Ranking

By the year 3026, society’s race to the bottom had accelerated beyond control.

Pregnancy ruined a woman’s career prospects, so I had my uterus removed to improve my chances of finding work.

HR rejected me anyway.

The reason was simple.

“I’m sorry, but you have a twelve-hour gap in your employment history. That’s far too long.”

When I asked my husband of one year to end our contract marriage, he agreed without hesitation.

That same night, I found an anonymous post from a man desperate to win back the wife who wanted to divorce him.

The details were suspiciously familiar, so I created a fake account as a love guru and offered to coach him through the final month.

To my astonishment, the brilliant and untouchable CEO I had married turned out to be a shy, hopeless romantic who had loved me since high school.

As every absurd piece of advice brings us closer, I must decide whether the marriage I planned to leave is the love story I never knew I wanted.

Both the Crown Prince and the Grand General wished to marry me.

I hated the intrigue of the Eastern Palace, so I chose the Grand General who had sworn that I would be the only woman in his life.

Yet on our wedding night, his female deputy lured him out of the bridal chamber with a single flask of wine.

Still dressed in my wedding robes, I listened to their moans through the wall for half the night.

When the rain became a downpour, I threw on a cloak and knocked on the Eastern Palace gate under cover of darkness.

At the Crown Prince’s astonished expression, I gave a bitter smile.

“Your Highness.”

“Tell me—if a woman suddenly thinks of another man on her own wedding night…”

“Isn’t that ridiculous?”

After my boyfriend dumped me, he planned to go to Tsinghua University with the beautiful top student and live happily ever after.

But when the National College Entrance Examination ended, I was the only student from our school admitted to Tsinghua, and I took the stage as the student representative.

The two of them could only watch from below.

In the third year of my secret marriage to a top celebrity, I visited him on set and found his assistant hand-washing his underwear.

He was playing video games.

When I tried to fold his clothes, his assistant shoved me aside. “Let me handle his clothes, sis. You don’t know how he likes them. He can’t get by without me.”

The suds on her hands splashed across my brand-new Chanel.

My celebrity husband explained from the sidelines, “Li always does it. Just let her.”

All at once, I said, “Let’s get a divorce.”

He froze.

His assistant had to fight harder to suppress her grin than the recoil on an AK.

I had no choice.

I was pregnant, and this four-person marriage was getting rather crowded.

The day I went to visit Duan Yujing on set, he openly skipped work to meet a popular young actress at a hotel.

When the intimate photos reached me, everyone on set watched my expression with nervous care.

I hardly cared. My attention had already been captured by a young man in the corner who looked somewhat like Duan Yujing.

Lunch was being served, and the cook gave him an extra lion’s-head meatball.

His eyes curved as he smiled with unguarded delight.

I studied him. “Who is he?”

My mistress prides herself on being a virtuous wife, even as she forces her husband’s bedmaids to drink mercury-laced contraceptive draughts.

When one girl dies and another is sold, my mistress chooses me as the next woman for her husband’s bed.

She does not know that I was once a modern physician—or that I have stopped waiting for mercy.

If this household refuses to recognize its servants as people, I will teach its masters the price of treating women as things.

Song Qi drew a dare: check his phone.

Of everyone in his contacts, who had he told “I love you” the most?

The class beauty: three times.

Me: 972 times.

The jeering around us died at once.

The class beauty burst into tears.

In front of everyone, Song Qi deleted my contact information, then smiled as he coaxed her.

“That’s worth crying over?”

“You know I only dated her for three months to keep up an act.”

“Nothing I said to her was real.”

Those nine hundred-odd declarations had all come from one drunken night.

Song Qi had crouched by the roadside, impossible for anyone to pull away, his head bowed as he sent me the same three words over and over.

“Once I send you ‘I love you’ 999 times, the bet is off.”

“Then we’ll be together for real, okay?”

The moment my daughter was born, Old Madam Lu of the Yongchang Marquis Estate took her away.

There was only one reason: I was once the most celebrated courtesan in Yongning, and the kept mistress of the marquis’s heir.

A filthy, lowborn prostitute like me had no right to raise the estate’s precious young lady.

Not even when I was the one who had given birth to her.

The year I turned eight, I was trampled to death beneath the Crown Prince’s horse.

His guards paid my parents one tael of silver to make the matter go away.

My parents did not even retrieve my body; they took the money with ingratiating smiles and said, “For our daughter to die beneath His Highness’s horse is a blessing she could never have hoped for.”

Before my first seven days of mourning were over, Father divorced Mother and took another wife.

Mother remarried with every appearance of joy.

It seemed they had forgotten me.

Later, just as I was about to be reincarnated, Father and Mother dragged the Crown Prince to my grave and made him pay for my death with his own.

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.

When our village reservoir dries up, several skeletons and eighty-eight strangely shaped stone Buddhas emerge from the mud.

Grandma warns everyone never to touch the statues.

But after my cousin dies by smashing his own head against one of them, I uncover a century-old injustice—and a vengeful spirit determined to make every descendant of the Lin family pay.

In my fourth year as Song Jingyuan’s kept woman, he tired of me and asked to break up.

I had meant to cry, make a scene, and threaten to kill myself to keep him, putting on the same devoted performance that had pleased him countless times before.

But the floating comments before my eyes said he meant it this time.

He had fallen for someone else, and this truly would be the last time we ever met.

I fell silent at once.

While tears slipped down my face, I hooked a bill from the floor with my little finger, rolled it into my palm, and tucked it deeper into my sleeve.

In a year of famine, I sold myself to a brothel for the sake of my family.

My little sister came to see me with dried melons and vegetables on her back.

One patron had a taste for very young girls, and the madam tried to tempt her.

My sister believed every word and refused to leave: she wanted silk every day and fish and meat at every meal.

I said no, took out the silver I had secretly saved, and asked a man from our village to escort her home.

After that, not a single letter came from my family.

Five years later, when my beauty had begun to fade, I persuaded a cloth merchant to redeem me and make me stepmother to his two children.

Then my sister returned.

We looked seven or eight parts alike, but she was alluring and uninhibited, far more so than my dull, quiet self; within three days of raising her banner, men crowded the door.

The cloth merchant hired a sedan chair to collect me, and my sister crooked one beguiling finger at him.

He hesitated for only a moment before laying the silver meant for my freedom at her feet.

Just as I was confessing my feelings to Lu Qinian, I suddenly learned that he was the male lead of a novel—and I was not the heroine.

I snapped on the spot, my face twisting as I yanked the love letter out of his hand.

“How could a bookish girl like me dare touch a shameless flirt like you?”

“Goodbye.”

Lu Qinian stared at me in confusion.

Later, Lu Qinian pinned me in his arms and kissed me senseless.

Between ragged breaths, he gave a cold laugh.

“I went to all that trouble seducing you, and you called me shameless?”

“You’re unbelievable.”

Would living my life over again make it any better?

After I was reborn, I still chose the young general who had treated me with icy courtesy in my previous life, and rejected the devoted Tanhua scholar.

A road whose every pitfall I had already crossed ought to be easier the second time.

Across two lifetimes, I was already an eighty-year-old woman at heart.

I asked for no great romance, only a safe and steady life.

Only on my wedding night did I discover that I had not married the second son of the marquis’s residence—the man I had been introduced to before the match.

I had married the sickly eldest son, who had spent most of his life confined to bed.

The idea had come from Miss Liu, who entered the household on the same day as I did and was now the Second Young Madam.

Smiling sweetly, she asked, “I heard you and Eldest Brother fell in love at first sight, Sister-in-law. Are you happy now that you are married?”

Everyone expected me to cry, make a scene, and expose how the grooms had been switched.

Instead, I lowered my eyes and calmly served tea to my new parents-in-law before I spoke.

“A maiden treasures her reputation above all else. I did not dare look closely at my future husband that day. Only today have I learned what a true gentleman looks like.”

My parents-in-law’s worry turned to delight, and they praised me as virtuous and noble—the finest of wives.

What none of them knew was that I came from a merchant family.

I believed in fair trades, and I never forgot a debt.

For the little matter of deceiving me, I judged that a few lives would be payment enough.

For ten years, I was a corporate Head of Administration.

Then I woke up as the legitimate daughter of a marquis.

Only then did I discover that I had landed in a female-led power fantasy about a maid’s rise to glory.

Blessed with the heroine halo, the maid could do everything: manage a household, run shops, organize disaster relief.

Everyone adored her.

Even my own younger brother and fiance became devoted second male leads who protected her at every turn.

In the end, the senior maid became a legendary merchant queen known throughout the realm.

I, meanwhile, grew jealous of the heroine.

Spoiled and willful, I courted disaster at every step until everyone abandoned me and I died alone in a secluded estate.

After a long silence, my professional instincts kicked in.

Household management was simply a logistics support system.

Running shops was supply-chain management.

Disaster relief was an emergency response plan.

Well, wasn’t that convenient?

She was the all-conquering maid with fate on her side.

I was an administrator trying to stay alive.

And survival began with rules.

My eldest legitimate sister hanged herself the night before she was to marry into the Eastern Palace.

The Court of Judicial Review’s postmortem report recorded an impossible finding: she was a virgin, yet three months pregnant.

Her baffling death destroyed my family—my mother killed herself, my father went mad, and the once-glorious Pei estate became a house of ghosts overnight.

Ten years later, I became the Court’s only female coroner and pushed open the carved door of my sister’s long-sealed chamber.

There, buried in my memories of that night, I found a truth monstrous enough to overturn everything I believed.

In my tenth year as a beggar, I was so hungry I had wrapped myself around a tree and started gnawing on its bark when a young lord in brocade appeared and promised to take me to Chang’an to live in luxury.

Tears filled my eyes at once.

I knew this plot: he had to be some poor boy I once saved, now rich and powerful and eager to repay me.

I hurled myself at him and cried, “Husband!”

The young lord nearly did the splits trying to escape.

“Shut your mouth,” he shouted, “I’m your real brother!”

My father drowned while building a bridge for the village.

Our stepmother beat and berated us, and everyone thought she treated us terribly.

Years later, my brother rose to high office, and the emperor granted her the title of Lady of Imperial Mandate. Only when she stood at the height of honor did everyone finally understand: beneath her cutting tongue was the softest heart.

On our wedding night, the prince was summoned away to the side courtyard by his cousin.

I had already taken off my bridal robes and slept soundly until morning.

After all, neither of us was the heroine.

Why should one supporting villainess make life difficult for another?

When I married into the Shen family, I already knew my husband had one great love.

She was the fisherman’s daughter who had saved him after he was gravely wounded while suppressing bandits.

They had sworn themselves to each other through life and death and privately pledged to marry.

But his mother threatened to take her own life and would only permit the woman to become his concubine.

On the eve of my wedding, Mother wept with worry and asked, “How will our Zhen’er ever live like this?”

How else?

He could play the devoted lover.

I would be the lady of the household.

Shen Yunfeng and I were merely two people traveling the same road toward entirely different ends.

On New Year’s Eve, I received a message from the boy who had shared my desk in high school.

I’m broke. Can you lend me some money?

A medical report followed.

Late-stage stomach cancer.

I sent him the last 19,873 yuan in my account.

Will that be enough for now?

After a long silence, he sent a voice message, his clear voice ringing with laughter in my ear.

How are you still this gullible?

When immortals fall in love, they threaten to destroy all living beings over the slightest matter of the heart.

When gods surrender to passion, none of the Three Realms knows peace.

The Celestial Realm is long overdue for a reckoning.

I have been able to breathe underwater since I was little, and I often hide at the bottom of the river to play with the fish and shrimp.

When I am seven, the county magistrate begins sacrificing young girls to the River God in exchange for favorable weather.

The family of each chosen girl receives five taels of silver and two sacks of rice.

Every time, I rescue the girl and secretly hide her in the mountains beside the river.

When I am sixteen, my parents bind my hands and feet while I sleep.

“Yuniang, your brother is old enough to take a wife.”

“This year, it is your turn to be sacrificed to the River God!”

After my divorce, I married the woman I had cheated with.

She was gentle and considerate, the kind of woman who always knew how to make me feel valued.

Her only drawback was that she came with a son.

But that was all right.

I had promised to love her, and I would love her child too.

As for my ex-wife, apart from the three thousand yuan I sent in child support every month, we had nothing more to do with each other.

Until the day I saw a hanging chair at a friend’s house—a chair that had once belonged to me.

My imperial sister’s tomcat set his sights on my female cat and was rejected.

My mother consort ordered me to apologize, so I did.

The tom still refused to give up, and my cat’s other suitors beat him up.

Then Mother Consort told me to kill my “femme-fatale cat” to appease my sister…

This time, I refused.

“Think about who she is and where you stand,” Mother Consort advised.

Understanding dawned on me. “Oh. It’s because my mother is a coward.”

My mother might be a coward, but I was not.

Neither was my cat—she was, in fact, the greatest feline beauty in the entire imperial harem.

Ever since I was little, Mother had told me that the Marchioness was a broad, hulking shrew with the heart of a viper.

Anyone who offended her, she said, would be beaten half to death and locked in a dark room to perish.

Yet on the day we were brought to the marquis’s estate, the woman seated at the head of the main hall looked like a celestial maiden.

Mother sprang forward and hoisted her out of the chair.

“Sitting in the Marchioness’s place? Have you got a death wish?”

*Book Transmigration · Inner Voice · System · Groveling Exes · Hidden Identities*

Shengsheng Zhou was a cannon-fodder bug in the story. She had thought that once Zhiyao kept the plot on track, she would be rewarded with a flawless reincarnation.

Unfortunately, each of these three men was stranger than the last.

When she had been a palace maid, they had treated her like a plaything.

She had assumed that once she donned a new identity, she could pay them back for every humiliation she had suffered.

Their behavior, however, left her utterly baffled.

The yandere villain told her, “I will offer the head of my own emperor as the bride price for the princess’s hand.”

The tyrant male lead, eyes red, bared his chest to her. “I owe you one life. Take mine.”

The scheming second male lead pinned her against a wall. “Kiss me once, and my life is yours.”

Shengsheng Zhou: “…Would any of you like a sour plum to calm down?”

By imperial decree, I was forced to marry into the Xiaoshan Earl’s Estate as the heir’s second wife.

I had heard that my future mother-in-law was cruel, my sisters-in-law were impossible, and my husband kept a pampered concubine so vicious and overbearing that she had driven his first wife to her death.

Every respectable family in the capital avoided the place like the plague.

Before I climbed into the bridal sedan, Mother clasped my hands with tears in her eyes.

“My daughter, you must be careful.”

“Don’t kill anyone in your husband’s family. Your father will have a hard time explaining it to His Majesty.”

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.

The general saved a woman.

Then he asked me to surrender my place as his lawful wife.

I held the divorce paper and laughed coldly.

“Gu Nianwu, success has gone to your head.”

You may command a thousand troops, but I command ten thousand ghosts.

Without me, where would all your glorious victories have come from?

On the day Mother was buried, Father gave me three copper coins.

He sent me all the way to West Street for candied hawthorns, but when I returned, he was gone.

Two days later, I found him at the lantern festival with a beautiful lady and another little girl in his arms.

The candied hawthorns he claimed to want were still wrapped in my hand.

Rather than waste them, I offered them to a pale, handsome prince who refused to drink his bitter medicine.

That small gift changed both our lives—and gave two abandoned hearts a home.

After overwork kills her in modern China, Zhang Yinhe is reborn as an abandoned infant in an ancient dynasty—and learns before she can even speak that freedom will never be given to her.

Sold into slavery, exchanged for profit, and repeatedly treated as someone else’s property, she survives every household, prison convoy, raider camp, and pleasure house with sharp instincts, shameless nerve, and the hard-earned skills of a former office worker.

Her fight for independence entangles her with Gu Zheng, a disgraced young master hiding a general’s true identity, and Anyang Ge, the quiet herdsman who once offered her a gentler life, but neither affection nor safety can tempt her back into a cage.

Armed with a false beard, a belt of pearls, and knowledge from a later age, Zhang Yinhe crosses war-torn borders in search of drought-resistant seeds and a future built on her own terms—even if Gu Zheng must first learn that love begins with an equal choice.

I grew up without a father or a mother.

When the widow at the east end of the village lost her son, I ran over and asked if she wanted to be my mother.

When I saw how strong the rough woodsman at the west end was, I asked if he wanted to be my father.

That was how the three of us pieced together a family.

With my mission to win over the male lead on the verge of failure, I broke down sobbing.

I cried so hard I practically gave my system a CPU ache: “Quit your damn crying. I’ll just kill him.”

Later, the male lead asked why I no longer loved him.

My system wailed in exasperation: “Doesn’t he have a wife of his own?”

“Tell him to get lost!”

The System orders her to win over the male lead, but there is one tiny problem: she is a lesbian.

When the mission finally changes to the aloof, brilliant second female lead, she throws herself into courtship with all the subtlety of a guided missile—and gets kicked into a bush for her trouble.

Between library dates, disastrous gorilla costumes, a hopelessly idiotic male lead, and an armed kidnapping, her target remains convinced that every romantic gesture is part of a scheme to pursue the wrong person.

She may not realize when she has succeeded, but across worlds, explosions, doctoral degrees, and one scandalous graduation photo, her wifey keeps choosing her anyway.

On the first day after I died, my boyfriend brought his first love back home.

They kissed passionately on the sofa I bought, acting as if no one else were there. They ate the celery dumplings I had made by hand and played with the gaming console I had given him.

One day, his first love asked curiously, “Where’s An’an?”

My boyfriend’s voice was calm. “We had a fight a few days ago. She applied for a business trip with her company.”

Oh, he still doesn’t know that I’m dead.

In our village, there was an abandoned Brick Kiln rumored to be haunted.

During my first year of middle school, a few classmates and I went to the kiln for an adventure. We unexpectedly stumbled upon a swarm of rats worshipping a wall, all of them throwing themselves against it until they died…

In that moment, I realized there was truly something in that kiln that shouldn’t be provoked.

Unfortunately, it was already too late. From then on, my friends began to die one after another.

Until one night, that thing finally stood at the head of my bed…