Second Chance

In my previous life, before my elder sister entered the palace to become empress, she bent her head to tell me, “Ah Ting, when I’m gone, you must take care of yourself.”

I promised her through my tears.

Five years later, the empress fell out of favor.

Her enemies had her raped, and that night she hanged herself.

The emperor decreed that the deposed empress of the Meng family was without virtue.

No one in the capital was permitted to wear mourning white.

I went to beg forgiveness on behalf of the Meng family.

Struck by my beauty, His Majesty took me into the palace, where I became the most favored woman in his harem.

The day I dragged him into the flames to die with me, he closed his hands around my throat in a rage.

“I have treated your family well!

For your sake, I even overlooked that defiled, deposed empress!”

I let the fire climb over me as though I could feel nothing.

“I didn’t.”

When I woke again, it was the day my sister entered the palace.

She stroked my head, then turned toward the palace that devoured people.

I stripped off my fine clothes and jewelry, then turned toward the bloodshed of an army camp.

Let us see whether that imperial bastard would still dare call her “deposed empress” when I surrounded his palace with my army.

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.

He Died Before Spring When Lu Chen died before my eyes for the sixth time, I finally stopped trying to block that car, that river, and that fire.

I no longer clung to a medical report, fruitlessly arguing with fate.

Over the past three years, I had dragged him back from the brink of spring time and time again, only to finally realize that someone eventually has to walk that path to the end.

But I still couldn’t let go. At the very least, this time, I wanted to tell him I loved him to his face before he closed his eyes for good.

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.

Because I coveted the Crown Prince’s beauty, I snuck into the Eastern Palace and became a Dark Guard.

The Crown Prince was temperamental and unpredictable, so I only dared to drool over him in secret.

Until the day he was deposed and reduced to a commoner.

Taking advantage of the chaos, I locked him inside the dungeon I had painstakingly built.

“You wretched slave! Release me at once!”

The proud Crown Prince’s eyes reddened with fury, making him look even more enticing.

I slowly undid his belt and pinned him against the damp brick wall.

“Let you go? I can’t do that. But… having you? That I can do.”

I devoured the Crown Prince completely and forced him through one position after another.

Until later.

I caught a Dark Guard slipping into the dungeon and kneeling as he begged the Crown Prince to return to the palace.

And the man who, just last night, had refused to yield beneath me even if it killed him, curled his lips in a lazy smile.

“No hurry. The Crown Princess and I still have some candlelit reading to do tonight.”

…

The freshly printed copy of Dragon and Phoenix Harmonizing Eighteen Positions in my hand fell to the floor with a smack.

My mother was the discarded wife of a marquis, and everyone was waiting to laugh at her.

Yet she refused to give them the satisfaction.

She neither made my father regret casting her out nor won the heart of some handsome man.

She left the capital in disgrace, looking like a homeless cur.

Years later, I was betrothed to the son of an earl’s household.

Noble though his birth was, his endless visits to brothels had left him riddled with disease.

On my wedding day, I sat in the bridal sedan, about to take my own life.

Then horses reared and people shouted outside, throwing the procession into chaos.

The marquis’s discarded wife had returned—to steal the bride.

My daughter spots a handsome man in a magazine and asks who he is.

Since he heads my company’s biggest business partner, I jokingly call him our “sugar daddy.”

The next day, she pins his son to the floor at school and declares that he is her father.

One spectacular misunderstanding later, the man I left years ago walks back into my life—and discovers the daughter I never told him about.

Zou Fengsheng wants an explanation.

I want to keep the peaceful, independent life I built without him.

But between meddling children, an office reunion, and feelings neither of us truly buried, keeping our past in the past may be impossible.

On the day I got divorced, I walked away with over a hundred million in assets.

Before I could enjoy the payoff, I dropped dead.

I opened my eyes back in high school, where a rich boy with a terrible reputation was asking me out in front of everyone.

My ex-husband was certain my taste was too good to accept him.

I snatched the love letter and said yes.

This time, I wasn’t about to suffer through building a fortune from scratch.

Pei Yizhi was the boy my father had taken in to raise as my future husband.

But after he placed first in the imperial examinations, he married a princess.

I should have stormed up to their gates on their wedding day.

Then the princess’s vicious servants would have beaten me out into the street, where I would die a miserable death.

This time, though, I didn’t.

The night I went to collect Prince Jing’s corpse, I saw my own jade bracelet and sleeping robe inside the coffin. My husband, returned from the dead, choked me and said, “Lanyin, die once in my place.”

When I opened my eyes again, I had returned to three months ago. This time, I will be the one collecting their corpses first.