Short story

My mother had come from another world, and she believed firmly in monogamy.

When she discovered that my husband was keeping a mistress, she stormed into his princely residence, demanding that I divorce him and come home with her.

I stared at her.

“Mother, your daughter already has power and wealth.

Why should I care if he keeps another woman?”

To please his mistress, my father secretly switched Mother’s newborn daughter with hers.

He meant for his mistress’s daughter to take my place as the legitimate young lady of the family and grow up surrounded by wealth and privilege.

Behind Mother’s back, the mistress mocked her.

“A country woman like her will spend her whole life laboring only to hand the fruits to someone else.”

Even Father thought Mother ignorant and easy to deceive.

But Mother was merely uneducated, not witless.

Neither of them knew that a fire broke out in the rear courtyard on the day Mother gave birth—and that she switched me straight back.

Even as he faced death, Father could not understand how a country woman like Mother had brought about his ruin.

I had always thought I was the heroine’s sworn enemy.

Only when I saw her willingly confine herself to a husband’s household for love did I realize how terrifying blind devotion could be.

Stroking her belly, she urged me to find a good man and discover the pleasures of love.

I shook my head, as determined as ever to follow my own path.

In time, she lost sight of her dreams in that household, all for love, while I made love itself a stepping-stone and climbed to the highest seat of power.

After wandering the mortal world for more than six hundred years, I hear that a once-in-a-century sword prodigy has appeared.

The young man has also found a dragon that sounds remarkably like the one I lost long ago.

Cultivators from across the realm flock to the mountain, some to seek the dragon and the Dao, others to kill and seize treasure.

I am different.

After a long, dusty journey to the Sword Sect, all I want is to set up a little stall at the foot of the mountain and sell wontons.

In the twelfth year of her political marriage, Lu Zhuohua’s husband slaps her for the sake of his newest concubine—and the formidable marchioness answers by smashing a bench over his head.

What first looks like another petty battle in a crowded noble household soon exposes a plot involving a staged miscarriage, a powerful young heiress, and a poison meant for Zhuohua and her little daughter.

With her family, her fighters, and twelve years of household authority behind her, Zhuohua decides that if her husband wants her dead, she will simply strike first.

In the year when I was at my most spineless, the Noble Consort called me oversensitive.

That very night, I took a rope to her bedchamber, intending to hang myself beside her bed.

Fortunately, she found me in time and rescued me in tears.

Later, a beauty newly arrived at the palace called me as stupid as a pig.

I said nothing.

I simply took out my rope.

The Noble Consort said nothing either.

She just kept slapping her.

“Even I daren’t scold her.

Who do you think you are?”

I transmigrated into the daughter of a mistress.

When I arrived, my mistress mother was sobbing her heart out.

“What happened?” I asked.

She said, “The Qi family sent word: either they cancel Bai You’s engagement, or they replace her with Bai Zhuo.”

I rubbed my forehead. “And that’s worth crying over?”

My mother stared at me. “How is it not? Haven’t you studied this hard so you can enter a good university and become a better match for the Qi family’s young master? I lost to that woman my whole life. Must my daughter lose to hers too?”

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.”

Mother always said that if a woman wanted to stay radiant, she had to know how to nourish herself.

Ginseng and deer antler were useless.

What truly nourished a woman was a young, vigorous man.

Following that regimen, she still looked sixteen well into her forties.

Having grown up under her influence, I understood the secret by the time I turned eighteen.

Scholars were lean, generals solid, actors charming.

I had sampled them all.

The one I found most intoxicating was Shen Zhaoye.

I lavished mountains of gold and silver on him, yet never so much as put an arm around his waist.

Then he came to take his leave, claiming he had found a more powerful patron.

Furious, I followed him by lantern light into Springwater Lane.

When I kicked open the door, he was kneeling beside a couch, offering tea to someone.

The beauty reclining there lifted her eyes lazily.

My lantern went out, and my soul nearly fled with the flame.

“Mother?! You’re sleeping with my man?”

My mother waited for my father her entire life.

Even when illness confined her to her deathbed, she never got the snowy stroll among plum blossoms he had promised her.

So when Second Young Master Cui and I took a liking to each other, I told him I would wait for him only three times.

The first would honor the joy of our meeting.

The second would honor the bond of truly knowing one another.

The third would honor the love we had shared.

After the third, our ties would be severed, and we would have nothing more to do with each other for the rest of our lives.

Second Young Master Cui agreed with a smile, saying that such a fine match was a blessing from Heaven and that he would never dare cast good fortune away.

Later, he rescued a young woman.

For her sake, he made me wait again and again.

The final time, he sent word that our wedding would be postponed and that we could discuss it again after he had safely brought the young woman back.

I gave a cold laugh and asked, “Whether I marry, and whom I marry, is no concern of yours, Young Master Cui.”

The wedding went ahead as planned after that.

Only the groom had changed.

Anyone who tried to steal my betrothed was certainly detestable.

But anyone who tried to steal Cui Zhaoyu’s bride was, in my eyes, utterly adorable.