Reborn as a Wicked Stepmother: Fleeing a Thousand Miles and Kicking the Trash Husband to the Curb

Reading guide: Fleeing famine + no romance + satisfying infrastructure-building + strong female lead who doesn’t waste energy on self-doubt

After transmigrating, Sang Zhi becomes a big, burly married woman. Before marriage, she was a homewrecker who stirred up trouble until her brother and sister-in-law nearly divorced. After marriage, she’s a wicked stepmother, hated by her husband and known for bullying her mother-in-law and abusing her stepdaughter.

To make matters worse, it’s a year of famine and disaster, and the road ahead is uncertain as people flee the chaos.

Things couldn’t have gone worse from the start.

Sang Zhi is close to tears. To find a way to survive, she has no choice but to take her weak mother-in-law and frail stepdaughter to seek help from her absent husband in Yongcheng.

They cross mountains and rivers, surviving one brush with death after another.

But all they get in return is a slap in the face: her husband has already married into a wealthy family and wants for nothing. When he sees the three women arrive at his door, he feels no guilt at all. Instead, he joins forces with his new wife to humiliate and drive them away.

A man who can’t respect himself is worth less than rotten cabbage. Sang Zhi is glad to see the back of him and immediately throws down a divorce agreement.

With no one to rely on, she puts down roots where she is. She leads refugees in reclaiming wasteland and building a new home, then develops recipes and starts a food stall. Step by step, she builds a stable livelihood, and life gets better and better.

Then the tables turn. Her down-and-out ex-husband is thrown out by his wealthy family and comes crawling back, pestering her relentlessly. After all the back-and-forth, she discovers it was all a scheme: the scumbag had his eye on the business she’d built up.

“I don’t have a son like you!”

“I don’t want a father like you!”

Looking at the mother-in-law and daughter she’d patiently warmed to her, Sang Zhi is filled with emotion. With a loving mother above her, a sweet daughter below, money in her pocket, and that scumbag far away, life is good.