Ranking

My husband brought home a young woman.

I waited for her to bow and pay her respects, but she started shouting that “all people are born equal.”

I suggested she become his concubine, and she clung to my husband, demanding “one man, one woman, for one lifetime.”

My husband told me to be more accommodating toward her.

I was silent for a long while.

Then I kicked him straight into the sewage ditch.

“You’re the one who’s born equal to dogs. The two of you can go be a pair of dogs for life!”

On my wedding day, my twin sister knocked me unconscious and locked me in the basement.

Then she impersonated me and married my fiancé.

“From today on, your man is mine.” Her eyes were filled with sheer determination.

She left in such a hurry

that she didn’t notice I had stopped breathing in the darkness.

Back when I was at my most innocent, I wanted the person I had a crush on to remember me.

So I kept deliberately controlling my scores, making him come in second in our grade for three whole years.

He got desperate and asked me out, trying to throw me off my game.

I agreed with a smile-then turned around and dumped him before he could dump me.

The good news: he really did never forget me for the rest of his life.

The bad news?

Years later, when I applied for a job, he was the interviewer.

He tossed my résumé aside without a second thought.

“This one won’t do. Next.”

Chapter 0

Pei Qian forgot me. All because, on the eve of our wedding, he got drunk, took a fall, and forgot he was supposed to take a bride. Was I to believe that, or not?

Naturally, I believed it with the utmost gratitude. Since he had forgotten me, my marriage to him could be written off in one stroke.

I packed up my money and dowry. Boling was no longer an option, so for the time being, I settled down in Hedong.

If my father had not died so early, I feared I never would have come anywhere near the gates of the Pei Family.

My father died after taking elixirs and running naked through the streets. Everyone praised him for being romantic and unrestrained-a true eminent gentleman!

He had only been a concubine-born son of a collateral branch of the Cui Clan, yet within a few days of his death, he had somehow become the pride of the Cui Clan.

For a time, the worth of my sisters and me rose with the tide. The great aristocratic families all came asking for our hands. Mother even forgot to fake her tears. Every day, she beamed with joy as she received one guest and sent off another.

This world had gone mad, and so had the people in it.

After much careful selection, Mother chose Pei Qian, the Second Young Master of the Pei Clan of Hedong, for me.

Everyone said he was elegant, graceful, wild, and unrestrained-the foremost romantic figure of Great Wei.

At that, I thought of my father, sprinting along with all that pale flesh jiggling in the wind.

I despised these so-called eminent gentlemen from the bottom of my heart.

As it turned out, he would rather change his name and identity than marry me. Excellent. That suited me perfectly.

Spending the night in an abandoned temple, I found a thin gauze handkerchief wreathed in fragrance. After nightfall, someone murmured beneath the window:

“My lady, have you perchance seen the handkerchief this humble scholar left behind?”

Through the crack in the door, the figure outside looked so ethereal that it seemed he might drift away on the wind at any moment.

At his words, I couldn’t help recalling the rumors about this place.

They said this temple had been abandoned for ages, and that seductive ghosts haunted the area. Any traveler who got entangled with them would either have their essence sucked dry or be dragged into another world, vanishing without a trace.

With that in mind, I hurriedly cracked open the window and tossed out the piece of cloth I had used to wipe the floor, the windowsill, and my stinky feet.

The other party caught it with lightning-fast reflexes.

Then he stared down at the gauze scarf in his hand, now crumpled and ruined like dried pickled greens, and fell into deep contemplation.

The woman who lived across from us was beautiful, with a captivating, mature allure.

Every man in the building was bewitched by her. Only my husband scoffed.

But when the elevator suddenly plunged,

he completely forgot about me and our daughter. He turned around and pulled her tightly into his arms.

So tightly it was as if he wanted to press her into his own body.

The first time I met Li Shuyu…

He had black hair, black clothes, and black-rimmed glasses.

He looked ascetic and buttoned-up.

Only after spending some time with him did I realize just how wrong I had been.

This seemingly aloof man would take off his glasses at night,

put in his lip stud and tongue stud, and say thickly,

“Don’t tremble, jiejie.”

Lady Wang and I went into labor on the same day.

She bore a son, while I bore a daughter.

When I awoke, lines of floating comments suddenly appeared in the air.

[The supporting woman is going to die of rage when she finds out the emperor switched her son for some stray girl.]

[With a family like hers, do you think the emperor would ever have risked letting her get pregnant if it weren’t for our precious Lulu?]

[The emperor is willing to corrupt the imperial bloodline for Lulu. The god of pure love has fallen!]

The next moment, Pei Yangxi carried the baby girl to my bedside.

“Ah Ci, look how adorable our child is.”

I fell for the beautiful, powerful, tragic second male lead.

For his sake, I shattered my spirit meridians and lost every trace of my cultivation.

Yet when the heroine burst into our wedding hall, he still abandoned me for her.

I called after him, “Xie Qingxing, take one step beyond that door, and I’m done with you.”

He merely held the girl in his arms and showed me the cool, aloof line of his profile.

“She needs me. How can I stand by and do nothing?”

But he had forgotten that Meng Zhiyuan was not the only person who needed him.

My spirit meridians were completely severed, and without pure-yang spiritual energy to sustain them, they would wither within half a month and take my life with them.

But that was all right.

Xie Qingxing was hardly the only cultivator in the world who practiced the Formless Sword.

At the school evening party, four girls from the Dance Club collapsed from poisoning while performing ballet.

After being sent to the hospital, three died from the poison, and one was lucky enough to survive.

The one who survived was me.

The one who poisoned them was also me.

Young General Yan was having a spat with the girl who held his heart.

During the night banquet, he had hidden a stem of Evening Magnolia.

He declared that whoever found that flower would become the General’s Wife.

The noble ladies all turned their heads, scanning the room to see where the Evening Magnolia had landed. I remained silent.

I simply used my foot to quietly kick away the flower lying behind my seat.

A moment later, Yan Ci’s nonchalant voice rang out. “I wonder which lady has picked up my flower?”

In the eighteenth year after I transmigrated, I finally became a proper maidservant.

When Old Madam and Second Master quarreled, I was the one who stepped in to smooth things over.

I knelt on the floor, clinging to Second Master’s leg, and begged him not to say things in anger.

Second Master pinched my chin and sneered. “I know Third Brother has his eye on you. But I insist on making you my concubine. Even if he finds out, what of it?”

Of course Third Master would not do anything to Second Master.

He would only kill me without a word.

I belonged to Third Master. He would rather have me dead than defiled.

In their eyes, I was a maidservant, a plaything to be fought over and snatched around.

I was a child bride, bought by the Song Family for five taels of silver.

But Song Jitong didn’t like me; he preferred the daughter of the family living at the east end of the village.

I originally liked someone as handsome as Song Jitong, but eventually, I simply gave up on those feelings. I planned to repay my debt of gratitude to the Song Family, see Song Jitong off to the capital to become the Top Scholar, and then leave.

However, Song Jitong later appeared with an imperial marriage decree in one hand and my redemption money in the other. In the middle of the night, he cornered me against a wall just as I was trying to sneak away with my bags packed. Gritting his teeth, he hissed, “Jiang Miao’er, don’t you dare try to run away.”

Before I could even answer, this elegant Top Scholar-as refined as iris and orchid-was the first to turn red-eyed, looking just as aggrieved as he did when we were children.

“Elder Sister, please don’t abandon me…”

The day the bandages came off my eyes, he never showed up; instead, I received a message from his childhood sweetheart.

“You may have saved him, but don’t try to hold it over his head. He doesn’t have time to pick you up, so make your own way home.”

I called him, only for him to hang up the instant his phone rang.

When I finally saw him again three days later, he demanded to know why I had sent such a message to slander his precious childhood sweetheart.

I watched the aura of fortune above his head hemorrhage away.

Suddenly, accepting that I was the heroine of a melodramatic angst novel did not seem so difficult after all.

Pei Qi traded cities for a beauty, a grand gesture that became a legendary romance. Unfortunately, I was not that beauty, nor was I Pei Qi; I didn’t even know him.

My husband was merely a soldier defending the city. Because he refused to surrender, he died in that war, though the city was ultimately held.

The following year, when Pei Qi traded cities for his beauty, I became that beauty’s Foot-washing Maid.

The Crown Prince’s White Moonlight, the woman he’d pined after for ten years, had finally returned.

She lifted her chin and looked down her nose at me. “You. Go back to where you came from.”

I lifted my skirts and stepped into the carriage, then turned back to smile at her. “Sorry,” I said lightly, “but this seat? You’re never getting it back.”

The Prince of Beijing’s elite circle mistakenly thought I had a crush on him and, with a haughty air, said he agreed to my pursuit.

Because I’m a coward, I was forced to date him.

The young prince has a bad temper, is unreasonable, and uses his handsome face to bully me with his beauty.

After three years of dating, I still couldn’t convince myself to spend a lifetime with him.

But, coward that I am, I didn’t dare break up.

Just as I was worrying, I saw his group chat message:

[“I’ve never seen someone as lacking in self as her. Come home a bit late and she starts checking up on me, so annoying! Next time she pulls that, I’ll just pay her off and send her packing.”]

I was so happy I almost jumped.

I’d get money, and I could break up.

This useless coward has finally found her spring.

On the day of our wedding, my wife stood on the roof of the building, clad in a pure white gown.

She wept as she asked me, “If I die, will the people who hurt me feel any remorse?”

“They won’t feel a thing,” I replied. “But I will kill them. I’ll make every single one of them follow you to the grave. If you still love me, if you can’t bear to see me become a murderer, then don’t jump. I’ll take care of you for the rest of my life.”

She wiped away her tears and forced a faint smile. “I’m sorry, but I can’t hold on anymore. Every single day I’m alive, I just want to die.”

I looked at her, a wave of desolate sorrow washing over me.

I loved her.

But if she jumped, I would understand.

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’ve read so many novels about the “crematorium” trope-where the husband has to crawl back and beg for forgiveness-but I never expected to find myself starring in one.

Except there’s no chasing, only the crematorium.

Because I’m actually dead.

I’ve become a ghost, watching the man who betrayed me. Seven days after my death, he finally seems crushed by a delayed sense of grief. In the home I can never return to, he howls in agony, acting as if life is no longer worth living.

You want to know how I feel?

I just stand there blankly, carefully admiring every inch of pain etched onto his face.

I listen intently to his desperate wails, triggered by my departure.

Beyond the desolation and heartache in my soul, a massive wave of schadenfreude suddenly wells up within me.

A joyful, blissful sense of schadenfreude.

It’s a sensation so sharp it borders on thrill. I cover my mouth and begin to laugh.

When I was eighteen, I didn’t dare push open that door. Behind it, my best friend was playing adult games with the male writer I secretly loved.

I remembered that moment for ten long years. In that decade, my friend died, the writer stopped writing, and my life was ruined.

I respectfully composed a letter and mailed it to the man I had once loved from afar: Chen Song.

My husband cheated on me.

My best friend has it even worse-her husband turned out to be gay.

I was raring to go: “Wanna get revenge?”

She clenched her teeth. “Yeah, let’s do it. Make them suffer.”

So, I swapped the lube with superglue.

She smeared chili extract all over their little toys.

That night,

our husbands ended up glued together, shaped just like the letter H.

My sister has hated me for twenty years. She once told me to my face that it would be better if I just died.

So, just as she wished, I was diagnosed with stomach cancer.

My elder sister and I were twins, born of the same womb.

But an eminent monk declared that I was the reincarnation of a fox demon, and that one day I would become a Wicked Concubine who bewitched the sovereign.

My family concealed my identity and sent me to Fahua Temple to cultivate a pure heart in seclusion.

In the sixteenth year of my quiet practice,

I had almost forgotten I was a demon. I only wanted to be a good person.

But then the Empress, favored above all in the six palaces, had a dream. She dreamed that one day, a woman of the Shen Clan would steal her phoenix throne.

And so my elder sister, who was soon to be married, was taken by bandits and violated again and again before dying an innocent, miserable death.

I held her body in my arms and wept until I had no tears left.

Three months later, the emperor came up the mountain to pray for blessings. The moment he saw me, he fell in love.

He asked if I was willing to follow him back to the palace.

I thought,

That title of Calamitous Demon Concubine… I suppose I ought to make it true.

That dog of an emperor ordered me to marry a young eunuch, and I didn’t even blink before agreeing.

Yet, on the night of the wedding, I was tied up and hauled into the emperor’s bedchamber before I even had the chance to remove my bridal veil.

Introduction: Ning Qiuyan participated in a Volunteer Medical Program, serving as a Humanoid Blood Bag for a certain powerful figure suffering from a blood disorder.

Guan Heng, the legendary mysterious tycoon, lives a reclusive and extremely low-profile life. When a photo of him was leaked, he quietly became popular online for his long hair and striking, androgynous beauty.

Ning Qiuyan discovered:

Guan Heng never appears in daylight; his house always has the curtains drawn, and they only meet at night.

Guan Heng has pale skin, a cold and eccentric personality, and every time Ning Qiuyan is asked to donate blood, he must first fast and bathe.

That house is cold and dark, with no sunlight.

Guan Heng’s heartbeat is slow, and his body temperature is icy.

The first time Ning Qiuyan fell asleep during the blood donation, he woke up to find a bite mark on the side of his neck.

And he, inexplicably, found himself wanting to submit to Guan Heng.

Synopsis While working the night shift at the hospital morgue, a man on the autopsy table who had died from blood loss suddenly opened his eyes and called out my name.

Only later did I learn that he was a vampire who had lived for two hundred years, and I was the one he had been searching for through seventeen lifetimes-the only person who could both save him and kill him.

I was forced to go on a blind date.

To make the guy back off on his own, I made something up. “I’m infertile.”

The handsome man across from me looked surprised. “Well, what do you know? So am I.”

So I simply took off my coat, revealing the skintight Wangzai shirt underneath.

He raised an eyebrow and stuck out one foot, showing off his golden Chelsea boot.

Me: “…”

I’d met my match.

My sister has a Koi Birthmark on her face.

After receiving her blessing, my father won five million in the lottery, and my mother regained a stunning, slender figure.

I was the only one who wanted nothing from her.

Because I knew that what was on my sister’s face was a Black Koi.

Whatever you take from her, you must pay back double.

I was Princess Jiuhua’s study companion, destined to one day enter the palace as a female official.

But at the welcome banquet, the General of Agile Cavalry asked His Majesty to bestow me upon him.

His mistress left a letter behind and ran away with the child.

After he sobered up, he traveled a thousand li to make amends and only then brought that woman back.

On our wedding night, he said coldly, “That day was merely drunken nonsense; I only blame you for blocking my sister’s path. But an imperial decree is hard to defy. Once this act is over, we each return to our own places.”

I asked him, “General, you see me as a mere object, and with a few words you cut off my path to becoming a female official. How can you speak of returning to our places?”

He replied indifferently, “That is your fate, not something you can blame on me.”

But I refuse to accept my fate.

I transmigrated into a world of horror, and by accident, I stole and ate the Bodhisattva’s offerings.

But the Bodhisattva did not blame me. Instead, They told me to leave that place and never come back.

After I became an adult, a huge sum of money inexplicably appeared in my account.

Someone told me I must not accept it.

Because in another world, someone was making offerings to the dead-me.

Half skeptical and half convinced, I took the money.

But that night, I heard the Bodhisattva’s whisper again.

“Run…”

“The thing from that world…”

“It has found you.”

I used brutal methods to murder ten innocent residents, then found a blind man with an unbearably tragic past to take the fall.

In the interrogation room, the police officer asked me, “Are you even human?” Human? Of course I wasn’t human. I was a god.

I spent ten years in the imperial harem testing rouge, and not once did I fail to detect a single trace of poison.

That was until Consort Hua dropped dead after applying the “Drunken Beauty Red” I had personally verified.

It was then that a newly arrived talented lady told me: what truly kills isn’t the rouge, but the intent to murder.

When I was five years old, my mother and I died in a car accident.

The people who orchestrated the accident were my father and my mother’s best friend.

After receiving two insurance payouts, they got married and lived happily together as a family.

Occasionally, That Woman would get scared: “The mother and daughter who died-won’t they turn into Vengeful Ghosts and come back to take revenge on me?”

My father would laugh at her for being superstitious.

But they didn’t know-I wasn’t dead.

And the me who returned alive for revenge would be far more terrifying than any Vengeful Ghost.

I found a chat log on Sheng Jing’s phone.

He had sent his female assistant a video of me helping Jiu Jiu with her homework and losing my temper.

“This is why I’d rather work overtime at the office than come home.”

The young assistant replied with a “poor you, sending hugs” sticker. “Manager Sheng, you have it so hard.

Work is exhausting enough, and then you have to deal with all that when you get home.”

The first time I killed someone, the blade was dull.

I was fourteen that year. It was winter, and the north wind whipped against my face with a stinging bite.

Three bandits had scaled the wall of my grandfather’s courtyard, intent on stealing the last half-sack of millet he had hidden in the cellar.

My grandfather was blind. Hearing the commotion, he called out my name: “Shen He, Shen He!” He was using my alias.

My real name is Shen Heyi, and I am a girl. But the bandits didn’t know that, and Grandfather pretended not to know either.

He just kept calling, his voice urgent and hoarse, sounding like an old crow being strangled by the neck.

I fished out that Bone-Cleaver from beneath the stove.

Its edge was curled and nicked, so dull it couldn’t even slice through sheepskin cleanly.

But a human neck is softer than sheepskin.

I didn’t think about that day again for a very long time-not until I met Xie Changgeng.

Fu Qiu had always accepted her lot in life.

When she was a child, a blind man read her fortune through bone-weighing and said her bones were light, her fate was lowly, and that in this life she could only sell her body.

As it happened, her family was going through hard times, so her father simply sold her to a brothel.

When she was still young and first put on display, the madam said that although she was beautiful, her face carried a pitiful, sorrowful look, and the customers she attracted would never be decent men.

Sure enough, every few days, she suffered another bout of abuse.

By middle age, her looks had withered, and she married a merchant. The neighbors said her thin lips and fox-like eyes meant she would never be the faithful sort.

Before long, rumors were flying everywhere. The merchant could not bear it, and on a rainy night, he drove her out of the house.

Even so, she never hated anyone. She only hated that her own fate was so poor.

As she lay on the verge of death, the Old Blind Man happened to pass by drunk, bragging to the crowd.

“Twenty years ago, I saw a little girl in another town. She was so young, but she already had the looks to topple a kingdom.

“So I pretended to be blind, did a bone-weighing for her, and told her she had a lowly fate-that in this life, she could only become a whore.

“And guess what? Her whole family believed me!”

In the unluckiest year of my life, a wandering Daoist priest came to town.

He gave my father an idea: have me worship a Household Guardian Immortal to suppress my bad luck, and maybe I would live past the age of ten.

My father was a rough man who had made his fortune in troubled times by the barrel of a gun.

He called his adjutant over and did the math for him. “One Household Guardian Immortal keeps her alive to ten, two keep her alive to twenty, and twenty keep her alive to two hundred. Right?”

The adjutant counted on his fingers. “Marshal, your math is absolutely correct.”

My father hardened his heart and rounded up all the pigs, cattle, and sheep from miles around as offerings.

“My damn girl is going to live ten thousand years!”

That year, my father rode into the old mountain forest on a pig with me and took eleven Household Guardian Immortal into our household.

He flew into a rage. “Damn it, that’s still one short of the twelve zodiac animals!”

Later, who knew where he bought a Daoist boy from, but that made the twelfth.

During an intimate moment, I accidentally scratched the tattoo on my boyfriend’s back, and he suddenly flew into a rage.

Feeling deeply wronged, I went to an emotional support livestream that night to talk about what happened.

The audience chimed in one after another to defend me, suspecting that my boyfriend’s feelings for me had changed.

Only the Host asked with a dead-serious expression:

“That tattoo on your boyfriend’s back-is it a bottle?”

I married Prince Shu in my elder sister’s place, figuring that if he discovered the truth, the worst that could happen was a fight between us.

Little did I know that Prince Shu was not only blind, but also determined to pamper the “wife” he had brought home.

Now he is knocking outside my door. “Little Qiao, we have been married for half a month. May I sleep in the bed tonight?”

Er… How am I supposed to tell him that his bride is actually his male, cross-dressed nemesis?