I Have Also Drifted for a Long Time - Chapter 2

Chapter 2

I had never had much interest in the Shangyuan Lantern Festival.

After transmigrating here three years ago, I thought I would end up like any of the countless transmigrated women in novels: either becoming a peasant girl and launching infrastructure projects, or being born as a noble daughter and walking a path paved with flowers.

If I was a little more ambitious, I might even get to be an empress.

Instead, I married Shen Huaizhi.

Because I had a face that resembled his dead childhood sweetheart, I became her replacement.

Shen Huaizhi was the legitimate son of a powerful family, blessed with both talent and intellect. He was the most sought-after young lord in the capital, the man who haunted the springtime dreams of countless noble girls.

After entering court as an official, he was even more at ease, rising into a glorious and influential minister.

Yet ever since his childhood sweetheart passed away, there had been nothing left in this world worth his attachment.

He married the Grand Tutor’s daughter, a girl born with the most expensive silver spoon in the capital in her mouth.

But he did not love her.

Night after night, Shen Huaizhi stayed at my residence and tangled with me in bed.

Back then, when he stood there in his blue robe, elegant as jade, smiling as he pinned a hairpin into my hair, I would also fall into a daze and think I was the heroine of a sweet romance.

But he would not allow me to keep his children.

In three years, I had already miscarried twice.

His lawful wife over there had lost his favor, and she vented every bit of her resentment on me, a mere concubine.

Even if I was only admiring flowers or teasing birds in the courtyard, she could still find fault with me.

Confinement every few days. A beating with the plank once a month.

Shen Huaizhi saw it all, but he never stopped her-because Lady Su came from an illustrious family, and even her tears were more precious than my life.

A concubine was lowborn. A concubine could be bought and sold.

To Shen Huaizhi, I was nothing more than a slave and a flesh vessel.

Over time, my body had been tormented until it barely seemed human.

At its worst, even breathing hurt, as if sparks were scorching through my lungs.

At the very beginning, I wanted to live. I wanted to live splendidly.

Gunpowder: one part saltpeter, two parts sulfur, three parts charcoal-add a little sugar and you had yourself a Tsar Bomba.

When inspiration struck, I even used a wolf-hair brush to write essays tens of thousands of words long.

On How to Resolve the Low Status of Merchants in Ancient China, Which Impedes the Flow of Productive Capital.

On How to Promote the Development of an Industrial Revolution Under the Dominance of Confucian Culture Without Being Suppressed.

After writing and polishing them, my heart surged with excitement. I had a page boy disguise himself as a commoner and deliver them to various government offices.

This was what I had most wanted to do back when I lay in an air-conditioned room in the modern world, wildly fantasizing about transmigrating.

Whether they understood any of it did not matter at all.

But later, Lady Su seized that page boy.

She gathered and fabricated all sorts of baseless charges and pinned them on me.

To pay for my life with his, that page boy was beaten to death right there in the courtyard.

His blood soaked my entire body.

Only then did I learn that when a living person was beaten to death, blood really did pour from all seven orifices.

Only then did I learn that this place was not an open-world game. There was no exploration mode.

This was a complete, unfamiliar hell of the real world.

After that, I only wanted to survive.

I no longer wished for life to go smoothly. I only wished for peace.

Later still, I no longer wanted to live, yet I had even lost the will to seek death.

Trapped within my own small corner of the world, I listened to Cuizhi tell me terrible jokes, and the days passed just like that.

Shen Huaizhi would still come by occasionally.

It was just that I grew more haggard by the day, with not the slightest trace of beauty left.

I was no different from a walking corpse.

Whatever he wanted, he could help himself.