Ranking

My family has one enormous, very public secret.

Ever since she was born, my mother has been bound to a system: the Beauty System.

Apparently, if she ever drops out of the top three on the Beauty Ranking of the Four Seas and Eight Realms, she will die.

At first, neither of my parents was remotely worried.

With Mother’s looks, holding her place for another few hundred thousand years would be no trouble at all.

But sometimes the unexpected arrives without the slightest warning.

When my parents joyfully welcomed their first child, a floating Beauty Ranking of the Four Seas and Eight Realms appeared out of thin air beside the bed.

And there, in first place, was my eldest brother, whose name had only just been decided: Zhou Yi.

My parents were a little bewildered, but didn’t think much of it.

Until they had their second child.

My parents and big brother once again greeted the new baby with delight.

Once again, the ranking appeared in midair.

First place changed hands again.

It now belonged to my elder sister, Zhou Er.

That was when Father panicked.

He moved out of their bedroom that very night.

For several years afterward, he didn’t dare set so much as one foot inside after sunset.

Every evening, they would hold hands in the corridor, gazing at each other as they lingered over their farewell.

Then my brother and sister would each take one of them by the hand and escort them to their separate rooms, with my parents looking back every few steps.

They pined so badly their eyes practically glowed green, but at least Mother’s life was safe.

The prince’s heir acquired a famous sword.

A fine sword deserved a beautiful woman.

My looks earned me the position of his sword-bearing maid.

Later, he took me to Taicang for the Sword Trials.

Someone saw me and remarked, “Baseborn to the bone.”

Everyone roared with laughter.

Only years later did they understand.

What the man had actually said was, “Blade-born to the bone.”

The boy I’d secretly loved was expelled from school for protecting his childhood sweetheart.

Years later, I became the most famous talent manager in the industry and ran into him waiting tables at a restaurant.

He had long since forgotten me, but I still wanted to give him a chance. I asked him, “Xie Xingyun, do you want to be an actor?”

He came with me.

It took me three years to transform him from a waiter carrying plates into the entertainment industry’s hottest new star.

Then the childhood sweetheart he’d protected all those years ago came looking for him.

I was born untamable.

After my parents died, I was passed from one relative to another.

At every house, I beat up the entire family—even the dog got a couple of slaps.

Then a delicate noblewoman adopted me and offered the perfect deal: food, a home, and permission to beat anyone except her and her cat.

Her household full of unruly adopted children never stood a chance.

Neither did the capital’s arrogant young nobles.

But her beautiful, sickly son might just be the one person who wants to shelter my sharp edges instead of putting them to use.

I was the legitimate daughter of an old noble house, carefully raised to become the crown prince’s wife.

Then a woman arrived on a mission to win his love, and he demanded that our betrothal be broken.

Everyone expected me to fight for him.

Instead, I removed my hairpins, left my face bare, and calmly asked His Majesty to grant the couple their wish.

That night, I left the capital.

Three years later, their passionate devotion had turned to resentment.

When the weary crown prince met me on my return and called me Zhang’er, I knew my opportunity had come.

In our village, a child who dies before his parents cannot be given a funeral—unless he dies in an unclean place.

When my drowned best friend is laid in the mourning hall, a seven-day vigil turns my guilt into terror, and the truth behind the hauntings proves more horrifying than any ghost.

On my first night inside the novel, the villain barged into my practice room.

Then he found himself staring at the male lead and the second male lead, already seated on meditation cushions.

After a long silence, he said, “Move over.

Make room for me.”

“There’s no room,” the male lead said.

“There really isn’t.”

I surveyed the cushions packed across the floor.

“I think we can squeeze in one more.”

On the day Ran Ling returned to the capital in triumph, his long-lost first love was brought back to him.

She had once cast aside reputation and status to elope with him, and he had once taken a sword for her.

Everyone said the star-crossed lovers of their youth would finally get the happy ending they had been denied.

But I wasn’t worried, because my mother had transmigrated into this novel—and I was a devoted mama’s girl.

It didn’t matter what anyone schemed against me; I was the hollow rose my mother had raised.

At my birthday banquet, my husband presented me with a portrait of myself on horseback.

The face in it was an ugly pig’s head.

The young woman holding it laughed at my scars, and he asked me to forgive her: immortals, he said, knew nothing of mortal rules.

I drew my sword and cut off her arm.

Now she knew mine.

My mistress kept a Kunlun slave.

Even after she married, she found ways to keep him at her side.

Later, she conceived what was to be her husband’s legitimate son, and spent her pregnancy pampered like a princess.

But when her ten months were up, the baby she bore was black.

Every maid and midwife who attended the birth vanished that night.

My elder sister was among them.

That night, the birthing room floor was slick and scarlet, as though it had been washed in blood.

By dawn, the black infant carried out of that room had become a white one.

Having borne the first legitimate son, my mistress was given control of the household.

I was quick-witted enough to offer her schemes, to have servants beaten and old women punished.

I helped secure her position as mistress of the house, and rose to become a first-rank maid.

Behind my back, the servants called me her dog.

When I heard, I merely curved my lips in a smile.

I meant to be a dog, all right.

A mad dog that killed its master.

I spent ten years loving my childhood friend, and he spent the same ten years finding me unbearable.

Then one day, I finally had my way with him—and left two hundred yuan behind.

Humiliated beyond measure, my childhood friend hunted for me everywhere.

But I made sure he never found me.

I hid from him for three years, until my father died and left me with no family.

His parents told me, “From now on, our home is your home, and that boy is your big brother.”

I looked at the face that went mad with shame and fury the moment he saw me, and called out brightly, “Hello, Big Brother!”

Bad news: I was sold into the Wu household, worked myself to the bone for three or four years, and just when life finally started looking up, the whole family had its property confiscated.

Good news: the Wus were pardoned, the family was released, and even the master escaped execution.

Bad news: they were exiled to Ningguta.

Good news: Ningguta was where I came from.

While I waited at the hospital for my follow-up appointment, a live broadcast of a celebrated director accepting an award overseas played on the giant screen.

During his acknowledgments, he said nothing and placed a call in front of the entire world.

Then my phone rang…

For three years, I washed the backside of the bedridden, paralyzed heir to the Marquis of Zhenbei.

He mocked me for it all the time.

“Chunxi, if you’re willing to wash even my most private parts, is there anything you wouldn’t do?”

“Do you think that just because the Chancellor’s daughter broke off our engagement, you’ll get to become my proper wife?”

“A lowborn woman like you, willing to stoop to anything to get ahead, isn’t even fit to be my concubine.

The best you could hope for is to warm my bed!”

Later, he learned to walk again, and I left with my silver.

Three years after that, he distinguished himself on the battlefield and asked for my hand as his reward.

But by then, I was already washing backsides at the Prince Regent’s estate.

“Heir Xie, aren’t you misunderstanding something?

I only agreed to serve you back then because the job paid three taels of silver a month.”

“Now I serve the Prince Regent’s heir for thirty taels a month.

Please don’t ruin this for me!”

My mother had come from another world, and she believed firmly in monogamy.

When she discovered that my husband was keeping a mistress, she stormed into his princely residence, demanding that I divorce him and come home with her.

I stared at her.

“Mother, your daughter already has power and wealth.

Why should I care if he keeps another woman?”

At a family gathering, my younger sister, holding my boyfriend’s arm, beamed as she announced they were getting married.

With a room full of guests, I, dressed in monastic robes, faced their gazes with a calm expression.

Amitabha, I am a monastic.

The story of Lin Wei, the eldest daughter of the Lin Family, being forced into monastic life by her family, had long been known to all.

To please his mistress, my father secretly switched Mother’s newborn daughter with hers.

He meant for his mistress’s daughter to take my place as the legitimate young lady of the family and grow up surrounded by wealth and privilege.

Behind Mother’s back, the mistress mocked her.

“A country woman like her will spend her whole life laboring only to hand the fruits to someone else.”

Even Father thought Mother ignorant and easy to deceive.

But Mother was merely uneducated, not witless.

Neither of them knew that a fire broke out in the rear courtyard on the day Mother gave birth—and that she switched me straight back.

Even as he faced death, Father could not understand how a country woman like Mother had brought about his ruin.

The day Ying Que descended to the mortal world, he accidentally crashed through my roof.

He also knocked out the simple-minded bridegroom I had taken in.

I came home from walking my dog, found my world had fallen apart, and burst into tears.

Ying Que promised to repair my house and heal my bridegroom.

But it would take at least seven days for him to wake.

The village was offering girls to a river demon.

If I failed to marry within three days, I would be sent as its sacrifice.

When Ying Que heard, he took up his sword and slew the demon, unexpectedly completing his trial under Heaven’s Way.

Before returning to the Celestial Court, he gave me two gifts in apology.

A grand house, and a clever husband.

Three years later, he returned to the mortal world to undergo a tribulation.

Passing through Yanhe Town, he found me begging beside the road.

I held out a chipped wooden bowl and “looked” at him with empty eyes.

“Sir, could you spare something to eat?

My dog is starving.”

I had always thought I was the heroine’s sworn enemy.

Only when I saw her willingly confine herself to a husband’s household for love did I realize how terrifying blind devotion could be.

Stroking her belly, she urged me to find a good man and discover the pleasures of love.

I shook my head, as determined as ever to follow my own path.

In time, she lost sight of her dreams in that household, all for love, while I made love itself a stepping-stone and climbed to the highest seat of power.

After wandering the mortal world for more than six hundred years, I hear that a once-in-a-century sword prodigy has appeared.

The young man has also found a dragon that sounds remarkably like the one I lost long ago.

Cultivators from across the realm flock to the mountain, some to seek the dragon and the Dao, others to kill and seize treasure.

I am different.

After a long, dusty journey to the Sword Sect, all I want is to set up a little stall at the foot of the mountain and sell wontons.

In the twelfth year of her political marriage, Lu Zhuohua’s husband slaps her for the sake of his newest concubine—and the formidable marchioness answers by smashing a bench over his head.

What first looks like another petty battle in a crowded noble household soon exposes a plot involving a staged miscarriage, a powerful young heiress, and a poison meant for Zhuohua and her little daughter.

With her family, her fighters, and twelve years of household authority behind her, Zhuohua decides that if her husband wants her dead, she will simply strike first.

In the year when I was at my most spineless, the Noble Consort called me oversensitive.

That very night, I took a rope to her bedchamber, intending to hang myself beside her bed.

Fortunately, she found me in time and rescued me in tears.

Later, a beauty newly arrived at the palace called me as stupid as a pig.

I said nothing.

I simply took out my rope.

The Noble Consort said nothing either.

She just kept slapping her.

“Even I daren’t scold her.

Who do you think you are?”

I transmigrated into the daughter of a mistress.

When I arrived, my mistress mother was sobbing her heart out.

“What happened?” I asked.

She said, “The Qi family sent word: either they cancel Bai You’s engagement, or they replace her with Bai Zhuo.”

I rubbed my forehead. “And that’s worth crying over?”

My mother stared at me. “How is it not? Haven’t you studied this hard so you can enter a good university and become a better match for the Qi family’s young master? I lost to that woman my whole life. Must my daughter lose to hers too?”

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.”

As the oldest unmarried young adult in my family, I had been suffering under the pressure to get married for years.

Eventually, I simply gave up fighting it.

My mom said she was so worried she could not sleep.

So I drove two hundred kilometers overnight, got home at three in the morning, stood by her bed, and pried her eyelids open.

My mom said everyone in the family was laughing at her because I refused to get married.

The next second, I tagged everyone in the family group chat:

[My mom says everyone is laughing at her because I won’t get married. I came to ask, who exactly is laughing at her? @everyone]

My cousin was the first to start a message chain:

[Your little cousin is not laughing at her.]

Then came an orderly line of replies:

[Auntie is not laughing at her.]

[Uncle is not laughing at her.]

[Second Cousin is not laughing at her.]

[Dad is not laughing at her.]

[…]

Mother always said that if a woman wanted to stay radiant, she had to know how to nourish herself.

Ginseng and deer antler were useless.

What truly nourished a woman was a young, vigorous man.

Following that regimen, she still looked sixteen well into her forties.

Having grown up under her influence, I understood the secret by the time I turned eighteen.

Scholars were lean, generals solid, actors charming.

I had sampled them all.

The one I found most intoxicating was Shen Zhaoye.

I lavished mountains of gold and silver on him, yet never so much as put an arm around his waist.

Then he came to take his leave, claiming he had found a more powerful patron.

Furious, I followed him by lantern light into Springwater Lane.

When I kicked open the door, he was kneeling beside a couch, offering tea to someone.

The beauty reclining there lifted her eyes lazily.

My lantern went out, and my soul nearly fled with the flame.

“Mother?! You’re sleeping with my man?”

My mother waited for my father her entire life.

Even when illness confined her to her deathbed, she never got the snowy stroll among plum blossoms he had promised her.

So when Second Young Master Cui and I took a liking to each other, I told him I would wait for him only three times.

The first would honor the joy of our meeting.

The second would honor the bond of truly knowing one another.

The third would honor the love we had shared.

After the third, our ties would be severed, and we would have nothing more to do with each other for the rest of our lives.

Second Young Master Cui agreed with a smile, saying that such a fine match was a blessing from Heaven and that he would never dare cast good fortune away.

Later, he rescued a young woman.

For her sake, he made me wait again and again.

The final time, he sent word that our wedding would be postponed and that we could discuss it again after he had safely brought the young woman back.

I gave a cold laugh and asked, “Whether I marry, and whom I marry, is no concern of yours, Young Master Cui.”

The wedding went ahead as planned after that.

Only the groom had changed.

Anyone who tried to steal my betrothed was certainly detestable.

But anyone who tried to steal Cui Zhaoyu’s bride was, in my eyes, utterly adorable.

Seven years after he forced me into marriage, my domineering CEO husband fell in love with someone else.

I wasn’t worried.

His sister, on the other hand, was so anxious she burst into tears.

“If you get divorced, what are Song Yu and I supposed to do?”

Song Yu.

The name sounded so familiar.

He was, if I remembered correctly, the childhood sweetheart I’d been dating before I married Gu Zeyan.

Li Furong spends three years saving Xie Qingheng through exile, only to be dismissed before his powerful friends as nothing more than a loyal servant.

When the man who promised her a future breaks his word and forces her into a nameless place in his household, she turns every lesson in survival against him.

Trapped among noblewomen as dangerous as the men who command them, Furong must decide how much of herself she will sacrifice to win the one thing she has always wanted: a life that belongs to her.

Times were hard.

I was sold to a wealthy household to be a playmate for its young master, who had a lame leg.

He had a delicate, handsome face, but his health was very poor.

His right leg was disabled, he was always coughing, and sometimes he was too weak even to sit up.

Everyone in the household said he would not live long.

Afraid I would be sent away, I slipped into his room and leaned over the edge of his bed.

“Could you please not die?

If you die, I won’t have a home again.”

He paused, then smiled gently and stroked my head.

“All right.

I’ll see if I can stay alive.”

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.

I was the tyrant’s favorite consort, and I had officially stopped trying.

When he ate chicken, I stole the drumstick.

When he slept, I stole the covers.

When he presented me with a priceless piece of jade, I hung it around my dog’s neck the very next day.

Furious, he threatened to have me beaten to death.

I carried on being a disaster, dropped my trousers, and flopped onto the couch.

“Go on, then.

Beat me to death.”

Well.

He suddenly changed his mind.

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?”

“Oh, very well.

I will marry him.”

My sisters’ eyes went round.

Everyone knew how hopelessly I adored Ninth Young Master Cui: his literary gifts, his youthful grace.

I had led his horse, ground his ink, and made an utter fool of myself over him.

Why would I now agree to help our aunt the empress build her faction by marrying Pei Yao, that Turkic bastard neither of his parents cared for?

“Quick, tell Father!

Sanniang has agreed!”

My eldest sister reacted at once.

Afraid I might change my mind, she loudly applauded my decision and sent a servant off with the news.

The others recovered, hastily put on smiles, and clasped my hands from either side.

Such a sensible girl, they told me.

I was bound to go far.

I knew none of them would accept this splendid opportunity if it were offered to her.

But for me, it was already the best future I could hope for.

After all, in that dream, I had fought against it.

My best friend was a top-tier Alpha, but he had a medical condition.

Pheromone overload.

If he didn’t get the excess out of his system, it could kill him.

So I, a Beta, volunteered to be his pheromone storage tank.

I was a Beta, after all.

The scent wouldn’t stay on me for more than a couple of days anyway.

Except that, before long, my best friend was sinking his teeth into my neck every few days.

Wait.

Had his condition really gotten that bad?

Dude!

Keep biting me and people are going to start wondering what we are to each other!

I had been born with little feeling for others.

When Mother struck me with a ruler for my sister’s sake, I did not shed a tear.

When my brother threw out the cat I had raised, I did not plead with him.

When the childhood friend I had grown up with asked for my sister’s hand, I calmly wished them well.

Without attachment, there could be no hurt.

I was content that way.

But I married a man who clung to me and loved me alone.

Xie Fuyu liked making me laugh, watching ripples disturb my expressionless face.

He taught me to hold on to the things I cared about.

So I began to fight for his love.

I would not let him go to wine houses or spare another woman so much as a glance.

Until my sister fell into the water and miscarried, and I would not let him go to help.

With a trace of disappointment, he snapped, “Meng Shiying, you never used to be this petty.”

Before long, he tired of me and took several aloof, quiet women as concubines.

Every one of them looked so much like the girl I had been.

I fought for half my life, and none of it brought me a good ending.

Then I was reborn on the day Mother arranged my marriage.

I bowed my head.

“Mother… the third young master of the Xie family and I are not suited.”

I transmigrated into an erotic novel as a supporting character—a female general built like a double-door refrigerator.

For now, though, I was merely the heroine’s maid of all work, ordered about and worked like a beast of burden.

But I knew a prince would soon buy her freedom, then hand her over to the brutal emperor.

Even a heroine as experienced as she was might not survive him.

I had lived through countless loops in this world because its main characters kept dying halfway through the story.

I assumed this time would be no different.

Then, right in front of the male lead, the woman who had always looked down on me suddenly caught my arm.

“Your Highness, please buy Hua Nu’s freedom too!”

The women in the detention center didn’t much like me.

Among all those streetwise girls, I was the only one who wore glasses.

When they finally asked what I’d done, I told them: I’d stolen five thousand yuan from my parents to go to Peking University.

They laughed and called me an unlucky kid.

The day I got out, my parents didn’t come.

A battered van did.

Blondie rolled down the window and told me to get in.

She was taking me to the station.

Just before the bridal sedan entered our gates, my elder sister suddenly changed her mind.

She ripped the hairpins and ornaments from her head and hurled them at me along with her round silk fan.

Before the assembled guests, she accused me in a shrill voice.

“Shen Zhi, stop putting on those seductive airs!”

“You needn’t waste any more effort trying to seduce His Highness the Crown Prince.

I’m giving this marriage to you!”

With those few sentences, I became a shameless woman who had tried to seduce her own brother-in-law.

The looks in the ladies’ and young misses’ eyes gradually turned knowing.

I staggered back in disbelief, tears spilling down my cheeks.

Choking on a sob, I asked, “Has your heart perhaps been captured by another man, Sister?”

“If so, our entire household ought to enter the palace and plead guilty, begging His Majesty’s forgiveness.”

“How could we play at swapping sisters for their marriages and commit the crime of deceiving the emperor?”

I was the heroine of an erotic novel.

Right in the middle of a passionate encounter, I suddenly landed in a chaste historical romance.

At that very moment, its male leads had lured me—the expendable supporting character—out to avenge their beloved.

They wanted to teach me a lesson.

Someone shoved me to the ground, and I couldn’t help letting out a little moan.

The man who’d been snarling at me a second earlier abruptly turned red at the tips of his ears.

“Ning Wan, what was that noise?!”