Ranking

After transmigrating into the body of a CEO’s stand-in for his unattainable first love, I started playing mind games with him.

“Since you’re treating me like her, why don’t you send me a picture of your abs first? Let me see what I’m working with.”

“You can’t even seduce me, and you think you can seduce her?”

To win Jiang Bai over, I, a spoiled little princess with a monthly allowance of hundreds of thousands, spent three whole years pretending to be dirt poor.

All just so I could mooch meals and drinks off him.

But now his “white moonlight” has suddenly returned, and she even had the nerve to mock me for being a broke loser.

Fine! Great! You want to see who’s richer?

I’m done pretending!

From the moment I was born, my Father Emperor could hear my inner thoughts.

[Whoa, so my Father Emperor is actually a brilliant and divine Emperor for the Ages!]

[It’s a pity he has a few stains on his record.]

[First, he’ll act on impulse and execute a great hero who served him well, only to cry afterward and curse others for not stopping him.]

[Then, he’ll execute the Chief Minister of the Court of Judicial Review, brewing a wrongful case that will shock the world for centuries, all while shifting the blame onto his ministers.]

[He’ll praise the Grand Preceptor as a ‘clear mirror’ in public, but after the man dies, he’ll raid his tomb and whip the corpse.]

[And the biggest death wish of all: he clearly loves my Mother Empress so much, yet he insists on making her give birth over and over again. When she eventually dies in childbed, he’ll be holding some other beauty while reminiscing about my mother. What a total scumbag.]

My Father Emperor’s brow twitched again and again. Finally, he couldn’t hold it together anymore.

“Quickly! Go and invite the masters from Huguo Temple!”

The transmigrated woman and the Seventh Prince were thrown into the Cold Palace together.

Her mission was to win over the Seventh Prince and get rid of me, the main villain.

But she couldn’t bring herself to do it.

So I picked up a brick and smashed it down hard on the unconscious Seventh Prince.

Once he stopped making a sound, I raised the brick with an icy expression. “Now I’m the Seventh Prince. You can win me over instead.”

When I was born, the stars showed an omen so strange that the Imperial Observatory calculated until dawn broke at the edge of the sky, yet still could not reach a conclusion.

The National Preceptor, who had lived for more than two hundred years, descended from Tianxuan Pavilion and left behind a single prophecy for me.

“This child will kill the current emperor.”

My father dropped to his knees in terror, kowtowing to his imperial father and begging him to spare my life.

The emperor held me in his arms-his newborn granddaughter, bound to him by blood-and was silent for a very long time.

In the sixteenth year of Shunhe, my imperial grandfather was forty-nine years old, and learned his fate ahead of time.

On the final day of the divorce cooling-off period, I waited for Yuan Shiyu at the Civil Affairs Bureau for three hours.

The person who eventually arrived wasn’t him; instead, it was a hospital representative delivering a critical condition notice and a last letter.

Everyone thought he had finally agreed to let me go. Only I knew that the first sentence of that letter read: Wantang, I’m sorry, I really can’t make it this time.

The Emperor brought a beauty back from Jiangnan and declared his intention to make her his Empress.

I adamantly refused.

“Empress Dowager, why? She and I share such a striking resemblance; it’s a sign we’re meant to be!”

You have the nerve to say that? You’ve gone and dug up the illegitimate daughter I hid so far away!

On the day my mother, the Empress, had me choose a husband, I began to hear the inner thoughts of the little palace maid standing beside me.

“How can I tell the Princess that she can’t choose this man? I used the Simulated Life System to test him, and he’s a total scumbag! He’ll subject the Princess to the cold shoulder, take concubines, and keep mistresses. The Princess absolutely cannot choose him.”

I shifted my gaze away from that man and glanced at another.

“Ahhh! You can’t choose this one either! He’s a mama’s boy. Your mother-in-law will torment you to death!”

I frowned, finding it hard to believe. Am I really that weak? If I were to end up in such a state, it would mean my father and mother-the Emperor and Empress standing behind me-had become weak as well.

My gaze unconsciously fell upon Long Zhao, who stood in the crowd with his head bowed.

The little palace maid screamed in her head. “Princess, pick him! Pick him! He will protect you, ensuring the country is prosperous and the people are at peace, and that the land remains safe and sound!”

Oh ho! In that case, I definitely can’t choose Long Zhao. I’m afraid that if I do, she’ll stop screaming.

His Majesty handpicked three women to enter the palace and help secure the phoenix throne for the woman he loved.

The first was the Grand Tutor’s daughter, steeped in the classics and celebrated throughout the capital for her brilliance.

The second was the general’s legitimate younger sister, peerless with bow and horse and proud to the bone.

The third was me, a woman without powerful kin or scholarly fame, armed only with hands that could manage a household and turn simple ingredients into exquisite food.

On the night before I entered the palace, Grandfather reminded me again and again to keep my head down and stay safe.

I smiled and agreed, yet as soon as I turned away, I wondered why I should.

The learned woman had no respect for her sovereign.

The horsewoman let her mount trample the palace steps.

As for the woman raised to the phoenix throne, she could not recognize a written character if it were as large as a grain measure.

Now that I had entered this game, I did not want safety.

I wanted to win.

Now that I had caught the emperor’s eye, I would not settle for a share of his favor; I would take it all.

Chapter 0

On April Fool’s Day, a pregnancy test with two distinct red lines fell out of my coat pocket.

I turned to my wife in surprise. “Are you pregnant with our second child?”

Her voice was flat. “Chen Wei, we haven’t had sex in six months.”

I froze for a second before quickly spinning a lie.

“It’s a prank prop! It’s April Fool’s Day, I was just messing with you. Gotcha, didn’t I?”

As soon as I stepped out of the house, I called my mistress to demand answers.

If she was pregnant, she needed to get an abortion immediately.

She had a worse temper than I did and denied it outright.

What a joke.

I only had two women in my life, and neither of them was pregnant.

Was this pregnancy test supposed to be mine?

A buddy of mine who drove a big rig had been tricked onto the dead-end road at the foot of Huai Mountain.

By the time I got the news, he had already gone missing.

His relatives were crying so hard they were on the verge of fainting.

I tried to comfort them. “That road had a Mount Tai Stone placed there to suppress it. Nothing too serious should happen.”

But one of the family members handed me a phone. On the screen was a photo of the Mount Tai Stone, split clean in two.

“Wang Cheng sent this back before he disappeared.”

I did something terrible back in middle school.

At the time, I didn’t think much of it. I was even relieved that no one ever found out.

But once I learned the full truth, the despair made me want to die.

A person as vile and shameless as me is surely bound for Hell.

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.

I was born a beggar.

Maybe some wealthy young lady had made a mistake, or maybe some brothel woman had simply had rotten luck.

Either way, I came into this world. I grew up begging for bowls of slop.

At my most wretched, I even fought mangy dogs for food.

Later, to stay alive, I sweet-talked a human trafficker into selling me into the palace.

On the day I entered the palace, I saw the red sun rising at the edge of the sky.

It looked just like the duck egg yolk that had once gone rolling and wobbling to my feet in the Drunken Fragrance Pavilion.

I smacked my lips and savored the memory for a moment, then turned and stepped onto that long, long palace road.

From a beggar hated by all, I became a palace maid within the towering imperial palace.

That year, I was nine.

A week ago, the true heiress of the Cheng family came to our door.

Only then did I learn that I was a fake.

But my biological parents were already dead, so the Cheng family decided to keep raising me.

The heiress who had just returned was very dissatisfied with a fake like me.

Not only did she take away all of Dad, Mom, and my older brother’s attention, she also wanted to reclaim the fiancé who should have been hers.

I didn’t really care.

I only wanted to scrape by and keep a roof over my head.

But when I tried to give my fiancé back to her, the man who had always been gentle wore a dark expression I had never seen before.

He locked an arm tightly around my waist, lowered his head, and looked at me with an air of effortless menace.

“Yangyang, ever since we were little, I’ve known you could only be mine.”

Just then, the heiress pushed open the door.

She blinked, revealing two adorable little canine teeth as she smiled.

“Brother Yan, didn’t you promise Auntie that you’d have dinner with me?”

Strangely, I suddenly heard the roar inside her head.

—“That fucking perverted male lead—stay away from the heroine; she belongs to the second male lead!”

After winning the lottery, the first thing I did was dump my sugar daddy.

Then, I turned around and sponsored the broke, handsome guy I’d had my eye on for ages, all while sending a three-hundred-point manifesto to my ex-benefactor, tearing him to shreds.

With money in my pocket and my pride restored, I was walking on air.

That is, until I decided to flaunt my new boy toy right in front of my former sugar daddy.

My handsome new man looked at him and said, “Hey, Bro.” Me: ?

I was the poor scholarship student at an elite private high school. That day, I suddenly started seeing floating comments:

[The male lead is cutting class and climbing over the wall from the school’s back garden, but he fell into the water! What do we do? The male lead can’t swim!]

[Where’s the female lead? Save him!]

[The female lead is sick today, so she’s not at school. Sigh, what a shame. Whoever saves the male lead will gain a ton of favorability with him.]

I wasn’t the female lead of this story. I was just cannon fodder.

At that moment, I lazily propped my chin in my hand and continued listening to math class.

Please. What good would the male lead’s favorability do me? I wasn’t going to save him.

He was the male lead, anyway. It wasn’t like he’d actually drown.

I wasn’t some kind, innocent little flower. I only cared about two things: money and grades.

The floating comments kept rolling by:

[Whoever saves the male lead will probably get a huge reward from his family, right? I wonder who’ll be that lucky. With how rich his family is, even a little pocket change from them would be enough to live on for a lifetime.]

Money!?

I shot to my feet. Behind me, my chair toppled over with a loud clang.

Before my father, Zhao Yong’an, left to join the army, he said that if he died out there, my mother was allowed to remarry the village hunter.

But though the hunter had a crippled leg, he was the fiercest man around. They said he could kill a tiger with a single punch, and that he had even beaten his previous wife to death.

If my mother married him, it would be no different from sending her to her death.

Three years later, sure enough, news came that Father had died.

Grandmother and the clan elders took twenty taels of silver from the hunter and forced my mother to be sold off to him.

Disciples knelt all across the mountain, crying out in unison, “We respectfully send off the Patriarch on his ascension!”

But what I saw was a silvery-white hook piercing Master’s throat, dragging him up into the clouds.

His feet had left the ground. He couldn’t make a sound.

Like a fish.

I lunged forward and wrapped my arms around Master’s legs. “Let him go!”

Eldest Senior Brother struck me with his palm and sent me flying. “You madwoman! Can you bear the consequences of ruining the Patriarch’s ascension ceremony?”

Blood spilled from the corner of my mouth.

I laughed.

“Ascension? Are you all blind? That’s fishing!”

Ever since I was little, I had refused to let anyone get the better of me.

When my elder brother gave my sister perfume from across the seas, I cried until I got some too.

When Mother hired a palace matron to teach my sister court etiquette, I threw a tantrum until I was allowed to learn beside her.

When it came time to arrange our marriages, the family chose the finest husband imaginable for my sister.

Then came my turn.

“There is only one Crown Prince in the realm,” they told me.

“His full brother is imperial blood as well. You can marry him.”

In my last life, I refused to accept that.

Why should I settle when the two princes were born of the same mother?

So I devoted myself to serving the Empress and winning her favor.

At last, I got my wish and became Crown Princess.

But Pei Jin despised my competitive nature.

The moment he ascended the throne, he made my elder sister his empress instead and sneered at me.

“Why struggle for something fate never meant you to have?”

When I was reborn in the year of my coming-of-age ceremony, I stopped fighting.

“Prince Rui is a fine match too. Thank you for arranging it, Mother.”

I am the dowry maid for the legitimate daughter of the Shen Manor.

Last night, I woke up in the Heir’s bed.

Now, the servants of the entire manor are pointing and whispering at me: “A lowly wench like this deserves to be beaten to death with clubs!”

Shen Yujiao sat regally at the head of the hall. “In that case, let’s just promote her to a Concubine.”

She watched with a smile as I knelt and kowtowed to thank her for her mercy.

Yet, I caught the scent of Hehuan Powder in the air.

That was the very incense I had blended with my own hands for her husband’s use.

[Strong Female Lead + Comedy + Modern Fantasy + Male Lead with Multiple Incarnations]

Yun Jianyue woke up one morning to discover that her best friend was dead… and had become a headless vengeful ghost.

Yun Jianyue: “I must’ve gotten up too fast. I’m going back to sleep.”

Best friend: “…”

Yun Jianyue took her best friend to get revenge on a scumbag, only for an even more powerful vengeful ghost to appear halfway through and steal their chance at revenge.

Yun Jianyue raised a chainsaw and hacked the ghost to pieces.

Best friend: “Where the fuck did you get a chainsaw?!”

Yun Jianyue was forced into a ghost marriage with the Evil God. Humiliated and furious, he tried to kill her.

Yun Jianyue raised her chainsaw and shaved the Evil God’s head.

Best friend: “Where do you keep getting these chainsaws?!”

When Yun Jianyue and the Paranormal Bureau found themselves surrounded and pummeled by monsters and evil spirits, Yun Jianyue raised her chainsaw once again.

Best friend: “Tell me! Where! The fuck! Do you keep getting! These chainsaws?!”

Off to the side, a teenage boy saw that the chainsaw’s blade had gone dull and silently handed her a new one. Yun Jianyue took it and swung it with deadly force.

Teenage boy: “Good deed done, no credit needed. Check.”

With a handsome Evil God on her left and an adorable puppy-like boy on her right, Yun Jianyue had her hands full.

Best friend: “Which one of them is actually your boyfriend?!”

Yun Jianyue: “It’s only two dicks. What’s the big deal?”

On the night I married Lu Boya, my buddies warned me, “Professor Lu is a refined scholar with a delicate constitution. You’d better be gentle with him!”

I gave them a ferocious grin. “Gentle? Not happening. This lady has plenty of strength-and plenty of tricks!”

The next day, my voice was hoarse and my eyes were swollen as I shouted at Lu Boya, who stood there in a crisp suit and gold-rimmed glasses.

“Liar!”

Refined scholar? Delicate constitution? All lies!

After my sister passed away, Jiang Huaizhou treated me like her substitute.

He married me, yet he despised me.

Outside our marriage, he kept one lover after another.

He even mocked me, saying, “Even with Weiwei dead, you will never compare to her.”

He belittled me until I was worth less than nothing.

But then I remembered that there had once been someone who said to me:

“Yinyin, no one else matters. You matter most.”

I was the daughter of a noble house, personally chosen by the emperor to enter the palace. With a single imperial edict, I was made Noble Consort. Everyone envied my good fortune, never knowing that within a gilded cage, even a sparrow cannot fly free. On the day I entered the palace, the matron attending my bath told me: “His Majesty is gentle and kind. Your Grace, do not be afraid.” But in this fathomless palace, the very earth was piled with bones. Every terror within these walls had been wrought by his own hand.

In order to win over the Tyrant Emperor, I slipped him an entire bottle of Obedience Potion.

Relying on the potion’s effects, I became utterly fearless.

Every day, I hogged the imperial bed, demanded that he coax me to sleep, and even drove away his most beloved noble consort.

Then the System appeared.

I was straddling the Tyrant Emperor’s waist, all too eager to show off.

“See? He’s as obedient as a puppy.”

The System fell silent.

Then the System screamed.

“Ancestor, you look more like a stupid dog with a death wish to me!”

“That cheap potion of yours only lasts for one day!”

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.

Changhui came here on a mission to save me.

When my grandmother passed away and the Crown Prince came to take me into the palace, I heard Xie Changhui’s inner thoughts.

[Don’t go. If you go, you will eventually fall in love with the Crown Prince and become a villain. You’ll commit heinous crimes and meet a miserable end.]

So, I refused the Crown Prince.

Later, when I encountered a sick youth on the road, I heard Xie Changhui’s voice in my head again.

[He is the blade you will use to kill. You love the Crown Prince, but he loves you. For your sake, he will slaughter countless people, only to die at the hands of the female lead.]

I picked up the boy and took him in as my younger brother.

Even later, when I finally met the female lead, I felt an unavoidable, murderous intent the moment I saw her.

Xie Changhui took my hand. “Shaohua, wake up. Think about who you are.”

Who am I? I am a daughter of the Song Family, the child of a founding official, and a future female general. I am certainly not some tool meant to spend my life plotting and fighting against others.

When I was thirteen, in order to serve the distinguished guest who had come from afar, I smeared lard on the soles of the lead dancer’s shoes, making her slip and embarrass herself on the spot.

After that, the beauty sent to his room became me, just as I had wished.

Yet that impossibly refined nobleman merely looked me over twice, then said a single sentence that left me chilled from head to toe, as if a basin of ice water had been poured over me.

“I saw everything just now.”

Seven days before the grand wedding, the legitimate daughter of the Marquis Manor, who had gone to offer incense and pray for blessings, vanished at Xiangguo Temple.

The matriarch made a prompt decision.

Taking over a hundred manor servants who had signed death contracts, she surrounded Xiangguo Temple, sealing it off into an impenetrable fortress to suppress the news.

The Old Marquis entered the palace overnight to submit a memorial, claiming that my legitimate sister had made a great vow to pray for the Imperial Family and plead for rain to alleviate the suffering of the common people before her wedding.

On the day of the grand wedding, she would be married off directly from Xiangguo Temple.

A room full of maids and older servant women, along with me, a concubine-born daughter, knelt huddled together, everyone trembling like leaves.

Because we knew that if my legitimate sister wasn’t found in one piece within seven days… We would all die.

It has been three years since I transmigrated into this brothel.

I have mastered the arts of seduction, and no one knows better than I how to make a man lose his very soul in ecstasy.

But then, I overheard a group of new girls gossiping.

“It’s hilarious. Our Flower Queen really thinks she’s living in ancient times.”

“A refined Female Doctor, tricked into working as a whore for three years. These rich people really know how to have a good time.”

“Do you think she’d go insane if she found out this was all orchestrated by her ‘Young Marquis’?”

“Shh! Every actor who comes in here has signed a life-and-death waiver. Who would dare let her know?”

I froze in place, as if plunged into a pit of ice.

Could it be that these three years of transmigration were nothing more than a scam?

Before I could regain my composure, the Young Marquis’s cold voice suddenly rang out from behind me.

“Fudong, what are you doing here?”

I am Ruogui, a Peach Blossom Spirit, known as the most notorious heartbreaker West of Weak Water.

I’ve maintained a scandalous entanglement with the War God, flirted shamelessly with the Golden Crow, and even tore up the marriage contract arranged by Sihun.

But I know the truth: I am a good girl.

The Immortal Realm looks down from its heights, treating demons and monsters like mere ants. But does a demon not have a heart?

I am a Peach Blossom Demon from West of Weak Water. I have tasted the full bitterness of longing and weathered every joy and sorrow the mortal world has to offer.

But when my lover was murdered and my companions fell one by one, the truth of my past lives surged back to me amidst the chaos. As it turns out, I am more than just a Peach Blossom Demon; I harbor a secret identity.

And I will wage a desperate, final war against the Ninth Heaven.

I am the empress of six different countries.

It’s hilarious, really. Since I’m so neglected, no one has even realized I’m just working part-time.

So, I took on a seventh.

Little did I know, this emperor wants to unify the world.

Me: “There are seven of you. Why are you the only one being such a handful?”

My parents had always favored me most.

But on the eve of the imperial capital’s fall, they fled with the entire family-and somehow forgot to wake me from my sleep.

When I woke up, the courtyard was deserted.

Yet the moment I turned my head, I realized I wasn’t the only one who had been left behind.

The illegitimate son my father had with his mistress was still here too.

He stared at me without blinking, the look on his face hovering somewhere between a smile and a sneer.

“Second Sister, how did you end up reduced to the same state as me?”

Father and Mother will definitely come back for me.

The words were about to burst from my mouth, but I paused.

Then I cleared my throat and put on a calm, unbothered expression.

“I was the one who refused to leave.”

Mom had a Leather Handbook that recorded every woman Dad kept on the side.

One of them, Aunt Wei, was marked in particular.

In Mom’s delicate handwriting, she had written: This is the little toy I’m leaving you. Enjoy this life to your heart’s content, my daughter.

After Mom died, that woman buzzed into my life like a fly.

And I swatted her straight down into hell.

After my mother got divorced, she became the fiercest woman in the village.

She often cursed at me, “If I didn’t have you dragging me down, I would’ve remarried some rich man long ago.”

Behind her back, the villagers gossiped, “She can’t get anyone to marry her, so she uses her daughter as an excuse.”

My father mocked her even more. “With your mother’s firecracker temper, and since she can’t even give birth to a son, the only man who’d want her is one with four sons who can’t find wives.”

Later, a small business owner really did want to marry my mother.

Then my father regretted it. “Yufen, let’s get married again. The three of us can live a proper life together.”

The Supreme God cultivated the Path of Ruthlessness. He was without desire or longing, stern and impartial.

To prove that she held a place in the Supreme God’s heart, the Fairy Maiden deliberately slaughtered Meng Family Village.

Kneeling on the ground, she wept like a rain-drenched blossom. “Your disciple has committed a grave sin. Master, please punish me. Grind my bones to dust and scatter my ashes.”

The Supreme God stared blankly at that beautiful face. In the end, he could not bring himself to do it.

He summoned the Nine Nether Yin Fire to burn the village and destroy all evidence, then ordered his disciple to return and copy scriptures in repentance.

I crawled out from a mountain of corpses and a sea of blood, selling my soul to the Evil Demon for one thing alone: revenge.

The Evil Demon’s voice was beguiling. “What do you want?”

I looked back at the roaring flames behind me. “I heard that a thousand years ago, the Supreme God killed his wife to prove his Dao. Give me a face identical to his dead wife’s.”

How do you get a man to spend five million on you with a single sentence?

“Sir, your face bears an omen of disaster.” The man looked at me with utter disdain.

The next second, the Rolls-Royce he had parked by the roadside was hit by a van.

It exploded on the spot.

If you read a lot of historical romance novels, then I’m sure you’re familiar with this scene: An assassin draws his blade and lunges at the male lead.

At the critical moment, the female lead rushes forward and takes the stab for him.

She collapses into his arms, and he cries her name in panic…

When I transmigrated, this exact scene was unfolding.

You think I was the female lead? Nope.

And of course, I wasn’t the male lead either. I was the assassin.

In the second year of the famine, just before my father was about to sell me at the human market, my mother secretly ran back to her maiden home.

The night she returned, she was covered in blood.

There was a hole in her belly, and one of her legs was gone.

She handed my father the tripod cauldron she had carried on her back.

“Take it. With this, you won’t go hungry. Don’t sell Ah Yu.”

The tripod cauldron was not very large, but it was packed full inside.

With one tug, a snow-white leg came out.

If you threw in a piece of cloth, an identical piece of cloth would come out.

If you threw in a chicken, another chicken would come out too.

My father was so overjoyed he nearly went mad.

He never noticed that, before my mother breathed her last, she said one final sentence to me.