Time Travel

In my senior year of high school, the school beauty, Song Shuyao, once came to me to borrow money for medical treatment and asked me not to tell anyone.

As it turned out, she used it to get an abortion. She hemorrhaged and died on the operating table of a shady little clinic.

Years later, Lu Jingnian-the untouchable top student everyone had once admired from afar-pursued me obsessively and proposed to me.

Then, when I was eight months pregnant, he locked me in a basement in the suburbs.

He cut open my belly while I was still alive and said, “This is what you owe Yaoyao and our child.”

Only then did I learn that before Song Shuyao died, she had held his hand and told him not to blame me.

But he was convinced I had deliberately killed the woman he loved and their child.

That day, I died under Lu Jingnian’s butcher knife, my eyes wide open in hatred.

Then, carrying a hatred vast enough to drown the heavens, I returned to the day Song Shuyao came to borrow money from me.

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.

The noble consort who had been cherished all her life said on her deathbed that she regretted everything.

“If there is a next life, I would gladly trade places with you. I would be a lowly palace maid, endure until I turned twenty-five, then leave the palace and be free.”

“The emperor’s favor, all this hollow wealth and splendor – whoever wants it can have it.”

Tears ran down her face as she said that all she wanted was a love that was pure and true.

Just before she closed her eyes, she clutched my hand.

“Cherry, will you do it? Will you trade places with me?”

Weeping, I pressed my lips to her ear.

“This servant is willing.”

I had spent a lifetime cleaning up her messes.

I was so tired.

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.

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.”

On the night before she joins her boyfriend’s startup, Wen Xiyue receives a call from herself twelve years in the future.

He will become a billionaire, but she will spend those years running his errands and surrendering her own ambitions.

Her future self has one urgent warning: take the developer job instead.

This time, Xiyue chooses her own career—and refuses to let the man who wants her talent steal her future.

Ten years after I became Xiaotian, the Celestial Hound, I finally took human form.

As a woman.

Yang Jian went silent.

All three of his eyes blinked for ages.

He still couldn’t work it out.

His best buddy was definitely male.

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.”

Every night, I travel ten years into the future along with my classmate, the school’s most popular guy.

I never would have imagined that ten years from now, we’d be married with a baby of our own!

So, the moment I saw him lying there on my pillow, I didn’t hesitate for a second-I pounced right on him.

Wei Ze’s first love got divorced after her husband cheated on her.

Without a moment’s hesitation, he broke up with me and posted to his social media feed:

“I really wish I could go back eight years and change Xu Nianxia’s fate so she never married that scumbag.”

Xu Nianxia was the woman he had never stopped pining for.

Later, he and I both traveled back in time to eight years ago.

He set out to change his first love’s fate of marrying a scumbag.

I set out to change my fate of being with him.