1 001

In the misty rain of a small town in the south, a postal worker pedaled through the morning with two bulging satchels of letters and newspapers hanging from his bicycle. After ringing his bell twice, he turned into Clear Spring Lane amid a bright, crisp peal and stopped before the Li Family Clinic at the far end of the alley.

The spring rain had fallen all night, and the bluestone steps outside the clinic gleamed as if freshly polished, slick with a faint reflective sheen.

“Li Chongjing, are you home? You have a letter!” the postman called toward the clinic.

With a creak, the clinic door opened, and Li Chongjing stepped out. He was wearing the spring uniform of Jade Ridge International School: a white shirt and black trousers. Broad-shouldered yet lean and long-limbed, with a messenger bag slung over one shoulder, he lifted his head to reveal clear, refined features. Beneath his thin black-framed lenses were a pair of bright phoenix eyes, sharp and lucid, black and white as distinct as ink wash painting, balanced in light and dark; they were also like a sapling in early spring, upright, fresh, and pleasing to the eye.

The postman, whose mood had been soured by the rainy weather, found his expression unconsciously easing.

Li Chongjing thanked him as he took the letter.

At first, Li Chongjing thought it was something Liang Hui had sent him again, but it turned out to be a registered letter. The sender’s information had not been filled out clearly; all he knew was that it had come from the distant capital province.

He opened it, drew out the contents while walking, and began to read. Then his already expressionless face darkened. A sneer of disdain slipped from his throat, and his expression grew even colder.

He tore the letter and the pages inside to pieces and tossed them into a trash can when he passed one.

In all his years, Li Chongjing had received many letters: coy love confessions, bluffing threats, and the occasional inexplicable prank. But he had never seen anything as outrageous as this.

It claimed that in the future he would meet a girl named Xu Luofu, fall hopelessly in love with her, empty his wallet for her, commit every kind of wicked deed, and ultimately die a miserable death. It advised him to keep far away from Xu Luofu, then went on at length about all the despicable things she had already done and all the despicable things she would go on to do.

He did not read closely the part listing her past offenses, and in fact did not even finish it, because the moment he saw the words “empty your wallet,” he was already thoroughly annoyed.

Even if it had only been a joke, no one who loved money and was stingy to the bone would be pleased to hear that someone meant to reach into their pocket and take it.

Li Chongjing was strikingly handsome. His pair of clear, elegant phoenix eyes carried a classical grace; his nose was straight and high, his lips red and teeth white, his bearing refined and proper. Since childhood, he had coasted through life on his looks.

On top of that, he had the halo of a genius student who came first in his grade every single exam. From a young age, he had been the kind of child everyone else loved to hate.

At school, he was the teachers’ beloved top student, the girls’ campus heartthrob and prince; outside school, he was the child neighbors dreamed of having, the kind of boy they never imagined actually existed. They could never guess that beneath that elegant, otherworldly shell, like a water-ink painting, lurked a heart full of the stink of money, and a man proud, aloof, and cold to the bone.

Because he liked money, he chose Jade Ridge International School, a private school with a shallow foundation, even though his grades would have easily gotten him into a top provincial high school. After all, they offered the highest enrollment bonus.

Of course, he had never said this reason out loud to anyone.

“My grandmother is old. I don’t want to live too far from home. As for studying, it doesn’t matter. If you want to learn, you can learn anywhere. My grades won’t be affected by the school environment.”

That was what he always said to outsiders, and it moved those who heard it to tears. What a wonderful son, what a wonderful eldest grandson. Granny Li was truly blessed. But the moment they came home and saw their own boy, they could not help but scold him.

Jade Ridge International School was a private elite school founded only a few years earlier. Its main target was families of wealth or status, but because it was still new and had not yet built a reputation, and because it needed to meet admissions targets, its entrance standards had been lowered somewhat. As a result, the school had both many children from rich families and some ordinary students with excellent grades who were exempt from tuition.

Perhaps because the cutoff scores were lower, and because money could buy admission, the place was a mixed bag and the school atmosphere was not very good. There had even been a student who jumped off a building the previous semester.

But none of that affected Li Chongjing in the slightest. Although he had entered through a special admission route, he was very good at handling relationships, and so he was not only popular at school but lived quite comfortably there. The darkness of the school never reached him.

For other special-admission students, however, that was not necessarily the case.

Xu Mengrui had been one of them, though that was a matter of her previous life.

In the capital, Xu Mengrui stood at the entrance of a grand villa and watched the car drive away, a cold smile spreading across her face.

In her last life, she had also been one of Jade Ridge International School’s specially recruited scholarship students, and she had suffered terribly there. The place was full of devils, who treated her like a toy, mocking and humiliating her at will, leaving behind a psychological wound that could not be erased.

And all of it, in the end, came down to her origins.

When her mother was in college, she had fallen in love with a wealthy young man, but the difference in their backgrounds had been too great, and they were forcibly separated. So her mother had no choice but to take the child in her womb, a child known to no one but herself, and go far away, struggling to raise her to adulthood.

Because they were poor, she had attended that high school for the money, enduring three years like hell. After getting into university, she met some people and, through them, found her biological father—the man her mother had never been able to forget.

Yet she had not expected that less than a year after her mother left, that man would marry a woman who looked very much like her mother, have a daughter only one year younger than Xu Mengrui, and raise that daughter in the palm of his hand with boundless indulgence.

That daughter was Xu Luofu.

Xu Luofu was the salvation she had met in college, the fiancee of her boyfriend Mo Yu.

Though it had only been a business marriage and Mo Yu had no feelings for her, she still would not let go, obsessively and stubbornly, simply because her cool, indifferent fiance had fallen in love with a poor nobody she despised.

To split her and Mo Yu apart, Xu Luofu had done many mad and vicious things, and the suffering Xu Mengrui endured at her hands was no less than what she had endured in high school.

Even more chilling was the fact that later, when her mother was reunited with that father and he learned that she too was his daughter, he had already mistaken the substitute for true love. He doted on Xu Luofu so much that no matter what Xu Luofu did to her, he excused it all.

Xu Luofu clearly had gained so much, and yet she could not bear to let Xu Mengrui have even one thing go well. Fortunately, although Mo Yu had once misunderstood her, he still stood on her side. In the end, he set a trap so that Xu Luofu brought disaster upon herself and met a miserable fate, and that bastard of a father also paid the price for spoiling his daughter beyond measure.

However, even though she had won the struggle against Xu Luofu, by the time she could finally savor the fruits of victory, she was no longer young. Perhaps it was because of the small and large ailments that kept appearing in her body, or the wrinkles slowly spreading across her face, constantly reminding her that her youth was gone, or the fact that her husband’s passion was no longer what it had once been. Looking back, she found it hard to let go.

If the mistake had been corrected from the very beginning, if her mother had not run away pregnant but had remained with her father, then how happy would she have been? How brilliant would her youth have been? How freely and joyfully would she have lived? Just like... just like Xu Luofu had, all those years ago before she died.

The more she thought about it, the less she could escape that fantasy. She grew gloomy and resentful, blaming heaven and cursing fate. Then, perhaps because of that obsession, she learned the truth of the world after a car accident. It turned out that the world was a novel; she was the heroine, her husband the male lead, and Xu Luofu the vicious supporting villainess, a antagonist who fluttered about in the early half of the story.

Because the heroine had died unexpectedly and the ending no longer matched the original plot, the world reset once, and she had been reborn at the point just before accepting Jade Ridge International School’s recruitment.

After her ecstatic joy, Xu Mengrui swore that she would take back everything that belonged to her and live a perfect life.

She slapped away the hand of the Jade Ridge International School admissions teacher, then turned to persuade her mother to come with her to the capital, where she arranged for her mother to reunite with her father, Xu Hanrui.

Perhaps because Xu Hanrui still had feelings for his first love at this point, or perhaps because that first love had not yet acquired the wrinkles and white hair she would bear years later, and with Xu Mengrui fanning the flames and pushing things along, the two sides tugged and circled for a while before the old flames reignited and burned out of control.

The white moonlight had returned; it was time for the substitute to step aside.

Xu Luofu and her mother were driven out by her father. She had fulfilled the dream of her previous life, replacing Xu Luofu and becoming the true young lady of the Xu family.

But that was not enough. She also wanted Xu Luofu to pay for everything she had done to her in her last life.

So she persuaded Xu Hanrui to send that mother and daughter back to where they had come from, and let Xu Luofu attend Jade Ridge International School. That den of wolves was very suitable for someone like Xu Luofu.

Good, very good. Everything was perfect now. The only problem was Li Chongjing.

If Xu Luofu was the early-stage boss, then Li Chongjing was the late-stage boss, the one who made her unable to enjoy her victory even after Xu Luofu died.

At first, Li Chongjing had been only one among Xu Luofu’s many simps. Aside from being better than the others in looks, build, and grades, there was nothing especially noteworthy about him, or rather, he did not seem like any kind of dangerous person.

But after Xu Luofu’s death, he had become a rabid hound. For fifteen years he hounded her and the male lead mercilessly in the business world, and outside it he set deadly traps with vicious cunning, keeping them perpetually in trouble and under pressure, even bringing them to the brink of death several times.

And all of it was for revenge for Xu Luofu.

Only after Li Chongjing suddenly died did she and the male lead finally get a chance to breathe.

She had never been able to understand why Li Chongjing loved Xu Luofu so much. He had once been a brilliant, well-mannered gentleman, a refined ink-wash nobleman. Even she had once had a good impression of him in high school.

She had read through the whole book, but unfortunately, as two supporting villains, the account of their past and inner thoughts was reduced to only a few brief lines. She could not find the reason there.

She guessed it must have been that Xu Luofu had deceived Li Chongjing and that he did not know her true nature. Or perhaps that vicious woman had done something to him in secret and tormented him into developing another personality. After all, there had seemed to be some rumors at the school at the time.

In any case, it absolutely could not have been because he truly loved Xu Luofu. She believed that everyone longed for kindness and yearned for sunlight, while Xu Luofu stood in complete opposition to all such beautiful qualities.

So she had written to Li Chongjing in advance, telling him what Xu Luofu was really like. Since she was the heroine, since she had already changed her mother’s fate and her own, then she must certainly be able to change Li Chongjing’s too.

By now, if she calculated the timing, Li Chongjing should already have received the letter, right? Even if he had initially dismissed it as a prank, he would soon discover that what the letter said had come true, and then he would have no choice but to believe it.

That day, not long after Li Chongjing arrived at school, he heard a piece of news.

“I heard there’s going to be a transfer student. She’s coming from the capital. She used to be a rich young lady.”

“What do you mean, used to be a rich young lady? She went bankrupt?”

“I heard she was kicked out of her house.”

“Huh? Why?”

“Because her mother was a mistress, I guess.”

“Ugh! Disgusting! What’s her name? I saw a lot of people there during summer break; let me see if I know her.”

“It seems to be... oh, Xu Luofu.”

Li Chongjing’s motion of turning a page suddenly halted.

Xu Luofu? The vicious villainess Xu Luofu mentioned in that letter?