Strong Love Interests

I was Sword Venerable Jiang Tingxue’s most devoted anti-fan.

I spent nearly a century slandering him from the shadows, yet he never once noticed me.

Then his cultivation was destroyed overnight, and his enemies threw him into a brothel to be humiliated.

I went there especially to laugh at him.

But when I saw the sickly beauty in a blood-soaked robe, blind eyes veiled in white, the words that came out of my mouth were not the ones I had planned.

“Hey, Jiang Tingxue, want to come with me?”

“…I suppose I could treat you a little better.”

And so, in the hundredth year of my futile obsession with Jiang Tingxue, he became the beautiful prize I kept all to myself.

I married a pig butcher in my young mistress’s place. On our wedding night, I said, “From now on, you slaughter the pigs and I’ll sell the meat. As husband and wife, we’ll work together and make a good life for ourselves. When we have children, we’ll send them to school and do our best to free them from the fate of becoming butchers.”

Then my rather handsome husband pressed a hand to his forehead and laughed.

My husband brought home a young woman.

I waited for her to bow and pay her respects, but she started shouting that “all people are born equal.”

I suggested she become his concubine, and she clung to my husband, demanding “one man, one woman, for one lifetime.”

My husband told me to be more accommodating toward her.

I was silent for a long while.

Then I kicked him straight into the sewage ditch.

“You’re the one who’s born equal to dogs. The two of you can go be a pair of dogs for life!”

After ten years by my side, my husband brought home a beauty and announced he would make her empress.

He said, “You have no son, but I need a crown prince.”

“What man under heaven doesn’t have three wives and four concubines?”

“When did you become so jealous, so incapable of tolerating others? You’ve changed. You’ve become hideous.”

That very night, I took my Young General with me and charged out through the city gates without looking back.

After I left, he said with red-rimmed eyes, “Ning Huan, come back.”

Of course I would come back.

Clad in the imperial yellow robes, I led three hundred thousand troops back to the capital, my loyal Young General standing at my side.

“Men, drag the Deposed Emperor and that beauty out and behead them. Hang their heads from the city walls. Let them go to hell and reflect on their disloyalty and lack of filial piety.”

My elder sister once saved Prince Cheng in Yangzhou, back when he was afflicted with muteness.

When he recovered, he personally came to our door to ask for her hand.

But by then, my elder sister was already married and had borne a child. Holding her newborn in her arms, she smiled warmly.

“I am five years older than you, and I only gave birth to this child a few days ago.”

“My younger sister, however, is only a year apart from you. Perhaps she would be a better match.”

Later, Prince Cheng truly did ask to marry me.

But after our wedding, he treated me with the utmost cruelty, forever complaining that my temperament was worlds apart from my sister’s.

“I was wrong. For the bright moon in my heart, I settled for second best and made do by marrying you.”

“And because of that, I have spent my entire life making do.”

Now that I had been reborn, it was once again the day Prince Cheng came to our door.

My elder sister was just about to bring me up.

I spoke first, smiling calmly.

“Sister, I don’t like older men either.”

When my elder sister was preparing to marry Marquis Ding’an,

she caught the eye of the Crown Prince.

Our entire family was overjoyed.

To give the marquis’s household an explanation, they pushed me out in her place on the day of the wedding.

After we were married, Marquis Ding’an despised me.

Again and again, he mocked me to my face:

“Crude and vulgar. You don’t compare to your sister in the slightest.”

“You can’t even read an account book. Astonishingly stupid.”

I felt wronged too. I smashed my rouge and powder at him and cursed,

“My sister is the Crown Princess now. If you’re so capable, go steal her back, you coward!”

And so we spent our entire lives at each other’s throats.

When I opened my eyes again, I had returned to when I was sixteen and not yet married.

My elder sister looked at me with smiling eyes and coaxed,

“Little sister, would you like to marry into the marquis’s household and become the Marchioness?”

I was abducted as a child, but because I had fair skin and a pretty face,

I was carefully trained into a temptress made to ensnare wealthy young masters.

That night, in the most extravagant luxury suite in Macau,

Zhao Rongzheng lay there, languid and sated, his gaze falling on me as I wept like a flower in the rain.

“Stop crying. I’ll pay off your brother’s debt for him. From now on, you stay with me.”

I took the money, coaxed him with sweet words, and then vanished without a trace.

Five years later, news that the Seventh Young Master of the Zhao Family was divorcing his wife to marry a widow shook all of Hong Kong.

Zhao Rongzheng, now the man in power over the Zhao Family, personally stepped forward to handle this sordid scandal.

Seated high above me, he looked down at my meek, submissive, pitifully vulnerable appearance.

“What is it? Does every man in the Zhao Family have to fall into your hands at least once?”

The night I married Pei Guanli, I cried so hard I soaked half my bridal veil.

Not because I didn’t want to marry him, but because everyone in the capital knew that Pei Guanli was more upright and proper than the ancestral tablets in a shrine.

He oversaw ceremonial protocols at the Ministry of Rites and revised the dynasty’s statutes and rites.

If a family used the wrong ritual vessels at a wedding, he could remember it for three years.

If someone wailed one time too many at a funeral, he could submit a memorial impeaching them straight to the emperor.

As the daughter of a merchant family from Jiangnan, this was exactly the sort of man I feared most.

Before my mother sent me into the bridal sedan, she clutched my hands and cried even harder than I did.

“Ah Ning, once you reach the Pei Family, speak less, smile less, and eat less.”

I asked, “Why eat less?”

Choking back sobs, my mother said, “Noble young ladies in the capital eat as delicately as if they’re painting flowers. You eat three bowls in one sitting. You’ll give yourself away too easily.”

I paused, suddenly feeling that before this marriage had even reached the bridal chamber, I had already lost on appetite alone.

My younger sister eloped with a penniless scholar, and her cold-hearted fiancé broke down my door, demanding that I take her place.

I was so scared I clutched my waistband and begged for mercy.

“Brother-in-law, how can you blame this on me?”

The two cinnabar moles beneath his eyes were as red as blood, and his tone was utterly indifferent.

“An elder sister is like a mother. In other words, every grievance has its culprit, and every debt has its debtor.”

“So, are you coming with me on your own, or am I dragging you away?”

Th-thrilling. Was this the domineering forced-love plot they wrote about in storybooks?

The weak could not fight the strong, so I was just about to get out of bed when I realized my sister had run off wearing the only pair of padded winter pants in the house.

Left with no choice, I lay right back down.

“Forget it. It’s freezing out, so let’s not move.”

“If you’re going to seize me, then seize me. Hurry up, while the blankets are still warm…”

“…”

-A laid-back heroine who sleeps through the abduction x an action-oriented hero who carries on abducting while she sleeps.