Unrequited Love

Ten years after transmigrating into a novel, I had spent seven of them trying and failing to win over the Second Male Lead, the villainous Archdemon.

There was only ever room in his heart for the Female Lead, pure and white as moonlight.

So I spent three years saying goodbye to him, and from then on, I let him go completely.

But he seemed to be the one who could never let go again.

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.

I had been married to Shen Shi’an for eight years, but he still cherished the woman he had never forgotten.

He had grown tired of me, sick of me, finding me dull and vulgar.

When I cooked porridge or simmered soup, I was a woman with no ambition, forever fussing over a stove.

When his beloved washed her hands and made a bowl of soup, she was gentle, considerate, and understanding.

Later, after I had written our divorce agreement, Shen Shi’an traveled all the way to Jiangling to ask me for a bowl of jujube porridge.

I smiled and told him, “We don’t grow jujubes in Jiangling.

I haven’t made it in years.

I’ve quite forgotten how.”

The year Shen Jiuyuan picked me up, I was like a stray dog.

For ten years, I took bullets for him, rooted out traitors for him, and knelt to lick the blood from his shoes.

Everyone said I was Master Shen’s most loyal dog.

Until that night, when he gripped my chin and asked, “What reward do you want?”

I kissed his bloodstained fingertips. “I want you.”

He gave a low laugh and pressed a gun into my hand. “Then kill the person behind you for me.”

I took the gun and turned around, and the mirror reflected my pale face.

On the first day of the Lunar New Year, I climbed out of my childhood friend’s bed.

He lit a cigarette with careless ease.

“Leave through the back door in a bit. Don’t let my girlfriend see you.”

I froze. “You have a girlfriend? Since when?”

He curled his lips in a cold smile.

“None of your business.”

“You were the one who came on to me last night. I’m not taking responsibility.”

My expression turned indescribable.

“The person who slept with you last night wasn’t me…”

It was the cleaning lady from the guesthouse, who also happened to be his second uncle’s wife.

I had only come over to clean up the mess for them.

After I died, my boyfriend’s grief moved God.

God gave me a chance to be reborn, sending me back to my boyfriend in a stranger’s face.

If he fell in love with me again, I could come back to life.

But when I returned to him, he already had a new girlfriend.

Qi Zheng raised a hand and knocked over the insulated food jar I was offering him.

“I’ve already been forced to marry you. Do you really expect me to fall in love with you, too?”

Once that video was leaked, everyone knew: the newly risen top star had been forced into marriage, and I was the clingy leech he couldn’t shake off.

That night, after the shoot wrapped, everyone tacitly ignored the fact that I was still tied to a tree.

By the time I was rescued before dawn the next day, my legs were stiff.

I felt my way back through the dark, missed my footing, and fell off a cliff.

When I woke again, I had returned to four years earlier-and met someone who favored me openly and without hesitation.

Qi Zheng, however, was not happy about it.

After getting married, I found out my husband had once loved an ex-girlfriend deeply.

On the eve of her wedding, that woman drove through the night and gave herself to him, just to say goodbye to her youth.

When I found out, my husband begged me not to expose it. “Otherwise, her whole life will be ruined.”

After our entire household was seized, My Lady became pregnant with our enemy’s child.

“What does a mere blood feud over a murdered father amount to?”

Faced with my disbelieving question, she gently stroked her swollen belly.

Her face was full of happiness.

When I was young, I found the Crown Princess and took her begging for three years.

Later, after she was retrieved, the Emperor recognized me as his adopted son.

Everyone assumed I would marry the Crown Princess.

But she became engaged to the Duke’s legitimate son.

On her birthday, she declared with a mocking smile in front of everyone: “How could someone of royal blood be matched with a beggar?”

I raised my cup and sincerely wished her a worry-free life, year after year.

She didn’t know yet that I had already accepted the imperial decree of a marriage alliance.

And from that year on, she would have no worries, and no Ziyou.