Bai Xue was quite surprised. She noticed that the women in the village all had lifeless eyes, but the girl before her...
Bai Xue stepped forward and greeted her, "Hello, my name is Bai Xue."
Shen Ni was startled but soon flashed a warm smile. "I'm Shen Ni."
"You're from this village, right?" Bai Xue asked, sensing that she seemed different from the other women.
Shen Ni hesitated before shaking her head. "I'm from outside..."
"What?!" Bai Xue covered her mouth in shock. "Then... you don’t have to work?"
Shen Ni looked slightly embarrassed. "My in-laws won’t let me work. They said I can just wander around if I’m bored."
A strange bitterness rose in Bai Xue’s heart, momentarily making her forget she had been trafficked here. "Pretty girls really get special treatment."
Shen Ni sensed something off about the girl’s tone and smiled politely. Just then, Mei Lanju called her from a distance, so she bid Bai Xue goodbye and left.
Back home, Bai Xue was ordered by Old Lady Liu to feed the chickens and then cook. As she worked obediently, she couldn’t help but think of the girl she had just met, feeling a pang of resentment. We were both trafficked here, so why does she get to live so comfortably? She glanced at the basin in her hands, tempted to throw it but too afraid to do so. Instead, she stomped her feet and cursed under her breath.
She had thought about escaping before, but after Liu San died, the Liu Family only had Old Lady Liu left, who wasn’t particularly harsh on her.
"Girl, your name is Bai Xue, right?" Bai Xue recalled what Old Lady Liu had told her after Liu San’s death.
"Don’t worry, I won’t sell you off. You married into the Liu Family, and now that your husband is gone, it’s not your fault. He was just unlucky. Stay here, and when I die, everything in this house will be yours."
Bai Xue felt a twinge of sadness. This old woman, a stranger to her, had lost her son yet didn’t blame her or even think of selling her. What a kind person!
If the two time-travelers had been there, they would’ve slapped her without hesitation.
Bai Xue’s self-righteous compassion swelled, and she willingly worked for Old Lady Liu, convincing herself that she could leave after fulfilling her duty to the old woman.
But the girl she had met today unsettled her. Even if you were trafficked, you’ve already slept with them—shouldn’t you work like the rest of us? Yet Shen Ni does nothing all day! How outrageous.
Two days later, shocking news spread through the village—the Fang Family was moving to the city!
This stunned many villagers. After all, no one from the mountain village had ever moved out before; they were all people who scraped a living from the soil.
Naturally, some went to investigate. Fang Zhiyi looked at the crowd gathered in his yard, some squatting, others sitting, and chuckled. "My youngest son has made something of himself. He bought a house in the city and started his own business. Now he wants us to come help him."
The villagers murmured in admiration.
But some eyed Shen Ni, who stood silently nearby, and asked skeptically, "Is your new daughter-in-law going too?" Their implication was clear—they wanted the girl left behind. They knew trafficking was illegal and feared she might bring the police back if she went to the city.
Mei Lanju’s eyes flashed with anger, but Fang Zhiyi cut her off before she could slam the table.
"Everyone, our new daughter-in-law is coming with us. As you’ve all seen lately, she fell head over heels for our Dagang. They’re inseparable now—it’d be cruel to split them up."
Shen Ni was quick-witted. She immediately linked arms with Fang Dagang, whose bruises had only just faded. The contact made him float with pride again, though he was puzzled—when did my little brother say he was bringing us to the city?
Some remained doubtful, so Fang Zhiyi added, "Also, I’m not going."
"What?" The villagers were confused.
"I’ll stay here as the liaison. Fang Xiaojun said his business is booming and he needs more hands. He asked me to see if any of you want to earn some money."
The crowd erupted.
"Uncle Fang! Me! Pick me!"
"Old Fang, how much can we make?"
Fang Zhiyi raised a hand to quiet them, then held up five fingers and flipped them back and forth.
"Five thousand?" one villager gasped. That was a fortune—buying a young girl didn’t even cost that much.
Fang Zhiyi shot him a look. "Didn’t you see me flip it? Ten thousand—minimum! Every month!"
The crowd was stunned.
Fang Zhiyi then signaled Mei Lanju to bring out a thick envelope. She opened it, revealing a stack of cash inside.
The news spread like wildfire. Everyone now knew that the Fang Family’s scholar son had made it big—and hadn’t forgotten his fellow villagers.
Even the skeptics dropped their doubts, their minds now consumed by greed for those red bills. As for the college girl? Who cares? Didn’t you see how close she and Fang Dagang are? And Old Fang is staying behind—if anything goes wrong, we’ll hold him accountable.
On the day the three left, the villagers lined the streets to see them off. Mei Lanju glanced back at Fang Zhiyi, their eyes locking in silent understanding.
Among the crowd, Bai Xue watched Shen Ni leave, her resentment flaring. But remembering that Old Lady Liu was waiting at home for her to cook, she gritted her teeth and turned away.
Rumors about the Fang Family’s daughter-in-law soon spread—that she was barren and blackmailing the family. But these whispers only circulated among the trafficked women. The native villagers didn’t believe it, nor did they want to offend the Fang Family.
Fang Zhiyi had a good idea who was behind the rumors and found it laughable.
"Old Fang! Phone call!" Someone came running, excited. "It’s your wife! Hurry!" They were so eager that four or five people came to fetch him.
Fang Zhiyi picked up the phone at the village’s small shop.
"Hello? It’s me."
"How’s it going there?"
"Waiting for your update," Fang Zhiyi said, waving at the crowd gathered around him.
"Two more days. I’ve already sent that girl back and told her to keep quiet for now."
"Good. And Dagang?"
"Him? He’s making money—big money!" Mei Lanju took a leisurely bite of her ice cream, watching the construction site in the distance. She and Fang Zhiyi had agreed to give Fang Dagang a chance—if he couldn’t be reformed, they’d dispose of him. So, upon arriving in the city, they sent him straight to the site.
Fang Dagang refused to go back after the first day, but he was no match for his mother. The next day, he went to work, weeping all the way.
He had thought about running—back to the village—but no matter where he fled, Mei Lanju found him. Whether on the streets, in a park, or even at the bus station, it was as if she had a tracker on him.
For the first time, Fang Dagang understood how the trafficked girls in the village felt.
And when she beat him in public, the bystanders just shrugged once they learned she was his mother. Some even scolded him for being unfilial after hearing Mei Lanju’s tearful complaints.
"How much could an old lady's beating really hurt?" they said.
Fang Dagang bore the bitterness in silence, resigned to his fate. Day in and day out, he toiled from dawn till dusk, though he never knew what his mother had said to the foreman—somehow, the hardest tasks always fell to him.
s the Eldest Princess, renowned for her cold and aloof detachment, became the most docile of lambs, obeying his every command without question. But when the final move was played on the chessboard, as Gu Chenghan seized everything and ascended on the verge of apotheosis, that very Princess suddenly embraced him from behind, her tone carrying a dependence never heard before: "Wait... you haven't yet... commanded me to love you forever." Gu Chenghan froze abruptly. She... hadn't been hypnotized?! ... [The Eldest Princess's Diary] [When my soul was extracted, becoming the sole spectator outside my own shell] [At first, there was overwhelming fury, until I saw] [How he used my sword to effortlessly shatter my inescapable doom] [How he wielded my authority to eradicate fatal conspiracies I had never even detected] [Like a deity, he rescued me from the deep mire I was trapped in] [If not for those annoying vixens, he and I would be a match made in heaven] [I think I am ill, gravely ill] [My deity should belong to me alone] ... "Hypnosis? Oh, it succeeded, my dear Master." "Only this time, it's my turn to hypnotize you."
nd fell into a coma while saving his younger sister from an out-of-control car. He became a vegetable. No one knew that his consciousness had crossed into a world of cultivation. Over the course of sixty years, he began as the lowest kind of mine slave, struggling to survive amid mountains of corpses and seas of blood. By sheer chance, he eventually obtained the complete memories of a fallen Immortal King. Alchemy, medicine, formations, feng shui, physiognomy, artifact forging… Every great inheritance of the cultivation world was now his. But when he opened his eyes again, he discovered that ten full years had passed in the modern world. To pay for his treatment, his father had sold the family’s shop and house, leaving himself covered in lasting injuries and illness. His mother had cared for him day and night, and more than half of her hair had already turned white. His younger sister, who had been only fifteen back then, was now twenty-five. To help repay the family’s debts, she had been forced to lower her head and put on a smiling face in places of glittering lights and endless revelry. Only then did Chen Xuan understand that what he had lost was not merely ten years. He had lost the life his entire family was meant to have. The good news was that he had brought back the memories of an Immortal King’s entire lifetime. The bad news was that his soul had returned alone—his cultivation had not come with him. Spiritual energy was scarce, resources were depleted, and the modern world still had firearms, surveillance, capital, and laws. If he wanted to protect his family, break free from everyone’s control, and become truly invincible beneath the heavens, he would have to start all over again.
he colors of other people’s emotions. Light red meant anxiety. Gray meant exhaustion. Orange meant excitement. Yellow... meant repression. At the same time, he could gain unlimited control over one of those colors. Pale cyan: relaxation. Using this ability, he started offering “two-yuan hugs,” spending an afternoon exchanging emotional-color experiences with others. Then came his final female customer of the day— a girl whose emotional color was pure black... —— A week later, Xu Chuan had become skilled at using pale cyan—Relaxation—treating it like a bottle of menthol balm whenever he needed it. That was when he discovered he had unlocked another unlimited emotional color: Purple, the color of fear. So these emotional colors refresh every week? Fine, I take it back—I’ll never call you useless again... —— Much later, after Xu Chuan had accumulated countless emotional abilities, one night, he suddenly found himself inside someone else’s dream. There, he could use the emotional colors he possessed to paint. And in her dream, he painted her a shower of pink shooting stars, spreading across the depths of the night sky...
ing gift was a patch of barren land, and disciples were all picked up along the way. He spent fifty years diligently building three "ramshackle little sects," thinking he could finally live a carefree life relying on his disciples. But right at the fifty-year mark, he was suddenly swept away by a spatial rift and exiled to the Chaos Desolation, the Disorderly Ruins. There was no spiritual energy there, only slaughter. Relying on the cultivation feedback from his disciples, Gu Changyuan hacked his way through a sea of blood for eleven hundred years. When the system finally fished him back out, he discovered the ramshackle little sects he'd built back then had developed a rather... unusual style. Hold on... I vanished for a thousand years, so how did my ramshackle little sects become holy lands?!
