Gao Quan, Left Vice Director of the Chancellery, had finally died.
Struck dead by lightning, no less.
What a cause for celebration!
In life, he'd wielded power over the whole court and earned himself a reputation for infamy from one end of the city to the other. Now even his undignified death made him look as if Heaven itself had punished him.
The whole city cheered. People called it karma, said his name would stink for generations, and declared that the Gao family's days of wealth were over. Everyone waited to watch their house of cards collapse, to see his shrewd, domineering wife, Pei Roujia, sink into the mire, and to see his hopeless children suffer.
Pei Roujia, however, was not worried.
She sat on her late husband's coffin and began plotting something big.
If being struck dead by lightning was undignified, surely she could just say he'd “ascended to godhood,” right?
*
Pei Roujia had a rocky start in life. Things only began looking up after she married Gao Quan, the man who believed that “a poor young man should never be underestimated.” Only Pei Roujia knew that the Gao Quan lying in the coffin was not the real Gao Quan. He was a soul from the future who had arrived years ago, and she had knocked him into this body with a vase.
By plagiarizing the works of countless authors, predicting history, and sucking up to his superiors, he had risen smoothly through the ranks. He'd been made a marquis and a chancellor in life, then left her with a mountain of problems after death.
Her eldest daughter had been cast off by her husband's family, who had also seized her dowry, yet she still pined for her former brother-in-law. Her second daughter was flirtatious and fickle, and her betrothal had been changed again and again. At last she had a match, only to discover that her future husband would also become a treacherous chancellor with a tragic ending, while her heart was set on her nephew, the Prince Consort. Her youngest son was born to a concubine. Not only did he have a congenital heart condition, he was destined to become the leader of a band of wastrels and the hero of a smutty book. His mother was also a transmigrator. She was a capable woman, but the romantic entanglements she'd attracted were enough to make anyone shudder.
Pei Roujia thought them all over, one by one.
Good.
Though her husband couldn't be saved, the rest of the family might still be salvageable.
Content warnings:
- Everyone is morally gray. The story imitates the complexities of real life; characters' views do not represent the author's.
- Gao Quan really is dead, stone-cold dead. He will not return in another body or be resurrected. The only thing that happens afterward is “making a god” of him.
Theme: Heaven's net is vast, but full of holes. Rather than pray to the gods, trust in yourself.
