wiping down his bedridden mother.

It was March, and the late spring cold had returned, yet I was drenched in sweat from exhaustion.

My hands shook so badly I could barely take the thin silk letter the attendant handed me.

“Where is my husband?”

“The young master has already arrived in the front hall.”

I sighed, set down the damp towel in my hand, and smoothed back the stray hair at my temples.

“Very well. I’ll go with you.”

Marquis Dingbei, Lu Chenzhou, had three wishes in life. First, a smooth career in court. Second, a prosperous household. Third, to marry the woman he loved. The first two were within easy reach. Only the third remained beyond him-unattainable, forbidden, inescapable. They said another man’s wife was not to be taken. But what if that woman was the wife he had divorced in his previous life?

My father was the richest man in Great Zhou, and I was his only daughter.

To protect me, he arranged for me to marry into Marquis Manor with an enormous dowry.

On the day of my engagement, I had a dream.

I dreamed that Marquis Manor looked down on me for being born to a merchant family, while the Young Marquis doted wholeheartedly on his talented cousin.

After my father died, my dowry was swallowed up completely.

To make his cousin his legitimate wife, the Young Marquis bribed the midwife to murder me while I was in childbirth.

When I woke from the dream, the Young Marquis walked into my family’s jewelry shop with his cousin in tow.

“Since you’re going to marry into Marquis Manor, you ought to shed that stink of money. Marquis Manor can’t afford that kind of embarrassment.

“Give this shop to my cousin. Consider it a greeting gift from you, her future sister-in-law.”

I looked at his smug, superior face and let out a cold laugh.

Then I turned and ordered the steward to throw him out.

“What kind of down-and-out household starts eyeing a wife’s dowry before she’s even married in?

“Your highborn Marquis Manor has worse manners than a farming family!”

Qi Zheng raised a hand and knocked over the insulated food jar I was offering him.

“I’ve already been forced to marry you. Do you really expect me to fall in love with you, too?”

Once that video was leaked, everyone knew: the newly risen top star had been forced into marriage, and I was the clingy leech he couldn’t shake off.

That night, after the shoot wrapped, everyone tacitly ignored the fact that I was still tied to a tree.

By the time I was rescued before dawn the next day, my legs were stiff.

I felt my way back through the dark, missed my footing, and fell off a cliff.

When I woke again, I had returned to four years earlier-and met someone who favored me openly and without hesitation.

Qi Zheng, however, was not happy about it.

My husband Chen Jing and I lived in harmony as a married couple, raising a son and a daughter.

Everyone said that for a merchant’s daughter like me to marry Chen Jing was a stroke of divine luck.

I deeply believed that too.

Reborn back to the year I turned sixteen, I held up the embroidered ball, waiting quietly for the new top scholar as he made his triumphant ride through the streets.

But Chen Jing waved the embroidered ball away.

He didn’t even care who the ball hit. It was as if, in this life, whoever I married had nothing to do with him.

I suddenly realized with a start- In this life, Chen Jing wanted a different wife.

Later, the good man I married was the very one he had caused the embroidered ball to strike.