“I transmigrated into the body of a long-lost ‘true daughter.’ Before my wealthy biological parents could find me, I married into a wealthy family first.”
“For five million dollars, my adoptive parents married me off to the Pei family’s eldest son, who had cursed six fiancées to death in just three years. Everyone expected me to die shortly after the wedding, but to everyone’s surprise, this supposedly cursed husband died even faster than I could.
On our wedding day, my ‘cursed’ husband died in a car accident. Not even a complete corpse remained, leaving only a ten-billion-dollar inheritance for me to inherit. But I turned my nose up at it…”
This was the last voice Jiang Chiyu heard before her consciousness faded. When her senses finally returned, she heard a different voice.
“What did you say? How much is the Pei family offering? Five million?!”
“A five-million-dollar bride price just to marry my daughter? What kind of windfall is this?”
It was a shrill female voice. Though she was deliberately whispering, her excitement was so overwhelming that her words pierced through the thin wall and reached Jiang Chiyu’s ears.
Jiang Chiyu’s brow furrowed tightly. Her thoughts were a chaotic mess, feeling as thick and sluggish as paste.
Before she could fully wake up, another voice came from outside the door. “What do you mean, a windfall? Haven’t you heard the rumors about the Pei family’s son? It’s been in the news multiple times. They say the eldest Pei son is a wife-curser—six fiancées dead in three years. If we let Xiao Li marry him… we might not see her again after six months.”
This time it was a man speaking. His tone was irritable, clearly torn between the five million dollars and the life of his daughter.
The words were incredibly ominous. Hearing this, the woman hurried to wave him down, signaling for him to shut up. “What kind of talk is that? Do you really want to stop our daughter from living a good life that badly?”
Despite her words, the woman had certainly heard the rumors.
In just three short years, the eldest son of the Pei family had been engaged six times. Not a single wedding had actually taken place. Every time the wedding date was being finalized, the prospective bride would die under various circumstances.
The first time, people dismissed it as the unpredictability of life. But when it happened repeatedly, no one could calmly write it off as a mere coincidence anymore.
Furthermore, the backgrounds of these six women varied—some were daughters of prestigious families, some were from scholarly backgrounds, and some were from ordinary families. Without exception, they were all dead.
After the death of the third fiancée, rumors that the eldest Pei son was a “wife-curser” began to circulate throughout Jinghai City.
Initially, people were skeptical. But after the fourth, fifth, and sixth fiancées died one after another, everyone was forced to believe the grim reality: the eldest Pei son truly carried a curse, and anyone who married him was doomed.
This was exactly what Jiang Zhongyi and his wife were fretting over.
Just yesterday, a middle-aged matchmaker named Mrs. Zhang had come to their door to propose a match. She informed Jiang Zhongyi that the Pei family wished to form an alliance with his family and asked for his thoughts.
However, it happened that Meng Meiyun had taken her daughter to visit her grandmother yesterday, so she only found out about the matter today.
Once she knew, she didn’t dare to agree immediately—even if the Pei family was considered one of the top elite households in all of Jinghai City.
Greedy as she was, she wasn’t quite ready to sell her biological daughter to her death.
Just as she was growing a massive headache from the stress, her peripheral vision caught the sight of a tightly closed door nearby.
Behind that door lived Jiang Chiyu.
The orphan she had picked up from the side of the road.
And her nominal adopted daughter.
Meng Meiyun and her husband were not kind-hearted people. The only reason they had brought a young girl wandering the streets back home was for money.
Back then, a photo of them picking up Jiang Chiyu in the heavy rain had been uploaded to the internet. A wealthy, kind-hearted fool saw the news and contacted them, stating that if they adopted Jiang Chiyu, he would provide a monthly subsidy of four thousand yuan.
The condition was that Meng Meiyun’s family had to send him recent photos of Jiang Chiyu’s life every month.
Upon hearing this, the couple immediately dropped any thought of throwing the girl back out and agreed wholeheartedly.
At that time, their combined salaries were only a few thousand yuan. Having a steady stream of income every month would significantly improve their lives, and all they had to do was add an extra set of chopsticks to the table.
They would have been fools to refuse.
Besides, if that person ever stopped paying, they could simply abandon Jiang Chiyu again. They bore no risk at all, so why not?
As for why they had picked up the young Jiang Chiyu in the first place? It was solely for the expensive-looking gold “peace lock” necklace the little girl was wearing.
The moment they brought her home, they had snatched the little gold lock from her wrist. They had intended to throw her back onto the street immediately, but the “wealthy fool” had reached out faster than they could get rid of her.
It was lucky he was so fast; otherwise, the hundreds of thousands of yuan in subsidies they had collected over the past decade would have slipped through their fingers.
Staring at the closed door, Meng Meiyun’s agitated heart suddenly calmed down. She reached out, tugged her husband’s sleeve, and whispered, “Did Mrs. Zhang specify which daughter the Pei family wanted to marry?”
At those words, Jiang Zhongyi immediately understood her meaning. His eyes sparkled, and his voice rose with excitement. “Mrs. Zhang only said the Pei family wanted to marry our daughter. She didn’t specify which one!”
The two were whispering, but Jiang Chiyu, separated from them by only a wall, heard every single word clearly.
What was going on?
They wanted to sell her?
To a wife-curser?
Wait, why was that her first question? Shouldn’t she be wondering why she was in a room that looked like a storage closet?
She remembered she was just in a several-hundred-square-meter mansion eating a late-night snack…
While eating, she had been scrolling through short videos. Before her consciousness blurred, she had been watching a novel recommendation video. She only remembered the beginning of the plot—not because her memory was bad, but because the intro had annoyed her so much she swiped away.
“Turning her nose up at a ten-billion-dollar inheritance?”
Who did she think she was? The top of the Forbes list?
Jiang Chiyu forced her weak body up. Recalling the conversation she just overheard, she felt the plot was strangely familiar.
Wasn’t this the exact opening of that recommended novel?
Sold by adoptive parents for five million to a cursed husband, followed immediately by the husband dying on the wedding night and leaving a ten-billion-dollar inheritance…
You’d be an absolute idiot not to marry him!
Jiang Chiyu stood up immediately, pushed the door open, and said with her eyes closed, “Mom, Dad, I’ll marry him.”