Transmigrated as a Love-Obsessed Scumbag Villainess (GL) - Chapter 1

The sun was scorching, and beneath the towering city walls, the atmosphere was utterly grim.

Zhao Shangrong opened her eyes in confusion, looking down at the hemp ropes tied around her neck and limbs. The thumb-thick ropes tightly constricted her wrists and ankles. The coarse fibers rubbed against her skin, leaving behind dark, bruised wounds.

The other end of the ropes was secured to five strong, swift horses. Astride the horses were five cold-faced, elite soldiers in black armor. They held the reins in their left hands and the whips in their right, waiting only for the command to spur their horses into action.

Amidst the tension and chilling atmosphere, one person waved a signal flag.

“Execute!”

With the command, the five horses moved in unison, galloping forward in a charge.

Her joints instantly dislocated with a cracking sound. However, before the pain could register in her brain, her neck snapped as if by a guillotine. Zhao Shangrong heard “herself” let out one final, piercing shriek: “Yuansi—”

She instantly lost all sensation.

Zhao Shangrong abruptly opened her eyes. After a long moment, she exhaled a coarse expletive, her heart still pounding with lingering fear.

Her clothes were soaked with sweat, clinging wetly to her back. She pressed her throbbing head, trying to calm herself.

She had transmigrated into this world of a book three days ago, and for three days, she had been plagued by the same nightmare—a truly “nightmare-ridden” experience.

How on earth could she get rid of this nightmare?

Honestly, as a “transmigrator,” her focus should have been on the fact of “transmigration” itself. Yet, this nightmare of being torn apart by five horses was so terrifyingly real that the “nightmare” became her biggest concern, preventing even the fact of “transmigration” from causing her further panic.

The reason was simple: the nightmare not only authentically tormented and disturbed her mind, but every time she woke up after it, she felt utterly uncomfortable, as if five horses were physically tearing her body apart in reality while she dreamed. For instance, the current headache was one of the after-effects of the nightmare.

Just as she was rubbing her temples to alleviate the headache, a trembling female voice came from outside the door: “Your Highness… it is time to rise.”

Zhao Shangrong hummed, responding indifferently: “Mhm, I want to bathe. Prepare hot water.”

“Yes, Your Highness.” The person outside departed.

Zhao Shangrong felt her body was slightly less uncomfortable than before. She shifted again, then slowly pushed her upper body up to sit.

Two days ago, she should have been working overtime on layout but, perhaps due to extreme fatigue, she couldn’t hold on and fell asleep slumped on her desk.

In her sleep, she felt physically unwell, but like a nightmare, she couldn’t wake up.

When she finally struggled to open her eyes, she found herself in a strange place, being subjected to the punishment of chelie (dismemberment by chariots/horses).

This was the first time this nightmare appeared in her dreams.

Unlike the subsequent two nightmares, after the first time, she didn’t wake up immediately. Instead, she watched a first-person “movie” within a “dream within a dream.”

The protagonist of this “movie” was the person who was torn apart by five horses—a woman with the same name as her, but whose identity was the “Prince of Yingchuan” in a certain dynasty.

The Prince of Yingchuan, Zhao Shangrong, was a genuine female, but ever since she could remember, she had presented herself as the seventh son of Emperor Wu, the founding emperor of the Luo Kingdom.

At the age of ten, she was conferred the title “Prince of Yingchuan” and moved out of the palace to establish her own residence.

The place Zhao Shangrong was now in was the main hall of the Prince of Yingchuan’s residence.

This “movie” titled “The Life of the Prince of Yingchuan” abruptly ended the night before the Prince of Yingchuan’s marriage at age seventeen.

Zhao Shangrong, now fully awake and having been forcefully implanted with memories that didn’t belong to her, finally realized why she had seen this “movie.”

She had transmigrated, and the “movie” scenes were fragments of the original Prince of Yingchuan’s memories.

To be precise, she had transmigrated into a book, because, based on the Prince of Yingchuan’s memories, she discovered high-level overlaps with the plot of a book she had worked on the layout for.

This book was a male-frequency web novel about court, nobility, and power struggles, detailing how the male protagonist went from an overlooked minor prince to being supported by powerful ministers, eventually overthrowing corrupt officials, consolidating imperial power, reforming governance, strengthening the nation, and gradually growing into an enlightened ruler whose literary and military achievements rivaled those of Emperor Qin and Emperor Han.

The novel was highly popular; it had been adapted into a comic and signed for publication by a publishing house.

The company Zhao Shangrong worked for was responsible for the publishing agency, and as the layout designer, she was responsible for the layout of every book.

The manuscripts that reached her were typically already proofread, so she generally didn’t read the specific content.

The reason this book’s content left an impression on her was that the proofreading colleague had jokingly mentioned that a character inside had the exact same name as her and suggested she memorize the entire text.

She didn’t have time to read the entire long work of over three million characters, so she would only briefly skim the table of contents during work breaks and quickly scan chapters that piqued her interest.

Although she hadn’t read the whole book, she still remembered a few plot points closely related to the Prince of Yingchuan.

The Prince of Yingchuan, as written by the author, was a villain, and a love-obsessed villain at that.

In her life before age seventeen, her behavior was relatively normal.

But starting at some unknown point, her personality became extremely twisted. She was not only jealous but also brutally cruel. As the original work described it, she was a lunatic who embodied all the negative traits of women in the world.

Specific examples include:

Because her own face was disfigured, she did not allow anyone more beautiful than herself to appear in her residence. Anyone more beautiful than her would have their faces slashed with a knife to destroy their looks.

Even if she saw an unfamiliar woman on the street who was more beautiful than her, she would stop at nothing to disfigure her.

This lawless, heinous behavior went unpunished because she was a prince. The common people in her fief feared her power and dared not speak out in anger.

She was also vicious and cruel, constantly beating and berating the generals and soldiers under her command, and would become violent and injure people when drunk.

As a general, she enforced strict military discipline. Soldiers who made minor mistakes were often subjected to several times the normal military punishment, and many soldiers died from overly severe injuries.

She also had a heavily criticized flaw—a love-obsessed brain.

Her fief was in Yingchuan, and she concurrently held the position of Prefect of Yuzhou. Yuzhou bordered the State of Yan and was a crucial border and military town of the Luo Kingdom. As the chief official of the prefecture stationed there, she encountered the Crown Prince of Yan, who was wandering in Yuzhou under the alias “Yuansi.”

During their interactions, Yuansi unexpectedly discovered her female identity but was neither afraid nor bothered by her disfigured appearance. Consequently, she fell in love with him and was willing to sacrifice everything for him.

Instigated by Yuansi, she grew to resent her own birth mother who had disfigured her. Coincidentally, someone reported her actions, and she was reprimanded by an envoy sent by the Emperor (the male protagonist), which fueled her rebellious heart.

She was a ruthless person who cared little for human life, much less the territory of the Luo Kingdom. Therefore, when the Yan army attacked, they moved through Yuzhou as if through no-man’s-land.

The Yan army captured cities and territory, and the Luo Kingdom lost over a dozen cities. Finally, the male protagonist’s trusted general stepped in, recovered the lost land, and stopped the Yan army, shattering the Yan Crown Prince’s plan to conquer the Luo Kingdom in one fell swoop.

The Prince of Yingchuan, the main culprit, could not escape death. Her end was exactly as Zhao Shangrong’s nightmare foretold: dismemberment by five horses.

Zhao Shangrong spent two days processing and accepting the fact that she had transmigrated into a book and become the love-obsessed villainess Prince of Yingchuan. She thought that was the end of it, but unexpectedly, she still couldn’t get a good night’s sleep last night.

“Are you afraid I don’t know you hate Yuansi?” Zhao Shangrong muttered to herself. “Fine, I promise you, I’ll find a chance to get revenge for you while I’m alive. Can you please stop making me experience ‘dismemberment by five horses’ every night?”

Perhaps it was Zhao Shangrong’s imagination, but after saying this, she felt her body was less uncomfortable.

Just then, the maid outside informed her that the hot water was ready and asked her to move to the side hall to bathe and change.

She got up, draped a black cloak over herself, and unsteadily pushed the door open.

The maidservants hastily prostrated themselves on the ground, respectfully seeing her off to the side hall.

From the fragments of the Prince of Yingchuan’s memory, Zhao Shangrong could glimpse that the Prince of Yingchuan’s twisted personality was not formed overnight. At least before she transmigrated, the Prince of Yingchuan’s temper was already somewhat irritable.

One of the reasons was likely that the Prince of Yingchuan, who was supposed to go to her fiefdom at age thirteen, was upset because her father passed away, her eldest brother was deposed, and her second brother, after ascending the throne, was busy eliminating powerful court officials and consolidating his position, thus delaying her official appointment.

When she got angry, she liked to take it out on the people around her, which made her maids and servants terrified of her.

Zhao Shangrong was relieved that the Prince of Yingchuan had not yet developed to the brutal stage of enjoying the destruction of others’ looks or the mistreatment of soldiers.

Although she hadn’t seen the Prince of Yingchuan’s memories after her marriage at age seventeen, judging from some snippets in the original work, the reason the Prince of Yingchuan became a maniac was likely due to her already sensitive, suspicious, and volatile nature. The disfigurement, compounded by fear, intensified her psychological distortion.

After being officially appointed and stationed in her fiefdom, she was far from the emperor’s reach and unrestrained, allowing her behavior to become increasingly reckless and audacious.

The Prince of Yingchuan’s face was disfigured by her birth mother. The reason… Zhao Shangrong was unclear, but being betrayed by her own mother was undoubtedly a direct cause of her mental imbalance.

Thinking of this, Zhao Shangrong touched her face while looking down at the reflection in the steaming bathwater. She saw that this face, which was eighty percent similar to her own and even more beautiful, was very smooth and didn’t look disfigured.

She let out a sigh of relief: Thankfully, I transmigrated before everything happened.

If she had transmigrated to the period where the Prince of Yingchuan had already committed monstrous crimes, she would simply do nothing and wait for death.

Zhao Shangrong didn’t want to repeat the Prince of Yingchuan’s tragedy. Having no ambition, she didn’t care whether she could go to her fiefdom to be a regional king—history proved that princes who held military power or got involved in politics often came to a bad end. So, she prepared to stay away from the male and female protagonists and the court, content to “lie low” in the princely residence and be a good “Imperial Brother” who had no power and posed no threat to the throne.

Now, let her beautiful day begin with a bath!

Zhao Shangrong took off her clothes. As she splashed around in the half-meter deep warm pool, she suddenly heard faint voices coming from outside the door.

The maids said in unison: “Greetings, Princess Consort!”

A gentle voice asked: “Has His Highness woken up?”

“Yes, His Highness is bathing in the side hall.”

“I wish to see His Highness. Please go and inform him!”

A moment later, the maid’s cautious voice came from outside the door: “Your Highness, the Princess Consort is requesting an audience outside the door.”

In the pool, Zhao Shangrong’s body froze.

The Princess Consort?!

Isn’t that the “heroine” from the original work who endured hardship to collect evidence of the Prince of Yingchuan’s treason and collaboration with the enemy for the male protagonist, allowing the male protagonist to legitimately execute the Prince of Yingchuan?

On a side note, this “heroine” was one of the male protagonist’s concubines and one of the eight female leads in the original work.

Zhao Shangrong panicked: How is the female lead here already?!