Second Chance

My father was famous throughout the surrounding villages for being a good man.

One freezing winter during a famine, he gave the last of our rice to a mother and child passing by.

After they left, they told everyone they met that my family still had grain.

The starving refugees, driven mad by hunger, came to our door to steal it, only to find an empty rice jar.

Humiliated and enraged, they forced my three-year-old sister into their arms and carried her away.

“If there’s no rice, then your daughter will do!”

I ran after them. In the end, all I found in the ruined temple was my sister’s mangled remains.

When I returned home, my father wailed through his tears, “I was trying to save people! It’s not my fault… That was just her fate!”

He saved someone else. In the end, my sister died, and I died too, in the bitter winter when I was fifteen.

When I opened my eyes again, I saw my father handing the freshly cooked rice to that mother and child.

I picked up the flower hoe beside me and stepped up behind him.

“My youngest uncle is Yin Boyu. You’ve heard of him, right?”

My blind date asked the question with a hint of contempt.

“I have.”

“He’s only a few years older than me, but he’s already the one in charge of the family company.”

“Impressive.”

“My uncle really is impressive. Handsome, loaded, the whole package. Too bad he’s so cold. He’s almost thirty, and there’s still not a single woman by his side.”

Is that so? I took a sip of my milk tea and didn’t tell him.

My divorce certificate with Yin Boyu was tucked away in my drawer.

They told me it was only a game, and had me wipe out the male lead’s entire household.

But when the NPCs’ blood splashed onto me, it was so scalding, so searingly hot, that I finally realized this so-called full-dive game was connected to a real world.

A real village. Real people. And a real young male lead who blushed as he asked me what flowers I liked.

Behind me came the sound of frantic, uneven footsteps.

Covered in blood, I turned around-only to see the young man staring at me in a daze.

In his hands, he was still holding a bouquet of dew-damp white begonias.

After my elder sister learned she was a false heiress,

she disguised herself as a man and went out drinking at a pleasure house to drown her sorrows.

Who could have known she would accidentally enter the wrong room?

There, she spent a night of passion with Zhou Huaixu, who had come to investigate a case.

Zhou Huaixu had been drugged. His mind was hazy, and he did not know who the woman from the night before had been.

He only remembered that she said she came from the Qinghe Cui Clan.

The Zhou Family was known for its upright traditions, and Zhou Huaixu soon came to propose marriage.

But by then, my elder sister had already left.

As it happened, I had gone looking for her that night and did not return to the estate until dawn.

He mistook me for my elder sister and married me.

It was not until our wedding night that he realized he had the wrong person.

Filled with regret, he blamed me. “If you hadn’t been so vague, how could I have married you?”

Zhou Huaixu treated me with the utmost coldness, yet in bed, he showed me no mercy at all.

When I cried and begged him, he only covered my face and sneered, “She would never be as frivolous and lowly as you.”

Then I was reborn on the day Zhou Huaixu came to propose.

I spoke softly. “That night, I went to bed early and never left the estate.”

After sacrificing a kidney for the family that never loved her, Song Zhiwei wakes up at seventeen on the day Zhou Jiashu offers her a cruelly false confession.

Newly able to hear other people’s thoughts, she rejects the boy who betrayed her and refuses to become medicine for her ailing half sister again.

As Zhiwei fights to reclaim her future, she discovers that Cheng Chi–the notorious silver-haired school tyrant–is the one person whose fierce devotion has always been real.

The day I married into the Gu marquis’s household, my father-in-law died and my mother-in-law fell ill.

The wedding feast became a funeral banquet, and I was forced to take charge in the midst of the crisis, assuming control of the household and carrying the funeral through with composure.

My husband thanked me for preserving the Gu family’s dignity, yet never set foot in my room again.

In time, he filled the household with concubines and fathered a brood of sons and daughters by them.

I raised them conscientiously and planned for their futures.

Then I overheard my husband speaking to them behind my back.

“I have never met anyone as coldhearted as your mother. Your grandfather died, and she did not shed a single tear. You may call her Mother, but never learn from her. She is unworthy of the name.”

By then, a physician had already told me I did not have long to live.

Not one of those children came to visit me or bring me medicine; they simply left me to die.

With my last strength, I set fire to the Gu residence and burned that cold, loveless place to the ground.

When I opened my eyes again, I had been reborn.

The Gu family came to propose marriage, and as I looked at the refined, handsome man before me, we spoke the same words at the same time.

“I refuse.”

It turned out I was not the only one who had returned.

In my last life, I saved He Yan, the young master of a marquis manor.

He took me as his wife, and for a time, our marriage was the talk of Shangjing.

But I had been born and raised in the countryside.

My manners were crude, and my reputation gradually soured.

He Yan, too, slowly grew distant from me.

I wept day after day, and before I even reached thirty, I died in misery.

Given a second chance, I swore I would never live that way again.

Only, after eating wild greens for three days straight, I realized I simply could not let go of the marquis manor’s soy-braised pork knuckle, sticky rice chicken, crab roe lion’s head meatballs, scallion-fried lamb…

On the day the Su Clan was raided and seized, Father dressed me in a magnificent gown and threw me in front of the soldiers.

“She is Su Yueying, the Eldest Young Miss of the Su Clan.”

Everyone said Father was a loyal servant.

When I saw him again, Father had become the New Emperor’s most trusted Divine Martial Great General.

Su Yueying had become Empress, the New Emperor’s one and only for the rest of his life.

And I was a courtesan in a brothel, a woman anyone could have.

To buy back my freedom, Mother dragged her gravely ill body to beg Father for help.

The gatekeepers beat her to death with two strikes of their staves.

I begged Su Yueying to let Mother be buried.

But she said, “There are plenty of untouched entertainers in the pleasure houses. If you had held fast to your principles, I might still have helped you. But you chose to debase yourself. I will not help someone like that.”

That very night, someone hacked off my limbs and sank me into the river.

When I opened my eyes again, I had returned to the day the Su Clan was raided.

This time, let Su Yueying go to the brothel herself and hold fast to her precious principles.

I was a male celebrity drowning in scandals.

Online, people said I had schemed my way to the top. They said my private life was filthy and promiscuous.

My family said I was jealous of the adopted son they had taken in, that I had racked my brains trying to ruin him.

My friends said I was two-faced and treacherous, not someone worth getting close to.

Even my fiancé believed I could never compare to my younger brother, who was generous, graceful, kind, and innocent.

If that was how it was, then I would leave your world behind.

I was never meant to be defined or controlled by anyone.

My elder sister loved sweets.

Every year, when lychee paste was sent from home, the first box was always hers.

As a child, I was greedy and stole a taste.

Mother frowned and said,

“Your sister is frail. Let her have it.”

Later, I kept giving way and giving way, until even my marriage was pushed behind hers.

When the Crown Prince came to consider a match, my elder sister disliked all the rules of the Eastern Palace and turned around to choose an Idle Prince instead.

So everyone’s eyes fell on me.

The Crown Prince said gently,

“The Second Young Lady will do as well.”

I married him.

After our wedding, he treated me well enough. It was just that every year, when lychee paste was presented as tribute, he would first send someone to deliver it to my sister’s residence.

I asked him about it once.

He smiled.

“Your sister loves this.”

“You’ve always been sensible. You won’t mind.”

Until, on his deathbed, he clutched my hand and suddenly called out my sister’s childhood name.

When I opened my eyes again, I had returned to the day the Crown Prince came to consider a match.

Mother pushed me forward.

I took one step back and said softly,

“This subject’s daughter already has someone in her heart. I fear I am not blessed enough to enter the Eastern Palace.”