Time Travel

On the day of the Flower-Viewing Banquet,

I accidentally spent a night of passion with Second Young Master Yan.

Forced to abandon my previous engagement, I was hastily married into Prince Yan’s Mansion.

I had thought such a noble household would be impossible to survive in.

Who would have guessed that after the wedding, my mother-in-law would be kind, my husband easy to coax, and my children sensible?

Aside from taking medicine, I never suffered any real hardship.

Comfortably and contentedly, I lived to the age of seventy-five.

On my deathbed, as I looked back on the past, I could not help but take Yan Zhao’s hand.

“In this life, you and I came together by a twist of fate, but it turned out rather well.”

“If there is a next life, would you be willing to be with me again…”

To my surprise, Yan Zhao’s face suddenly went cold.

“Shen Yao, if we could live this life over, you would still want to have an illicit affair with me without so much as a matchmaker?”

“What do you take me for? It is not as if I cannot live without you!”

Seriously?

We already had children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, yet he was still this resentful?

He should have said so sooner.

Then the husband I had known since childhood, the one who was supposed to marry into my family, would not have ended up leaving alone after I broke off the marriage.

He would not have died so young in a distant land.

Thinking of Rong Zhen, I grew even more melancholy.

There had been three perfectly good people. How had I ended up the only one to live a happy, peaceful life?

My eyelids grew heavier and heavier.

When I opened my eyes again, I was back at the Flower-Viewing Banquet.

It has been ten years since I died.

After a decade, I have finally seen the first person to come and pay their respects at my grave.

It is a man, limping as he walks toward me.

It is my father.

When I was six years old, I first discovered I could see things that didn’t belong to this world.

My grandfather passed away that year, and we moved into his home in the Grain Bureau Residential Compound.

A week after he died, I saw him at home again. He was leaning on a dragon-head cane, tottering toward the bathroom all by himself.

I followed him, only to find the bathroom completely empty.

I told my dad about it, and he slapped me hard across the face.

Grandma said I was seeing “unclean things.”

But later, I realized I could see more than just the dead; I could see the living, too.

For instance, Aunt Chen from the compound had been away on a business trip to Beijing for several days. Yet one afternoon, I ran into her in the stairwell-just a fleeting glimpse.

I ran off to tell the adults who were outside enjoying the cool air. As a result, when Aunt Chen finally did come home, she and her husband had a massive row.

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.

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.”

Father Emperor is a transmigrator, and I have been able to hear his inner thoughts since the moment I was born.

[Huh, so this is the future villainess? She’s so soft and adorable; how did she end up turning out so wrong? No, I have to protect her. My daughter can only be the lead heroine.]

In the beginning, that was exactly what he did. He taught me self-respect and self-love, told me not to depend on men, and said that girls could hold up half the sky.

But later, things changed. He looked at me with eyes full of loathing, claiming I didn’t have a shred of the decorum expected of a young lady, and forced me to kneel in the Buddhist hall to copy Buddhist scriptures. And I could no longer hear his inner thoughts.

I was married to Chi Ni for three years.

It wasn’t until after his death that I discovered his morbid, obsessive longing for me through his diary.

“I’m so jealous of the Young Lady’s dog. I want her to put a collar on me, too.”

“I dreamed of the Young Lady. When I woke up… I was wet again. I am a sinner.”

Clutching that diary, I was reborn into a time ten years in the past.

These were Chi Ni’s most wretched, downtrodden days.

He looked at me with a cold, detached gaze, like a wild dog that couldn’t be tamed.

I curled my finger at him with a beaming smile. “Smile for me, or I’ll kiss you until your lips are raw.”

The cold indifference he had fought so hard to maintain instantly crumbled.

I’m an influencer who specializes in adventure content.

For the sake of the show, I bought a cabinet that had once been used to hide a corpse.

Supposedly, the cabinet was cursed.

Anyone who owned it would die an unnatural death within ten days.

I’ve always been stubborn, and luck has always been on my side.

I absolutely didn’t believe it.

The night I had the cabinet moved into my home, I had a dream.

A girl covered in blood crawled out of the cabinet.

She beckoned to me, then glanced at the clock on the wall and used her fingernail to carve a “9” into the cabinet. …

Chapter 0

After my father beat me to death in a drunken rage, I was reborn as my grandmother’s best friend-an obstetrician-gynecologist.

Grandma asked anxiously, “Xiao Fang, is the baby healthy?”

I said, “It’s brain-damaged. I recommend aborting it.”

Noble Consort Qin was a peerless beauty, alluring enough to make the emperor cast aside his first wife and depose his legitimate son.

With tender eyes, Noble Consort Qin murmured, “His Majesty and I were joined as husband and wife in our youth. We are as devoted as a pair of mandarin ducks…”

Emperor Gaozu, inveterate male chauvinist: “Lady Qin is a mere concubine. How could she possibly have been joined to Us in our youth?”

“Throw this insolent wretch into the cold palace at once-and bring Us five hundred jin of memorials!”

◆ Male-chauvinist emperors with a single-minded devotion to a rich nation and a powerful army ◆

◆ We have no need of love. We want GDP! ◆

Notes:

1. This is a male-lead story in a fictional setting, and an unconventional quick-transmigration novel told through feudal monarchs who enter romance stories.

2. The emperors are written as typical rulers of feudal eras. They care only about raising GDP and have no time for romance. And yes, they truly are male chauvinists. Emphasis very much intended.

3. This is a wish-fulfillment story hostile to the pampered-concubine trope, with face-slapping and scum getting what they deserve. The emperors’ values do not represent the author’s. Please do not derail the discussion.

4. The direction and pace of the plot are entirely the author’s decision, and the author reserves the final right of interpretation.