Reborn as Jia Yuanchun, I Rewrite the Ending of Dream of the Red Chamber from the Imperial Palace

One morning, Jia Yuanyuan woke up as Jia Yuanchun, the doomed-to-die character from Dream of the Red Chamber.

At this point, she was still only a palace maid, not yet an imperial consort, but the Empress was already testing her and the palace eunuchs were keeping her under surveillance. Even a cup of tea concealed a deadly blade.

She knew the future.

She knew she would be named Virtuous Consort, that the Jia family would hold a lavish homecoming reception for her and exhaust their fortune, and that after the splendor faded, the whole family would fall into ruin, while she herself would die within the palace walls.

Since Heaven had given her an early chance to enter the game, she refused to take the same road to death again.

With a letter home, she woke up the Rongguo Mansion. With a simple phrase, "Better frugal than extravagant," she curbed the family's vanity. She had Wang Xifeng investigate the household's hidden deficits and helped Jia Tanchun take charge of the household. She forbade the Jia family from using her palace connections to make money, refused to let the Xue family use the golden lock to pressure Baoyu, and would not let Lin Daiyu be slowly driven to her death as a dependent in someone else's home.

Yet the more she tried to save the Jia family, the more she realized that the old sachet sent from the palace had already placed them on the chessboard.

The Empress wanted her to abandon her birth family in exchange for favor. The Emperor wanted her to expose the Jia family's old accounts with her own hands. Her clan wanted her to keep serving as the Jia family's gilded symbol of wealth.

But she had never wanted merely to survive.

She wanted to ensure that even if the Jia family lost its splendor, they would not all be destroyed. She wanted everyone driven to the edge by fate to find a way to live.

Above the phoenix throne, the words "Virtuous Consort" weighed on her like golden shackles.

In this life, Jia Yuanchun would not be a sacrificial pawn in Dream of the Red Chamber.

She would rewrite the ending with her own hands.