Ranking

My father was famous throughout the surrounding villages for being a good man.

One freezing winter during a famine, he gave the last of our rice to a mother and child passing by.

After they left, they told everyone they met that my family still had grain.

The starving refugees, driven mad by hunger, came to our door to steal it, only to find an empty rice jar.

Humiliated and enraged, they forced my three-year-old sister into their arms and carried her away.

“If there’s no rice, then your daughter will do!”

I ran after them. In the end, all I found in the ruined temple was my sister’s mangled remains.

When I returned home, my father wailed through his tears, “I was trying to save people! It’s not my fault… That was just her fate!”

He saved someone else. In the end, my sister died, and I died too, in the bitter winter when I was fifteen.

When I opened my eyes again, I saw my father handing the freshly cooked rice to that mother and child.

I picked up the flower hoe beside me and stepped up behind him.

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.

The day my interview results came out, I came across a post: “How lethal can a white moonlight really be?”

The top-voted answer had only been posted a little while ago.

“I’ll tell my own story. He had a crush on me in high school, and we ran into each other a few days ago while I was job hunting.”

“Even if I’m not as capable as the others, he’ll still make me the one-in-ten-thousand choice.”

Attached was a graduation photo of them at eighteen.

The girl wore a white dress, her slim back quiet and well-behaved.

The boy had his head turned, looking at her intently, his profile clean and… familiar.

My phone trembled faintly. It was the message rejecting me after the interview.

Only then did I understand. She was Xie Qingyue’s white moonlight-and what she had killed was my future.

I would rather be a tree waiting for spring than a bird that turns back.

I could allow my feelings to fall apart completely.

But my future, my freedom, my life-none of them could afford the slightest mistake.

You had been blind. Then, one day, your sight suddenly returned. But a voice in your mind said, “Don’t tell them you can see.”

My brother once forced me to swear that I would never harbor any immoral thoughts about him in this life.

I did as he asked.

But he didn’t know that we were living inside a PO novel.

If I failed to win him over, I would be replaced by a new little sister.

In the tenth year after I married Pei Yan, he made my legitimate elder sister his empress.

Then he ordered me to feed a gu with my own body to cure her poison.

“Yuanyuan, it is only a Forget-Sorrow Gu. Wouldn’t it be nice to forget all your worries?”

It did sound nice.

So, right in front of him, I swallowed that Forget-Sorrow Gu. Just as he wished, I began to “forget sorrow.”

I forgot how he had demoted me from wife to concubine.

I forgot the bowl of abortifacient medicine he had bestowed upon me.

I forgot that I had once loved him more than life itself.

Later, bewildered, I asked my maid,

“His Majesty is so strange.

“I smiled at him, didn’t I? So why was he still crying?”

On our wedding day, he left me alone at the venue and disappeared.

Four months pregnant, I called him again and again.

At first, he simply didn’t answer. Later, his phone was turned off completely.

Whispers began to rise around me.

“This is the first time I’ve ever seen a groom run away from his own wedding.”

“Shotgun marriages never involve decent people. No wonder he doesn’t want her.”

I stood in the wind, at a complete loss, trying over and over to reassure the guests as they left one after another.

All day long, I waited like a fool on that street corner. Even after everyone had gone, he still never appeared.

An auntie nearby muttered without thinking, “Jiang Shen looks like your father’s ex-wife’s son. Don’t tell me he came to get revenge on you.”

On the way back, those words kept echoing through my mind.

Lost and dazed, my car collided with a truck. My four-month-old child and I were buried beneath the wreckage.

Five hundred years after my death.

The people who had once benefited from my kindness had long since forgotten me.

Only my sworn enemy crouched at my grave, huffing and puffing as he dug for three whole days.

And dug me out.

As twelve bolts of tribulation lightning crashed down,

I saw Ye Yu’s face-unchanged from five hundred years ago.

The moment he saw me, his face lit up with excitement. “Shen Xi, come fight me!”

My gaze drifted past his shoulder

to the nervous members of the Righteous Path hurrying over behind him.

Those people had once been my master and fellow disciples.

They were also the ones who had killed me back then.

At the sight of them, I suddenly clutched my chest and collapsed into Ye Yu’s arms while he was watching the show.

In a soft, delicate voice, I said, “Big brother, this freshly reconstructed body is still so weak. Be a dear and take care of those small fry for me, will you?”

In an instant, I felt the body I was leaning against go completely rigid.

When I lifted my head again, the arrogant, untouchable Demon Lord was blushing so hard he looked ready to burst into flames.

I am the most pathetic pervert alive.

After a year of crushing on the class heartthrob,

I finally couldn’t suppress my urge to spy on him anymore.

So I installed a cheap camera in his home.

Less than three hours later, the camera ran out of battery and shut off.

I tried to send him a creepy message:

-I like you I like you I like you I like you

Before it could even send, my phone notified me that my service had been suspended for unpaid bills.

Because I was broke,

I was forced to become an upstanding person.

Until one day, when I opened my door,

Xie Yu was on my bed, half-dressed and tied up with rope.

When he saw me come in, he even deliberately tightened the ropes, looking pitiful as he said,

“You don’t like me anymore, Xiaocui?”

After my twin sister was bullied at school until she jumped to her death, I took her place and infiltrated the campus.

During break, I received a blood-soaked note of intimidation:

[The prey has returned. The game continues.]

The signature was a Joker with a disturbingly twisted smile.

Everyone was waiting to watch me suffer.

But what they didn’t know was that the roles of prey and hunter had already been quietly reversed.

Because I was the sole heir to the Gu King of Nanjiang.

The woman my husband had always pined for was parachuted in as my intern.

She sobbed and accused me of bullying her, and for the first time, my husband raised a hand against me.

The next day, I returned to the company with the group’s dissolution notice in hand.

Only then did they realize that his position as deputy general manager-and the entire office building-were both mine to control.

I was the freest child in the village.

All the other kids envied me because no one ever told me what to do.

But the truth was, my parents had divorced, and neither of them wanted me.

That was why they left eight-year-old me all alone in a mud-brick house up in the mountains.

During the day, it was all right.

But at night, the mountain wind howled, and the drunk old bachelor would reach his hand in through the crack in the window. “Jingjing, are you scared all by yourself? Uncle Dog will keep you company!”

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.

The year I turned eighteen, my mother took five taels of silver and married me off to Ji Songzhu, a man infamous far and wide for bringing death to his wives.

Before me, both of his previous wives had died of sudden illness three days before the wedding.

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 transmigrated into the ruined white moonlight, and the crown prince humiliated me for the female lead.

“Take off one piece, and I’ll give you one million.”

I thought it over for a few seconds.

Then I promptly took off my dress.

My husband was sick and dying.

But before he died, he insisted on divorcing me.

He transferred every asset under his name, including the company, to me and left himself without a penny.

The night we signed the divorce agreement, he held me and cried like his heart was being ripped out.

He said this was the last thing he could do for me. He didn’t want me, after his death, to become the widow everyone pitied-the woman whose husband had died.

It was his one and only wish before he passed. As the wife who loved him so deeply, how could I possibly refuse?

The night before we were supposed to pick up the divorce certificate, he suddenly fell into a coma and was rushed to the hospital.

The doctor issued a critical condition notice.

And I signed the consent form to forgo treatment without hesitation.

They couldn’t save my husband. He died on that rain-lashed night.

I turned away, wiped the tears from my eyes, and tore the divorce agreement to shreds with a smile.

That same night, I called the funeral home. Before dawn broke, I had him sent into the cremator and burned down to a handful of ash.

I was the most envied courtesan in all the capital.

Simply because I bore a seventy-percent resemblance to the Crown Princess, someone threw down a fortune and bought me on the very night I was first listed.

Hugging that heavy pile of silver, I sat in a small sedan chair, both thrilled and anxious.

I secretly made up my mind: even if my patron turned out to be some nasty sixty-year-old geezer, I would still gaze at him with tender affection and kiss him anyway.

As long as I could get my contract of sale and take hold of my own freedom, I could do anything!

But when I saw the prisoner in the cell, soaked with urine and raving like a madman…

I turned around and wanted to leave.

Sorry. I had still overestimated myself!

After the college entrance exams ended, students leaving the test site were interviewed and asked how they felt in that moment.

A handsome boy with eyes like stars and moonlight looked into the camera and said calmly, “I only hope to realize my dreams.”

A moment later, he added in a low voice, “And meet the rainbow in my heart.”

The camera cut to a girl with dimples and a smile as bright as a blooming flower. A rainbow hair clip pinned in her hair caught the light in tiny, glittering sparks.

She stuck out her tongue playfully. “Oh no, I think I might not get into Q University! If I end up having to repeat the year, Pei Zhiyu, you have to wait for me!”

Pei Zhiyu was the person I liked.

But I was not that beautiful girl.

When that interview aired, I was hiding at home, sobbing my heart out because I had bombed the college entrance exams.

It looked like my life and my first love were both about to be completely over.

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.

In the year of famine, disaster fell upon our entire village.

My little brother was so hungry he no longer had the strength to cry, yet his small belly was swollen tight and shiny.

Mother held him in her arms and sat on the threshold, motionless, like a clay idol that had lost its soul.

In the pot was Guanyin clay boiled in clear water. Eating it made your stomach swell, and then you couldn’t pass it.

“Girl…” Father finally spoke. “Don’t blame your mother and me for being cruel… In the palace, in the palace there’ll at least be a mouthful of food.”

When the human trafficker came in, he brought with him a gust of dry, cold wind.

“She’s decent-looking enough, just a bit too thin and weak.

“Three pecks of millet. Not a grain more.”

I saw Father’s hand trembling violently as he pressed his handprint onto that sheet of paper.

Three pecks of golden-yellow millet were poured into the only broken grain jar in our home, making a soft rustling sound.

It was such a beautiful sound-the most beautiful sound I had ever heard.

My little brother would probably live through this winter.

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.

I was never smart, but the neighbor’s son was a once-in-a-century genius.

I spent day after day hunched over my desk doing practice problems before I finally got into a Project 985 university. He skipped class and dated the prettiest girl in school, yet the top universities fought over him.

I practically lived in the library, studying from morning to night, only to miss out on a guaranteed graduate school spot by one rank. He flipped through his books right before the exam and easily took first place in the entire department.

Whenever my parents scolded me, they would twist my ear and say, “Look at Little Lin! You’re both human, so how are you so much stupider than him?”

…

I spent the first half of my life living in his shadow. The moment I graduated, I couldn’t wait to leave home and run away from it all.

For three whole years, no matter how hysterical my parents got over the phone, I never went back.

On New Year’s Eve of the fourth year, I was carrying shopping bags back to my rented apartment when I saw him at the door.

His thin frame leaned against the wall, and he asked softly,

“Why won’t you go home?”

I didn’t answer.

The light in his eyes dimmed. Then he said, “Come back. Your parents miss you so much… and so do I.”

I worked as a maid at Marquis Manor for ten years. Then, simply because the young lady lost a Peach Blossom Hairpin, I was driven out of the household.

In the blink of an eye, many years passed. I had nearly let go of all the grudges and grievances between me and Marquis Manor.

But to my surprise, one night, the young lady of Marquis Manor knelt before me in utter disarray, begging me to take her in.

Her husband’s family had cast her out. In all the vast world, she had nowhere left to go.

And now, I was the only person she could turn to.

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.

She Has Been in the Wind for Two Years

Synopsis: Two years after my wife passed away, I still received messages from her every day and ate the dinners she had “arranged” for me.

I thought she had never truly left-until one late night, when I followed a text begging for help back home and realized I had been living all along inside the Fengli she left behind for me.

I am blind.

Inside the refrigerator, I felt my boyfriend’s corpse.

And someone was standing right behind me,

waiting to see how I would react.

On the day I died, Xiao Xu was about to make another woman his empress.

He came to the Cold Palace, hoping I would swallow my pride and yield to him. What greeted him was only my ice-cold corpse.

For reasons no one could explain, Xiao Xu broke down. He did one deranged thing after another, and every day he wept blood before my grave.

In the end, he got his wish and was reborn a thousand years later.

In the twenty-first century, Xiao Xu and I were classmates.

He was still dazzling. Still exceptional.

He was looking for me.

But he didn’t know that I had been reborn too, with all my memories intact.

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.

I had a dream while boating on the lake with my friends.

In the dream, a man told me he had taken a liking to me and demanded that I marry him.

I refused.

The next day, a female classmate on the boat vanished without a trace.

When I dreamt again that night, I agreed.

He laughed with joy, but unfortunately for him, he had no idea that I am the sole Earth Master successor.

The world says I have been blessed with a charmed life.

My father is a first-rank official, and my mother hails from a prestigious, noble clan.

Both of my elder brothers serve in the imperial court, and all three of my elder sisters have married into high-ranking families.

Since childhood, I have been draped in the finest silks and fed the rarest delicacies from jade platters.

Even the trifles I play with on a whim are worth enough to sustain an ordinary family for half a lifetime.

Yet, outsiders see only the surface of my tapestry-like life.

They do not understand that greatness brings its own burdens. Within these embroidered curtains and silken screens, schemes lie hidden at every turn.

Between the golden chalices and jade chopsticks, murderous intent flashes when least expected.

A single misstep is all it takes to fall into the bottomless abyss.

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.

I married a man three years my senior, and everyone said he was head over heels for me.

But not long after our wedding, he cheated.

He smoked, he drank, he got into fights, and he even kissed other women right in front of my face.

He did everything I hated most.

Duan Yi took a drag from his cigarette, looking down at me through hooded eyes. “What? Regretting it now?” Clutching the divorce papers in my hand, I took the glowing, red-hot cherry of his cigarette and ground it hard into his palm.

“Duan Yi, you ruined me. You should have died back when you loved me most.”

Duan Yi acted as if he had just heard the funniest joke in the world, his shoulders shaking with laughter. “That actually hurts.”

Do you know what it feels like to be diagnosed with a terminal illness at such a young age?

I was livestreaming fortune-telling when I connected with a male streamer.

When I asked if he had ever killed anyone, his expression shifted instantly. “Yeah,” he replied. “And you’re next.”

Ten minutes later, there was a knock at my door.

The bullet chat was exploding with people screaming for me to run. “He’s that famous serial killer streamer!”

I let out a soft chuckle. What they didn’t know was that I am the sole Earth Master successor.

I am the deadweight sister of the Number One Sword Cultivator of the Heartless Path.

He is a once-in-a-millennium cultivation genius, while I have never possessed a spiritual root.

Whenever I encountered danger, I would do nothing but cry out for my brother to save me.

My brother would always arrive instantly.

He would wipe away my tears with one hand while slaying every demon and monster with the other.

I thought he would always spoil me like this. Until I found myself in peril once more.

No matter how much I screamed, my brother didn’t appear.

The provoked Ghost Fiend had already coldly gripped my throat.

Yet, all I could see was a swarm of bullet-chat comments mocking me: [The male lead is staying away on purpose. He wants this drama-queen sister to suffer a bit so she finally learns her lesson.]

[She knows she’s weak but keeps running around recklessly. If she doesn’t die, who will?]

[She really messed with the wrong person this time. The villainous Ghost King has a violent temper and hates weak, useless girls who do nothing but cry.]

[And it’s because she barged in so rashly that the female lead found an opening to break through the formation and escape.]

[The villain lost his beloved female lead again. He’s gone mad with rage and is going to swallow the supporting female lead whole…] I was so terrified that I didn’t dare shed another tear.

But then, I suddenly heard the Ghost King’s complaining inner thoughts: {Am I ugly? Why does nobody like me?} {Everyone who doesn’t like me deserves to die-}

Seeing the youth’s eyes grow increasingly crimson, I spoke up in a panic: “-I like you!” “I… I only came here to confess my feelings to you.” “Please be with me, Senior!” He froze.

My concubine-born younger sister has experienced Rebirth twice.

In her first life, she chose the Sixth Prince, but it was the Ninth Prince who eventually ascended the throne.

In her second life, she chose the Ninth Prince, but it was the Sixth Prince who eventually ascended the throne.

In this third life, she wants to destroy whoever I choose.

I didn’t choose the Sixth Prince, nor did I choose the Ninth Prince.

Instead, I chose the physically disabled First Prince. She was dumbfounded.

Later, I ascended the throne as Emperor, and my sister became a prisoner.

She raved in madness, saying it was impossible-that only the Sixth Prince or the Ninth Prince could ever be Emperor.

I couldn’t help but laugh. She will likely never understand that it doesn’t matter who the Emperor is.

What matters is that whoever I choose becomes the Emperor.

In the previous two lives, I chose the Sixth Prince and the Ninth Prince. But in this life, I chose myself.

While staying at a hotel, I discovered a headless corpse under my bed.

Time of death was less than an hour ago, making me the prime suspect.

The police arrested me, but I told them the corpse would come back to life by nightfall.

Everyone thought I was insane. What they didn’t know was that I am the sole successor of the Earth Master lineage.

And this corpse belonged to a Jiangtou Practitioner who could use the Flying Head Jiangtou.

When I was pulled into the Death Game, the System gave only one rule: No Romance. As luck would have it, the boy I was paired with for survival in the first Dungeon was gentle, brilliant, and always took the hits for me.

It wasn’t until the Life Gate opened that he admitted with a smile that he was an Administrator.

But what he didn’t know was that I was one, too.

When I was sixteen, the Zhou Family bought me to be a breeder for their lame son, Zhou Yuqing, to bear him children.

Though the agreement was for me to arrive in June, I reported to the Zhou Family in March.

I did this for two reasons: first, to save my own family some grain, and second, to leave a good impression on my future master.

But Zhou Yuqing despised me for being a country bumpkin and called me stupid.

He said I wasn’t nearly as delicate or pretty as Miss Su next door.

Even as he shared my bed, he looked down on me for being dirty.

“You must bathe four times with green jasmine and white champaca, then comb your hair with osmanthus oil. Miss Su uses osmanthus oil-have you got that through your head? ”

“If you serve me well next time, this young master might just grant you a formal title.”

I nodded, scrubbing myself with a loofah until I nearly rubbed my skin raw.

Suddenly, someone grabbed me by the scruff of the neck and hauled me, dripping wet, out of the tub.

It was Madam Liu, the broker who had sold me. She was in a frantic rush as she dragged my naked, fragrant body toward the door.

“Good heavens! It’s all wrong, all wrong! It wasn’t the Zhou Family who bought you-it was the Zou Family!”