Ranking

The first thing Lu Xiangzhi did after becoming the top scorer in the imperial examination was divorce his wife.

“The Shen family woman is virtuous enough, but far too dull.”

He married a woman from a brothel, while I remarried a spoiled heir.

Lu Xiangzhi believed I had only married that ignorant, good-for-nothing dandy out of spite.

He thought a Shen family woman valued wifely virtue above all else, while that dandy was too unruly to be managed.

It would not be long, he assumed, before the man grew tired of a dull woman like me.

He waited half a year, yet never heard that I had been cast aside.

When Lu Xiangzhi finally could not resist coming to see me, I was holding a discipline ruler and tapping my dandy husband’s head with it, rather helplessly saying, “The teacher explained it three times. You still don’t understand?”

My dandy husband wrapped an arm around my waist and grinned like a shameless rogue.

“I don’t. I want a kiss.”

Have you ever heard of Crossing the Yin?

They say that when a woman undergoes Crossing the Yin, half her body has already stepped into the Yin Realm.

She has to stay in the same room as a dozen burly men, all night long, until dawn.

Only then can she snatch her life back from the hands of the Yin beings.

I had always scoffed at rumors like that.

Until one day, my beloved little niece underwent Crossing the Yin too.

But she was only six years old!

Nan Jinping was an unfavored concubine-born daughter of the Nan Family.

To escape the fate of being sent by the principal wife to become a powerful nobleman’s concubine, she searched everywhere for a marriage that might keep her alive.

At the Bamboo Grove Elegant Gathering, she provoked Wang Yu, the aloof and distinguished legitimate son of the Langya Wang Clan; later, during the turmoil at Hong’en Temple, a twist of fate led her to save his life.

After that, as the world descended into chaos and friends and family were scattered, Nan Jinping rushed from place to place to save her maid, Xiao Mei, and ventured deep into danger to find Wang Yu.

Under the crushing weight of life and death, and of social rank, the two gradually developed feelings for each other.

When the realm was thrown into upheaval and the glory of the old clans collapsed, she finally went from a concubine-born daughter at the mercy of others to someone capable of choosing where she belonged.

After stepping into a giant footprint out in the wilderness… I got pregnant.

It was such an outrageous thing that, naturally, my mother refused to believe it.

She slapped me across the face right off the bat and demanded to know which man I’d been sneaking into the woods with.

I clutched my cheek and didn’t dare make a sound.

In an attempt to salvage a little dignity, Mother had me put on a Heaven’s Headdress, implying that this child had no father and was a gift from the heavens.

Who would have thought that, as dusk approached, people really did descend from the sky?

Every last one of them was bristling with righteous fury, their eyes red-rimmed, looking even more wronged than I did.

“My Lord was born divine. He is the King of the State, and the Universal Lord besides. How could he possibly have anything to do with some village woman from the countryside?”

“Speak. What exactly did you do?!”

Thinking back to that enormous, awe-inspiring footprint from last night, I was completely bewildered.

“Me? I just… shivered on top of it?” -After Stepping on the God’s Footprint This story is adapted from the ancient myth of “the Jiang Maiden conceiving after stepping in a footprint.”

Basically, it’s a story about the female lead raising a child, the male lead also raising a child, or the two of them raising a child together.

In my first few years driving rigs, my master used to tell me that the main road could hold back evil.

So unless you absolutely had to, you should never leave the proper road, and you should never pay any attention to the “things” that stood outside the guardrails.

Lately, though, whenever I’m out on the road, I keep seeing my childhood friend-the one who’s already dead.

At first, he only stood beyond the guardrail, one leg raised stiffly.

But little by little, he managed to get that leg up onto the rail. Now half his body is leaning out over the highway.

My friend was a “bone collector.” After opening a coffin, he actually desecrated a female corpse right in front of her family.

He did it several times in a row, and the local villagers flew into a rage and locked him up.

I rushed over to save him, but the villagers shouted for me to get lost.

What they didn’t know was that I was the sole Earth Master successor.

Yuan Lina was the kind of teenage delinquent who wore bizarre outfits, dyed her hair strange colors, and caked on dramatic makeup.

Yuan Lina smoked, drank-she did it all. She had once poured Erguotou into a mineral water bottle and brought it to school to drink openly.

Yuan Lina liked forming little gangs and bullying people.

Plenty of people had been beaten up by her.

I am a mushroom. But my master doesn’t see it that way.

Whenever I tell him I’m a mushroom that gained sentience, he just lets out a long, heavy sigh.

Aside from that, he’s very good to me. He cooks for me, buys me clothes, watches boring arthouse movies with me…

On every late night I spend curled up in the corner, after he gets home from working overtime, he quietly carries me back to bed.

He even told me he wanted to have a child with me. At that, I clutched my stomach and burst out laughing.

“Please. How could a human and a mushroom possibly have a baby?”

We reproduce by spores. Have you never heard of reproductive isolation?

…

Until one day, I stared at the pregnancy test with two bright lines on it and completely short-circuited.

While I was at work, a line of comments drifted over my head: [Huh? Is this player pouring tea for the boss?]

[No way! This is a super SS-rank horror instance!]

The blood-red words swept past overhead, radiating an eerie, ominous air. Not far away, my boss sat with his gold-rimmed glasses on, head lowered as he read the newspaper, just like always.

I stopped looking at the “comments” and, bracing myself, picked up the cup of hot tea. “B-Boss, your tea is ready.”

The man in front of me didn’t take it.

Instead, he stared at me with an unreadable expression.

“Why are you so nervous?”

“Did you see something I can’t?”

“I once blew thirty-five thousand on a man in a single night.”

Everyone thought I was drunk and talking big, and the room burst into laughter.

Only one person remained expressionless. He was the star of the night.

The entire department had taken turns playing Truth or Dare, all for the sake of buttering him up and securing the seven-figure ad placement case in his hands.

When the drinking was over and everyone had left, the man looked at me, the only one who had stayed behind.

His gaze was indifferent, his tone laced with mockery.

“Director Yu, how many years ago was that? And you still remember it so clearly?”

When the village held funerals, it had a custom called “Ox-Cutting.”

Each member of the bereaved family would take a blade in the mourning hall and hack a live ox to death as an offering to the departed.

A friend brought me along to watch the ritual.

I never imagined that when I woke up, I would have become that “ox.”

The villagers closed in around me with knives in hand.

But what they didn’t know was that I was the sole Earth Master successor.

Just now, I found the note my fiancé had saved me under in his phone.

“Top-tier A-grade knockoff.”

Those four words were enough to make my blood run cold.

No wonder he always said I looked so much like my older sister.

Turns out he’d been harboring those kinds of thoughts all along.

I couldn’t accept it. I immediately packed up my things and was about to leave, only to run straight into his gorgeous twenty-year-old younger brother-and in that instant, I changed my mind.

“At least I’m an A-grade knockoff. Look at you-you’re at most your brother’s 9.9-yuan free-shipping bargain-bin version.”

At a construction site, five coffins were dug up-four with something inside, one empty. Strange things kept happening at the site.

In less than three days, two workers had already been sent to the hospital.

Someone had asked me to go there and haul the coffins away.

But the expert the site had hired kept blocking me at every turn, refusing to let me move them.

With a dark, sinister look, he told me: “These five coffins can’t be moved by anyone within seven days. Whoever moves them will be the one buried inside.”

A beautiful woman came into my shop one night to have her phone repaired.

With practiced ease, I installed screen-spying software on her phone.

After she left, I opened the monitoring terminal.

Everything happening on the woman’s phone appeared before my eyes in real time.

That thrill of peeping into someone else’s screen had me completely hooked.

Until late that night…

I saw something that made my blood run cold.

The Han army captured Luoyang. My husband, His Majesty himself, knelt at the rebels’ feet, trembling like a lamb waiting for slaughter.

“The Empress is in Jiaofang Hall. Please, don’t kill me…”

I had been married to him for five years and had given birth to our daughter, Princess Heqing.

Yet at the moment of crisis, he offered me up without the slightest hesitation.

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?”

For five years, I brought meals to the scholar next door.

When he passed the imperial examinations as Tanhua, he did not come back to marry me.

Others laughed at me for being foolish. Though it hurt, I still waved it off and pretended to be carefree.

Then, one year, Mother was beaten half to death by the principal wife. Clinging to what little old affection remained, I cast aside my dignity and went to beg him.

I begged him to find a way to invite Doctor Dong, the most renowned physician in Shangjing City, to come take a look at her, and to help me obtain some good medicine for my mother.

The scholar advised me with a troubled expression, “It isn’t that I won’t help you. It’s just… how could I possibly interfere in your father’s inner household? I know Mother has been wronged, but as a concubine, how could she never suffer a beating?”

Years later, the scholar was implicated by others and demoted, and came to beg at my door.

By then, I was already Lady Jun, a First-rank Imperial Mandate Lady, not someone ordinary people could meet at will.

People of the time had a saying: Better to offend Lord Zichen than to offend Lady Jun.

I idly picked at the gold foil on my nail guard and said slowly,

“It isn’t that I won’t help you. It’s just… I am only a woman of the inner quarters. How could I possibly have any say in affairs of court? Besides, as an official and a subject, how could one never suffer a grievance?”

To surprise my online boyfriend, I secretly traveled thousands of miles to his university.

When I arrived, I happened to see him coming back to campus from outside.

I was just about to go up and say hi when he walked right past me without so much as a glance.

?

A moment later, my phone buzzed.

“Holy crap, babe. I just saw someone who looked exactly like you.”

“But you’re the only one in my heart, so I didn’t even spare another woman a second look.”

I was so mad I laughed. Right then and there, I snapped a selfie in front of the school gate and sent it to him.

“Maybe try taking another look?”

Because of her physical development, Li Zhuguang was maliciously humiliated and secretly photographed by her classmate Zhang Kang.

Luo Xing, once her only friend, also turned her back on her amid the rumors.

To strike back, Li Zhuguang deliberately got close to Song Wangshu, the top student Luo Xing had a crush on, using Zhang Kang’s jealousy to force him to expose himself.

She then returned the evidence of the secret recordings to each of the victims.

After Zhang Kang was expelled, the off-campus landlord retaliated by planting a pinhole camera in her room.

With help from Luo Xing, Song Wangshu, her teachers, and her classmates, Li Zhuguang finally dragged the malice lurking in the shadows out into the sunlight-and learned to trust the people around her again.

I was trafficked to a mountain village for a ghost marriage.

But they don’t know I’ve lived for three hundred years and am the Dragon King’s Wife.

In the dead of night, I soothe the Black Dragon coiled around my waist.

“Alright, alright. They’re just little kids of sixty or seventy. What are you getting mad at them for?”

Chapter 0

Liang Ling shot to unexpected fame thanks to a fleeting “white moonlight” scene in a xianxia drama, and through it, she met Tang Chen, the calm and self-restrained heir to a wealthy family. During their five-year relationship, she thought she had finally found the stable love and family she had always wanted. Instead, time and again, Tang Chen’s practical calculations, family obligations, and views on marriage pushed her into second place.

Career scandals, breakups and reconciliations, and his belated attempts to make her stay finally made Liang Ling see the truth: this relationship had long since become a burden neither of them could afford to carry. In the end, she dragged her luggage away from Tang Chen and gave her five years of youth a proper goodbye as well.

As Yan Zhengyang’s ultimate simp,

I had done square dancing with his grandma.

Played Go with his grandpa.

Played mahjong with his mom.

And with his dad…

Oh. Not his dad, actually.

I had mastered every trick in the book and was convinced Yan Zhengyang would never escape my clutches.

But a thousand pounds of devotion couldn’t compete with a few ounces of cleavage.

Ever since a curvy beauty moved in next door to him, everything changed.

My father rebelled, and I became the most honored legitimate princess.

No, wait-the Grand Tutor said it’s not rebellion.

How can it be rebellion when it’s the act of a founding emperor?

It was the descent of the Imperial Star, the gods and buddhas blessing the people, rescuing the masses from misery!

As the Grand Tutor taught, one should say:

The previous dynasty was tyrannical and unjust, the common people were in a living hell, suffering unbearably. My father the Emperor led a group of righteous men in uprising, successfully ended the chaotic times, and established the Great An Dynasty.

So I, an ordinary farmer’s wife in the previous dynasty, inexplicably became the one and only legitimate princess of the An Dynasty.

That’s right, I’m married, my husband is alive and well, I have both a son and a daughter, my life is happy and fulfilling, and for years I’ve topped the list of happiest young wives in the village.

Before becoming a princess, my biggest worry was that my son didn’t like meat and only ate vegetables, while my daughter didn’t like vegetables and only ate meat.

Now my biggest worry has become: being a legitimate princess and all that-I have no experience with it…

I transmigrated into the villainess’s… apple.

That’s right, the Poison Apple from Snow White’s stepmother.

On the very first day after transmigrating, I cried because I was so ugly.

Damn it, half red and half green.

Maybe because I was crying too loudly, the Magic Mirror next door cautiously poked me.

“Um… actually, I think you’re the most… special… apple in this world.”

I paused, then glanced at his slightly reddened mirror surface.

“…Thanks, Comfort Hero.”

I stole my sister’s man.

During the year she was abroad, the man she’d been longing for all these years came to me with her photo in hand.

“Do you know the girl in this photo?”

I took off my mask, revealing a face identical to my sister’s, and smiled sweetly.

“Are you looking for me?”

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.

While I was playing with my cat’s tail, the B-king school heartthrob suddenly video-called me.

“Stop touching him.”

“That part of me… I think it has an Empathy Link with your cat’s tail.”

I didn’t understand, so I asked him, “What part?”

His face flushed scarlet. Abandoning all dignity, he simply tilted the camera downward.

Holy crap. Was I even allowed to see this for free?

Was he hiding a bottle of mineral water in his pants?

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’m going to be the Empress someday!”

Ten-year-old Song Weiwei stood on a dirt slope facing the imperial city in the distance, shouting those words with all the swagger she could muster.

As for me, I sat on a dirt mound with my chin propped in my hand, speechless.

“Song Weiwei, you still haven’t paid back the two copper coins you owe me.”

Song Weiwei turned around and rapped me on the forehead.

“What’s the rush? Have you ever seen an Empress who welshes on her debts?”

She hopped down from the slope and turned to coax me.

“Just think about it, Du Zeyi. If I become the Empress, you’d be my sister. You can have anything you want. Why worry about those two copper coins?”

As if becoming the Empress of a nation could be that easy.

I muttered under my breath, rubbed my forehead, and raised my voice. “My mother’s calling me home for dinner!”

Then I slipped away as fast as I could.

Leaving only Song Weiwei behind, stamping her feet in exasperation.

I transmigrated and became an ancient beast of burden, with signs that I might be headed toward the life of a chicken or duck next.

My major didn’t teach me how to make soap or explosives, and the market’s invisible hand wasn’t about to scoop me up either.

Maybe if I’d transmigrated into the ruling class, I might have wanted to stay in this dynasty.

But I know one thing very clearly: I just want to go home.

After my fiancé, Xie Zhao, left on a long journey, I wrote him two letters asking him to make a decision.

The first was about my stepsister, who wanted my betrothal goose and had been crying and throwing tantrums over it.

The second was about his younger brother, who had taken a fancy to me and was being far too attentive and far too hard to shake off.

Xie Zhao had never liked my meek, timid nature to begin with. He had always wanted to call off this engagement.

So on the very day I sent the second letter, he had an old man bring me a message:

“Since she wants it, just indulge her.

“She’s young and doesn’t know any better. Surely you do?”

W-who was he talking about?

Seeing that I suspected him of delivering the wrong message, the old man lost his temper too.

“From ancient times to now, I’ve heard of giving away a wife, but never of giving away a betrothal goose!

“Besides, Second Young Master Xie is half a month younger than your sister.

“He obviously means for you to marry someone else!”

At my ten-year high school reunion, I showed up bare-faced, wearing an outfit that cost less than three hundred yuan from head to toe, with a child in my arms.

And the poor boy I had once dumped, my ex-boyfriend, was now the CEO of XX Group, dressed in a sharp suit and sitting right across from me.

In the dead of night, only after I let out a satisfied sigh did Wei Che gently roll off me.

He had been putting in so much effort lately that I figured he was probably about to leave me.

With a faint sigh, I turned over and went to sleep.

After all, everyone knew it.

I was the most useless kind of lovesick fool.

When the sky wanted to rain and a man wanted to leave, what could I possibly do about it?

Beg him bitterly? Threaten suicide and make a scene?

That was what a real lovesick fool would do.

But I was a fake.

A long time ago, I had already understood one simple truth-

Everyone despised a lovesick fool.

Pretending to be one, however, was the advanced strategy.

I grew up in the countryside until I was seventeen. Then people from the capital came and told me I was the young lady of a marquis’s household.

But the moment I arrived in the capital, they hurriedly married me off to a spoiled wastrel.

Later, that wastrel caused a disaster and had his family estate confiscated. I was the only one who tossed him a sickle and said,

“Husband, come home with me and farm the fields.”

When we were kids, I told my childhood friend, “I like your best friend, but don’t tell him.”

Then came his best friend’s wedding.

I grabbed my childhood friend by the throat. “Wow, you really can keep a secret.”

He let out a cold scoff. “Say you like him one more time, and I’ll beat your ass.”

I was doing fortune-telling on livestream when I connected to Qin Shi Huang.

“I wish to know what became of my Great Qin in the end,” he asked.

I opened a history book.

“After your death, Zhao Gao and Li Si joined forces to put Hu Hai on the throne, then forced Prince Fu Su to take his own life.

“One year after your death, chaos swept the realm, and Liu Bang and Xiang Yu rose in rebellion against Qin.

“Three years after your death, the Qin dynasty fell.”

The more Qin Shi Huang listened, the angrier he became. He raised his hand and smacked Hu Hai, who was playing with mud off to the side, twice upside the head.

“Look at the mess you made!”

After Pei Xingzhi had Li Pin beaten to death with rods for the sake of the Noble Consort,
I was ill for three months.

When I recovered, it was as if I had become a different person.

I no longer racked my brains to win his favor, no longer grew jealous over which concubine’s palace he would dine in that day. I became cautious, careful, and obedient to the rules.

When Pei Xingzhi summoned me again to attend his bed,
word came from Changchun Palace that the Noble Consort was having a nightmare and wanted him to keep her company.

In the moment of hesitation before he could decide, I had already fetched his cloak for him and fastened it in place, speaking softly:

“The roads are slippery in the snow, Your Majesty. Please watch your step.”

Pei Xingzhi suddenly seized my hand, his voice slightly hoarse. “You’re not going to ask me to stay?”

I smiled gently. “I would not dare sway Your Majesty’s will.”

After all, every time I tried to keep him before,
he had never stayed.

My roommate insisted on teaching me how to chase her childhood sweetheart.

Then she turned around and made a post asking for help:

[My good son said he wants to date, so as his dad, I introduced him to my roommate.

[And he got mad.

[How am I supposed to coax him, huh~]

The comments were dying of laughter:

[Brother Pei doesn’t want to date. He wants to date you.]

[He’s mad because you’re so clueless!]

The barrage comments exploded too:

[If the supporting female character tries a little harder, this dense female lead is about to realize her own feelings.]

[With her in the middle, their feelings will heat up and sparks will fly, and then they’ll finally break that last unspoken barrier~]

[She’s seriously using 001 like he’s Unit 001, huh.]

[Pretty durable, then. So when is she going to use him up and toss him in the trash?]

I let out a soft laugh.

Then I deleted the draft I’d been about to post: [Not chasing him anymore.]

You want me to keep pursuing him?

Sure.

It’s just that-

if I really do win him over,

don’t go being unhappy about it again.

My computer got hacked, and the hacker threatened to leak intimate photos of me and my ex-boyfriend.

I logged into my big Weibo account and started flaming the hacker right back:

“Then post them, if you dare!

“My ex-boyfriend is handsome, and his body is incredible. Anyone who sees him will be jealous of me.”

The hacker snapped. “Do you have no shame?!”

The netizens said, “I want all the information on her ex-boyfriend within one minute!”

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.