Ranking

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.

Chen Mu hated me.

Because I bullied and framed his precious childhood sweetheart.

Again and again, he saw through my schemes with cold eyes and watched me reap what I had sown.

“Bad seed,” he called me.

But when I kissed him in the dark, he panicked.

“Brother Chen Mu, shouldn’t a bad girl deserve a little punishment?”

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.

I was a palace maid serving at the emperor’s side when I accidentally started seeing floating comments.

The comments said the emperor was hopelessly love-brained.

By day, when Consort Gui treated him coldly, he acted as if he couldn’t care less.

By night, he would sob under the covers, terrified his eyes would turn red from crying, then sneak out of bed in the middle of the night to press ice against them.

I didn’t believe it. Was this really my cold-blooded, ruthless, domineering emperor?

Later, I discovered the comments were right.

He really was love-brained.

Only, the target of his obsession had become me.

But I… didn’t love him.

My youngest sister had been flirting with three men.

Unfortunately, she had used my name and our middle sister’s.

All three came to ask for her hand.

To smooth things over, our parents suggested that we each marry one of them.

My other sister wavered.

I refused.

There was nothing wrong with me.

Why should I marry a man who had loved my sister?

Didn’t I deserve a love untainted by all this?

I looked up at my youngest sister, who kept avoiding my eyes, and said evenly: “First, tell me exactly what happened between you and those three men.”

My father was the most formidable businessman in the Republic of China. On my seventh birthday, the gift he gave me was a handgun.

I blinked at him. “But Papa, I’m a girl.”

Father pondered for a moment, realizing that it was indeed inappropriate. He then turned to the butler and ordered, “Go have a custom gun made for the Young Miss. Make it pink.”

After my Imperial Mother Consort died, I was given three foster mothers in succession.

Of those three foster mothers, some were deposed, and the others were ordered to die.

In the end, I landed in Beauty Lin’s care.

For three years, she and I lived together in peace, without incident.

Until she offended the wrong person and was thrown into the Office of Punishment.

My heart gave a jolt. Oh no. It looked like I was going to have to change foster mothers again.

Worse still, this time, she was the only one I wanted.

I am a Thief.

While I was stealing, the homeowner came back.

With no other choice, I had to hide Under the Bed.

But in the next second, the Man pulled out a Knife and slit the woman’s throat, then took out his Phone to make a call.

Just as he dialed, from the pocket of my clothes,

came the sound of vibration.

At my boyfriend’s house, I finally found my aunt, who had been missing for over a decade after being abducted.

She was no longer the gentle, soft-spoken goddess from the dance department I remembered.

As for the family that had tormented her: the father, dressed in a sharp suit, expected me to call him ‘Uncle’; my boyfriend was in the middle of a soulful marriage proposal; and the youngest sister, wearing a bright, radiant smile, referred to her as ‘the family-less madwoman.’

–

I swear, I didn’t mean to break into that room.

It was just that the sound of something slamming against the door was so violent, it made me feel as if a wild beast were trapped inside.

My husband thinks I’m one of those women who bleed their husbands dry for their brothers and sisters. What he doesn’t know is that my “eldest brother” is actually the son I gave birth to at nineteen, my “second brother” is the son I gave birth to at twenty-five, and my “little sister” is the daughter I gave birth to at twenty-eight.

Three months after I moved into Old River Bend, the old lady next door died. While I was helping clear out her belongings, I found a diary.

The first page read: “My daughter died three years ago. The person living next door to me is a ghost.”

But I knew there was something wrong with her daughter from the very first day, because I’m a ghost, too.

Chapter 0

The Princess believed in living for pleasure.

During a palace banquet, I spared a single extra glance at the Crown Prince, and she had him delivered straight to my bed.

“So what if he’s the Crown Prince? As women, we must rise to the challenge!”

Afterward, the Crown Prince demanded that I take responsibility for him.

The Princess blocked me, refusing to allow it. She declared with righteous indignation, “If you give him an official status, how are you supposed to keep having fun in the future?”

Later, when enemy troops surrounded the imperial palace, I rushed to tell her to flee for her life. Instead, I found her in her tent, favoring dozens of male consorts.

“Princess, look at the time! It’s too late!”

She finally realized the gravity of the situation. “You’re right. Here, I’ll share half of them with you.”

And so, I was delayed as well.

Never in my wildest dreams did I imagine that the Hostage Prince from the enemy nation would be among those male consorts.

Just before he was about to be rescued, I ruined his virtue. He was so furious he ground his teeth in rage.

The Princess and I were captured together. Tied behind horses and dragged along the ground, we were sent to the Great Yan Palace.

To scratch out a living, I confessed my love to the Hostage Prince, claiming I only took his body because I loved him, and begged for his protection.

Unexpectedly, the Princess stepped forward and said, “You fool, you actually believe that? To her, you’re just one of-”

The Hostage Prince drew his sword on the spot, demanding an answer: “Exactly how many men have you had before me?”

“I’m truly done with you! Princess, you’re my living ancestor! Aren’t we unlucky enough already?”

I was so enraged that I coughed up blood and died.

The Princess, however, was so notoriously debauched in her speech and conduct that the enemy soldiers wanted to humiliate her, yet they feared she might actually enjoy it. Left with no other choice, they allowed her to live out her final years in peace.

Carrying my corpse on her back, the Princess declared that since she could no longer seek pleasure in the days to come, she would rather die. She threw herself onto a sword and ended her life immediately.

Reborn into a new life, I have returned to the day I entered the palace to save her.

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?

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 was scammed by a real estate agent into moving into a Columbarium. To my surprise, the place was already occupied by a handsome, young, and tsundere ghost. When I took a closer look, I was even more shocked-it turned out we were old acquaintances.

I’m a washed-up, eighteenth-tier starlet who spent three years playing the submissive role just to marry into the Jiang Family, the wealthiest clan in the Beijing circle.

My three-hundred-million-yuan ‘wedding of the century’ to Jiang Yuan, the family’s only son, instantly shot to the top of the trending searches.

However, a big shot from the metaphysics circle claimed I had the face of a concubine.

The livestream chat exploded immediately:

“That’s hilarious. It’s the year 3202-who still becomes a concubine?”

“Is it possible they don’t mean a concubine, but a mistress?”

My expression darkened. I joined the livestream and pulled out my marriage certificate for everyone to see.

To my surprise, the master simply said:

“Among the living, you are indeed the primary wife.

“But if we’re counting the dead… well, that’s a different story.”

On her seventieth birthday, Song Xiaotao found an unconscious young man in her vegetable patch. Judging by her years of experience cracking melon seeds and shooting the breeze at the village entrance, this fellow was clearly trouble. Yet, she brought him home anyway. Song Xiaotao had seen off her last living relative ten years ago. Even if he brought a calamity that wiped out her entire household, she was the only one left to go. When the young man came to and saw Song Xiaotao’s wizened face, his vision swam, and he nearly blacked out again. Heavenly Bodhisattva, why was his Love Tribulation partner an old woman?!

The day my Senior Brother emerged from the Secret Realm, he brought back a Mermaid.

She was a pitiful, innocent creature, seemingly unable to care for herself the moment she left his side.

To protect her, he went as far as threatening to break our engagement, demanding that I show her more tolerance and understanding.

So, I granted him his wish. I called off the engagement and seized his opportunities.

I kicked him down from his position as the Mountain-Guarding Senior Brother.

They came to the Cultivation World to play at love and romance.

But I am different. I am going to achieve immortality.

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.

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.

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.

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?”

My cousin is dead.

His hands were tied to a ceiling beam, and he was wearing a red dress over a swimsuit-a swimsuit that was still dripping wet.

The police report claimed it was a suicide.

But I know he didn’t kill himself. And I know who’s next.

It’s me. There is no escape.

When seven-year-old Linzhi watches her licentiate father bring home Xingdi, a disgraced quanzao maid meant to cook by day and warm his bed at night, she sees two very different women discover that obedience will never protect them.

After lust, cruelty, and a child’s preventable death bind Xu Tingyu, Xingdi, and Linzhi together, they turn the rules of a patriarchal household against the man who owns their lives—and set an exquisitely patient revenge in motion.

But killing one tyrant cannot free women from a world built to strip them of property, names, and futures, so mother, aunt, and daughter must risk everything to claim a life their laws refuse to grant them.

I followed an underworld Big Brother for six years.

But on my birthday, he brought home a girl.

He was covered in blood, and the pretty, delicate girl was hiding in his arms.

From then on, the man who had indulged my every whim never looked at me again.

Everyone thought I loved Xu Chang but could never have him, and that I was heartbroken beyond words.

I only smiled and toyed with the watch on my wrist.

I was an undercover police officer planted inside Huaxi’s largest criminal gang.

I’d stayed by his side all these years for one reason: to treat him to a taste of prison food. So how could I possibly… fall in love with him?

Father Emperor is a transmigrator, and I have been able to hear his inner thoughts since the moment I was born.

[Huh, so this is the future villainess? She’s so soft and adorable; how did she end up turning out so wrong? No, I have to protect her. My daughter can only be the lead heroine.]

In the beginning, that was exactly what he did. He taught me self-respect and self-love, told me not to depend on men, and said that girls could hold up half the sky.

But later, things changed. He looked at me with eyes full of loathing, claiming I didn’t have a shred of the decorum expected of a young lady, and forced me to kneel in the Buddhist hall to copy Buddhist scriptures. And I could no longer hear his inner thoughts.

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 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?”

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.

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.”

My Miss is a traditional lady of the old school; the rules are etched into her very bones.

On their wedding night, the Chen Family Young Master, disdainful that she wasn’t a “modern woman,” didn’t even lift her bridal veil before climbing over the wall and running away.

Her parents-in-law, fearing she might do something drastic, sent people to stand guard outside her door all night.

But the next morning…

Miss appeared properly dressed and groomed, kneeling respectfully to serve tea to her parents-in-law. “Since I have entered the gates of the Chen Family, it is only right that I serve my elders.”

Three years later.

The Chen Family Young Master returned, bringing with him a woman dressed in a Western-style skirt and high heels.

Standing side-by-side in the center of the main hall, they declared that arranged marriages were a relic of the old feudal system and demanded a divorce from Miss.

In the silence that filled the hall, no one could bear to look at Miss’s face.

Only I saw-

As Miss lowered her gaze…

Very slowly, ever so slowly…

The corners of her lips curled into a faint smile.

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.

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.

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.

On the night before the college entrance exam, I was raped.

Two murderers broke into our home and brutalized me right in front of my grandmother.

Then, they strangled her to death right before my eyes.

I barely escaped with my life, but I went from being a star student destined for Tsinghua and Peking Universities to a useless cripple, paralyzed from the neck down and unable even to use the bathroom on my own.

Fortunately, I have been reborn.

I have returned to the very moment the killers knocked on the door.

Pei Xu was the Chancellor’s son.

On a wager, he disguised himself as a poor young man and set out to win me over.

Instead, he fell deeply in love with me and swore he would marry no one else.

When his sister learned of it, she had my younger brother and sister killed, then sold me to a brothel to put an end to my presumptuous dreams.

Years later, she was to marry the young marquis.

But on their wedding day, he never came to fetch his bride.

Dressed in his wedding robes, he was at a brothel, spending a fortune on me.

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.”

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!