A large sheet of white paper had been hung across the ornate iron gate, with a huge black Chinese character “Longevity” written on it. In the charcoal brazier by the entrance, sheets of yellow funeral paper were still burning.
The Jiang family was holding a funeral.
For her.
Jiang Ni’s thoughts went blank for a moment.
The night before, she had stayed up late reading a novel called The 1970s Military Officer Who Spoiled Me Rotten. Then, without warning, she passed out.
When she opened her eyes again, she had transmigrated into the novel!
And she had become the cannon-fodder female supporting character, who was also named Jiang Ni.
In the novel, the original Jiang Ni was the pampered daughter of a capitalist family. She had grown up surrounded by luxury and had a spoiled, willful personality. She was beautiful, but unfortunately, she was also famously empty-headed.
She was one of the most well-known social butterflies in Shanghai.
Her father had married into the Jiang family.
Her biological mother had died young, leaving behind a massive inheritance divided among Jiang Ni, her older brother, and her father.
Her father remarried and used her mother’s inheritance to maintain a comfortable and respectable life in Shanghai.
As for Jiang Ni’s share, according to the Jiang family’s ancestral rules, it was handed over to her after she married the male lead of the novel, Fu Ruichen, who had been betrothed to her since childhood.
But no one had expected that her father and stepmother had long coveted her inheritance.
They had secretly encouraged their nephew, Gao Minglang, to seduce Jiang Ni, hoping that she would divorce Fu Ruichen and then marry Gao Minglang with her inheritance in hand.
The original Jiang Ni was hopelessly blinded by love. She had never liked the quiet and reserved Fu Ruichen.
Then Fu Ruichen’s entire family was sent away for re-education.
The original Jiang Ni wanted nothing to do with him. Desperate to get a divorce, she wrote letter after letter to Fu Ruichen at his military unit, humiliating him in every possible way.
Eventually, Fu Ruichen agreed to divorce her.
She thought she could finally be together with the man she loved.
But she never got that chance.
One night, Jiang Ni happened to overhear her stepsister and Gao Minglang having a secret conversation by the river.
The moment she learned the truth, she was shaking with rage and rushed over to confront them.
During the ensuing struggle, she fell into the river and drowned.
After her death, Gao Minglang split her inheritance with Jiang Ni’s father and his family. The entire family then moved to Hong Kong, where they lived like wealthy aristocrats.
Meanwhile, Fu Ruichen married the novel’s female protagonist, and the two became a celebrated couple.
The original novel barely mentioned Jiang Ni. She was nothing more than a minor cannon-fodder character, and the author never bothered to give her much of a storyline.
When Jiang Ni transmigrated into the novel, the original body had just fallen into the river and water had already entered her throat.
Fortunately, Jiang Ni herself knew how to swim.
After climbing ashore, she went to the hospital to have the wound on her head examined.
The injury wasn’t serious.
But the doctor gave her an entirely different piece of news.
“You’re pregnant. The baby is three months old—and you’re carrying triplets.”
Jiang Ni stood there in stunned silence for a full minute before finally processing what she had heard.
The male lead really was something.
They had only been together once on their wedding night, and she’d gotten pregnant immediately!
In her original world, she had never even been in a relationship. And now that she’d transmigrated, she suddenly had three babies in her belly.
It was an incredibly strange feeling.
Jiang Ni immediately made a decision.
She was going back to the Jiang family to get revenge.
Then she would take the babies in her belly and follow Fu Ruichen to the military.
She was going to cling tightly to this powerful husband of hers!
Now, Jiang Ni raised her eyes and looked into the villa.
Her father, Liu Xingde, her stepmother, Gao Xiuli, her stepsister Gao Mengmeng, and Gao Minglang were gathered around the dining table, eating and chatting happily.
There wasn’t even the slightest trace of grief on their faces.
They weren’t even bothering to pretend anymore.
Jiang Ni curled her lips into a faint smile and called out in a soft, eerie voice,
“I’m back…”
Everyone looked up.
A white figure suddenly appeared at the doorway.
Her long black hair hung damply around her face. Blood seeped from the wound at her temple as she silently walked toward them.
The face revealed beneath that wet hair was exactly the same as the “dead” Jiang Ni’s.
“Ghost!”
Gao Xiuli screamed, so frightened that she flung her chopsticks away.
The others shot to their feet.
Liu Xingde trembled.
“You… you’re Jiang Ni?”
Gao Mengmeng’s face turned deathly pale.
“Weren’t you… weren’t you swept away by the river?”
Jiang Ni walked closer, revealing her pale, almost translucent face.
Gao Minglang was the first to recover.
He rushed forward and wrapped his arms around her, forcing a tear from his eyes.
“Xiao Ni, thank goodness you’re all right. I thought I’d never see you again.”
Jiang Ni fought back her disgust and pushed him away.
Pretending to be concerned about the wound on her forehead, she touched it and asked,
“Minglang, I hit my head pretty badly, and I can’t remember a lot of things. What’s going on at home?”
The others exchanged glances.
Gao Minglang continued playing the part of the deeply devoted man, while Gao Mengmeng also began pretending to cry.
“Sister, you went out with some friends last night. Someone saw you accidentally slip and fall into the river, and the current carried you away. We all thought…”
Liu Xingde and Gao Xiuli quickly nodded in agreement, squeezing out a few tears of their own.
Jiang Ni watched their performance and laughed coldly inside.
In the novel, her father and stepmother had deliberately raised her into a spoiled young lady who knew nothing except how to eat, drink, and have fun.
Her arrogant and domineering personality had been cultivated by them from childhood.
Their goal was to make her easier to manipulate.
Jiang Ni suddenly looked enlightened.
“So you thought I was dead, so you held a funeral for me?”
Then, with a beautiful face full of confusion, she asked,
“But Dad, didn’t you send anyone to look for my body? You don’t even have my ashes, so how were you planning to bury me?”
Liu Xingde’s expression stiffened.
He quickly spat several times as though to ward off bad luck and changed the subject.
“Now that you’re back, why are you talking about ashes? That’s such an unlucky thing to say. Go upstairs and change your clothes, then come down and eat. I’ll have all the funeral things taken away.”
“Oh.”
Jiang Ni went upstairs and changed into a fresh set of clothes.
Seeing how easily they had managed to dismiss her, the others exchanged glances.
Jiang Ni hadn’t drowned after all.
Fortunately, she’d hit her head badly enough that she had apparently lost all her memories from before she fell into the river.
The heavy weight in Gao Minglang and Gao Mengmeng’s hearts finally lifted.
After dinner, Jiang Ni turned to her father, Liu Xingde.
“Dad, Minglang and I are getting married soon. I’m so careless and absent-minded that I think it’s better if you keep my inheritance for me.”
Everyone’s eyes lit up.
Liu Xingde immediately asked,
“Where is it?”
“On the mountain in the eastern part of the city.”
Jiang Ni paused before adding,
“There’s a lot of it, and it’s very heavy. Why don’t we all go together and move it?”
The mountain was pitch-black that night.
A few crows cried out in the distance, making the place feel eerie.
There was a dilapidated thatched hut and a cesspit on the mountain.
Jiang Ni pointed toward the ground.
“My inheritance is buried in the soil beside the cesspit.”
Gao Mengmeng looked suspicious.
“Are you sure you’re not making this up? How could your mother’s things possibly be in a place like this?”
Jiang Ni calmly replied,
“You all know that my grandfather’s property was confiscated. If anything valuable had been buried somewhere else, it would’ve been discovered and taken away long ago.”
Jiang Ni’s maternal grandfather had been a capitalist, and this was an era when capitalist families were being heavily persecuted.
Her explanation sounded reasonable enough.
The others stopped questioning her.
They grabbed shovels and began digging.
Unfortunately, the smell was absolutely unbearable.
While they were distracted, Jiang Ni suddenly kicked all four of them straight into the cesspit, which was more than two meters deep.
Splash! Splash! Splash! Splash!
All four fell into the pit.
Gao Minglang got filth all over his mouth. Maggots wriggled through the gaps between his lips and crawled inside.
He desperately reached up to wipe them away, only to forget that his hands were already covered in excrement.
He smeared it all over his face.
The foul-smelling sludge soaked into Gao Mengmeng’s expensive clothes.
She let out a piercing scream, so overwhelmed with despair that she nearly fainted.
Gao Xiuli’s head plunged into the filthy water, and she choked several times.
Liu Xingde hurriedly reached out to pull her up.
Jiang Ni pinched her nose and walked around to the outside of the hut.
Then she kicked it several more times with all her strength.
“Creak…”
The rotten thatched hut finally collapsed, falling directly onto the cesspit and trapping the four people beneath it as they struggled desperately to climb out.
Under the moonlight, Jiang Ni looked down at their panicked and miserable figures.
She couldn’t help feeling wonderfully satisfied.
Gao Minglang roared furiously,
“You tricked us!”
Jiang Ni gave him a mocking smile.
“I merely treated you the way you treated me. Did you really think I’d forgotten how you and Gao Mengmeng pushed me into the river?”
Gao Minglang and Gao Mengmeng’s expressions changed instantly.
Jiang Ni had done it deliberately!
“You ungrateful wretch! You unfilial daughter!”
Liu Xingde erupted into furious curses.
Jiang Ni’s almond-shaped eyes turned icy.
“Dad, you’re the last person who has the right to call me unfilial.”
“When my mother left that inheritance for you, she did it because of me. And what did you do? You took my mother’s money, married another woman, and raised her daughter with it.”
“Don’t think I don’t know. You’ve already squandered every last bit of that money!”
That was precisely why Liu Xingde had set his sights on Jiang Ni’s inheritance.
Only now did the four of them realize that something was terribly wrong with the Jiang Ni standing before them.
How had the famously empty-headed, spoiled young lady suddenly become like an entirely different person?
Jiang Ni continued,
“From this day forward, everything my mother left behind has absolutely nothing to do with any of you.”
“What do you mean?”
A terrible feeling rose in Liu Xingde’s heart.
Jiang Ni didn’t answer.
She simply turned around and walked away, leaving them with the graceful silhouette of her back.