Second Chance

During the year of our purest love, Chen Ming and I shared a kiss in front of everyone when we won the Zhengfa Cup debate competition.

But later, when our son was diagnosed with autism, we both came to regret it.

After ten years of love, the wear and tear of life had transformed us from a match made in heaven into a pair of bitter rivals.

Time skipped forward to our son’s fifth birthday.

Chen Ming and I were in the car, arguing once again over our child’s illness.

Right in front of our son, we cursed each other, screaming for the other to drop dead.

The next second, an out-of-control heavy truck barreled toward us.

Chen Ming went against his instincts and jerked the steering wheel to the right, but the violent impact swallowed all the shouting and cursing anyway.

When I woke up again, we were back on the day we won the Zhengfa Cup.

This time, facing a stadium full of cheering and jeering, we pretended we barely knew each other.

When my elder brother returned to the capital after investigating a case, he brought back two Liuxian Skirts, one blue-green and one pink.

He first asked my eldest sister which one she liked.

When it was my turn, my brother smiled gently.

“Pink is delicate, and it suits your complexion too. Do you like it?”

If I didn’t, there would be nothing left for me.

I nodded and took it.

Later, when choosing tutors and selecting study companions, it was always the same.

It was no different on the day we were to choose our husbands.

The Crown Prince won my eldest sister’s hand, looking thoroughly pleased with himself.

The Third Prince was crushed. He pointed at me at random.

“Then the Second Miss it is.”

After we married, the Third Prince regretted it a little.

But he was a good man.

He was willing to hand over management of the household to me, and he took no concubines.

Even when my eldest sister and I fell from our horses on the same day, he was the one who risked his life to save me.

At the very end, he touched my brow bone and let out a long sigh.

“Even if all I can ask for is a resemblance, so be it. In this life, I sought the highest, and in the end got only what was second-best.”

And so, when I was given a second chance at life, at the banquet where husbands were chosen,

I covered my brows and eyes and answered the Third Prince in a muffled voice.

“Yinyin already has someone she loves.”

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 dying under mysterious circumstances, fearless general Shi Songyue awakens as a ghost bound to Jiang Yinxue, the sharp-tongued imperial censor who was once her sworn enemy.

She assumes she can drain his yang essence and torment him at will, until she discovers he stole her body, traded away his lifespan to summon her soul, and spent years hiding a love neither of them dared confess.

As fragments of memory expose her former fiancé Shen Feng as her murderer, Songyue must choose between clinging to Jiang Yinxue at the cost of his life and leaving him behind forever.

Yet fate offers the quarrelsome lovers one more chance—if they can stop wounding each other long enough to seize it.

My elder sister cared more about dignity than anything else.

After our family was stripped of everything, we were sold together to the Red Pavilion as entertainers, and my elder sister, a gifted qin player, declared, “Even if I must sell my art, I will do it with dignity, for my qin is meant for nobles and high officials, not common rabble unworthy of refined music.”

The patron she insulted lunged at her, and I sacrificed my body to preserve her dignity while she went on to become the Red Pavilion’s foremost art courtesan.

When a wealthy merchant took a fancy to her and made her his lawful wife, I begged her to redeem me too, but she only said, “Wait a little longer, and I will take you out once I find a respectable excuse.”

I waited five whole years, until she had become one of the capital’s celebrated noblewomen, yet her rescue never came.

In torn clothes, I stopped her sedan in the street and asked whether she had forgotten her promise.

She looked me over in disgust and said, “I have no sister as disgraceful as you.”

Through my tears, I demanded, “Did I not become this way because of you, and do you truly not understand what I suffered?”

She pouted and replied, “I watched every step that brought you here, so what hardship could possibly excuse you?”

With that one sentence, she turned the whole street against me, and they cursed me as a shameless whore.

Fury overwhelmed my heart, and I died coughing blood.

When I opened my eyes again, I had returned to the day she refused to play for the patrons.

She was standing there with her neck stiff, arguing with a man.

I never expected that I would accidentally end up becoming colleagues with my ex-husband. After all, it had only been three months since we finally ended our miserable three-year marriage-a marriage that was nothing but mutual torture.

On the final day of the divorce cooling-off period, I waited for Yuan Shiyu at the Civil Affairs Bureau for three hours.

The person who eventually arrived wasn’t him; instead, it was a hospital representative delivering a critical condition notice and a last letter.

Everyone thought he had finally agreed to let me go. Only I knew that the first sentence of that letter read: Wantang, I’m sorry, I really can’t make it this time.

The year I turned eight, I was trampled to death beneath the Crown Prince’s horse.

His guards paid my parents one tael of silver to make the matter go away.

My parents did not even retrieve my body; they took the money with ingratiating smiles and said, “For our daughter to die beneath His Highness’s horse is a blessing she could never have hoped for.”

Before my first seven days of mourning were over, Father divorced Mother and took another wife.

Mother remarried with every appearance of joy.

It seemed they had forgotten me.

Later, just as I was about to be reincarnated, Father and Mother dragged the Crown Prince to my grave and made him pay for my death with his own.

In my previous life, as my Imperial Younger Brother and I were being hacked into mincemeat by a flurry of blades, the Imperial Son-in-Law stood outside the bamboo grove, cold and detached, as if he were a mere bystander.

In this life, I looked at the handsome gigolo kneeling before me-the same man who had once died while shielding me from a blade-and I couldn’t help but smile.

“You’ll do.”

While I was offering prayers to Buddha on the mountain, a young gentleman suddenly intruded upon my solitude.

He apologized, his face flushing a deep crimson.

Yet, I heard his inner thoughts: [I have heard the Princess is kind and benevolent; I wonder if she will blame me.]

[I only ended up in the wrong place because I was trying to escape my eldest brother’s schemes.]

[How should I apologize to make the Princess happy?]

He did not know that I had experienced a dream.

In that dream, I followed the guidance of his inner voice to investigate his claims, only to walk step by step toward a dead end.

In the end, my Imperial Father grew to loathe me, my eldest brother was deposed, and I was drowned in a pond.

Only after my death did I learn that this young gentleman could choose who heard his heart’s voice.

It was by relying on this trick alone that he rose from being an Outer Chamber Son to the legitimate second son of a Marquis’s manor.

Now. I looked at the fair-skinned, red-lipped young gentleman before me, who appeared shy and timid.

I gave him a gentle smile. “Someone, come. For trespassing in the Forbidden Courtyard, give him thirty strokes of the cane.”