Chapter 1: The Broken Pendant

I told my best friend to try on the bridesmaid dress. Somehow, she ended up wearing the wedding gown instead.

On the morning of my wedding, she came out of the same room as my boyfriend, both of them disheveled.

The hotel staff stared in shock. My parents wept and cried out in despair.

My boyfriend stepped forward and embraced me guiltily.

I didn't cry or make a scene. Right there, I generously announced that I was giving them my wedding.

My best friend looked triumphant—but she didn't know what had happened.

The instant my boyfriend hugged me, the protective jade pendant my grandmother had left me shattered.

Grandma used to say that if the pendant broke, it meant it had warded off disaster.

A catastrophe beyond imagining.

1

“Jiatang, what happened last night was an accident. I put on your wedding dress by mistake, and Xu Yang had too much to drink to recognize me…”

My best friend, Liu Shuoshuo, said all the right words, but the smugness in her eyes was impossible to hide.

Of course I knew what she was so pleased about.

Xu Yang came from a prominent family. He was handsome and charming—and especially indulgent toward his girlfriend.

During the nearly six months he pursued me, he gave me gifts worth more than a million yuan.

We had dated for half a year before I finally agreed to marry him. And now this had happened.

The scene before me was absurd.

Liu Shuoshuo wore a wedding dress torn to shreds. The marks on her exposed skin made it clear what had happened the night before.

My boyfriend, Xu Yang, kept his head bowed, as if he didn't dare look at me.

My parents kicked him hard in the thigh. Even when the hotel staff tried to stop them, they kept pointing at him and cursing.

Xu Yang scrambled up from the floor and came to me. He wrapped his arms around me gently.

“Jiatang, I wronged you. But what's done is done. Please let us have your blessing.”

The shamelessness of it was almost unbelievable.

I wasn't stupid. I could see how pleased he was with Liu Shuoshuo.

She had a better figure than I did. She was more uninhibited, too.

While we were dating, Xu Yang had hinted at that more than once. I had only hoped it would happen after we were married.

Everyone expected me to slap him and curse out his entire family.

Instead, I smiled and nodded.

“Fine.”

Then I added, “The hotel is already booked, anyway. You two might as well get married here today.”

Xu Yang let out a relieved breath.

“I knew you were a generous girl, Jiatang.”

My parents nearly choked with rage at my words. They even tried to grab a broom from a hotel employee and beat some sense into me.

“He Jiatang! You're just going to let this pair of cheaters get away with it? Where are we supposed to put our dignity?”

I pulled my furious parents away.

At the end of the corridor, I took the jade pendant, now broken in two, from inside my clothes.

“Mom, Dad, this is the pendant Grandma left me.”

The moment they saw the pale-green pendant, once smooth and flawless, split in half, their anger vanished.

Mom pulled me quickly toward the elevator.

She looked at me in alarm and asked, “Did it… just break?”

Dad's face, which had been beet-red with anger, turned deathly pale. His fingers trembled.

“That can't be…”

I nodded. “It broke when Xu Yang hugged me just now.”

My parents looked at each other, their brows drawn together. They could not relax.

As soon as we stepped out of the hotel elevator, Dad announced, “We're moving. Right now!”

When we passed the bride-and-groom sign set up outside, my parents kicked Xu Yang's name off it and carried away the one with mine.

Mom immediately called the wedding decorator.

She told him to remove every word and picture connected to me. Not a trace of me was to be left behind.

Seeing how tense my parents were, I was moved, too. I deleted every contact and photograph of Xu Yang from my phone.

Our whole family fled the hotel in a panic.

That night, we moved out of the city.

2

The reason we were so frightened was the jade pendant Grandma had left me.

My grandmother was the most accurate spirit medium in the region.

She could divine anything, from a catastrophe that shook the heavens to something as small as a lost cat or dog.

Some people even said Grandma wasn't human at all, but an animal spirit that had cultivated itself into human form.

She had never been wrong in her life.

Grandma lived to the age of ninety-nine.

The day she died was a clear winter's day.

She sat in the courtyard sunning herself in a rocking chair, stroked the family's yellow dog twice, and called my name.

“Xiaotang!”

I was only eight. When I came to her side, Grandma took off the jade pendant she had worn all her life and tied it around my neck.

“Xiaotang, take good care of this pendant. Don't ever remove it. If one day it breaks, that means it has warded off a disaster for you.”

“You must leave the person closest to you as soon as it breaks.”

“When the jade breaks, it wards off a calamity. A calamity beyond imagining.”

I didn't understand. I asked innocently, “Grandma, what kind of calamity?”

Grandma looked at me and slowly answered with her toothless mouth:

“Sanjia Village.”

She left only those three words. Then she closed her eyes, settled into the rocking chair, and passed away peacefully.

Grandma's funeral was very grand.

Not only people from our village came. Influential people from the six neighboring villages came, too.

I told my parents everything about how Grandma had given me the pendant.

I asked them what Sanjia Village was, but they fell silent. Then they turned away to pack. Our whole family moved into the city.

Now, after years buried in memory, those words had surfaced again.

The ridiculous story between me, Xu Yang, and Liu Shuoshuo had spread through our entire circle of friends.

At first, everyone thought Liu Shuoshuo was despicable for doing something like that to her best friend.

But when they learned I hadn't been angry and had instead turned around and given her both the groom and the wedding, some people began calling me a coward. My best friend and boyfriend had slept together, and I still didn't dare get angry.

Rumor after rumor spread without end.

I didn't care. Let them say whatever they wanted.

Liu Shuoshuo had successfully stolen my wedding. She became the bride and Xu Yang's lawful wife.

She seemed immensely pleased with herself.

Her social feed had been updating nonstop since the wedding.

A dazzling diamond ring as big as a pigeon's egg. A two-million-yuan red packet from Xu Yang's parents. Xu Yang kneeling on one knee to slip crystal shoes onto her feet. One luxury wardrobe after another…

[Thank you, Jiatang—and thank my past self for bravely pursuing love.]

[This time, I want both money and love.]

[You only live once. Be brave in the present.]

Xu Yang was happy to play along, too. He posted one affectionate photo after another.

Many of our mutual friends liked her posts. Some even flattered her in the comments, hoping to get on her good side. Apparently, one of us really had no fortune.

Liu Shuoshuo seemed delighted that everyone was piling on me. She replied with a grinning emoji.

I looked at those boastful posts and found myself laughing.

I wondered if she had any idea what was coming for her.

Liu Shuoshuo didn't stop there. She flaunted her wealth online and posted her “conquest”—stealing someone else's fiancé—for everyone to see. It drew a great deal of attention.

Her account gained half a million followers overnight.

The comments praised her as “the true heroine of her own life,” said “the brave get to enjoy the world first,” and declared “the one who isn't loved is the real third party.”

The news that my parents and I had moved away that very night reached the internet, too.

The people who had laughed at me as a coward laughed even louder. They said my parents and I were cut from the same cloth—timid and afraid of death.

I didn't care what they said about me. But when I saw them mock my parents, I couldn't hold back.

I commented beneath Liu Shuoshuo's post:

[You can insult me if you want, but why drag my parents into this? Don't any of you have parents? Please watch your words online. And I hope a certain Ms. Liu will stop using me to farm views.]

3

After posting, I immediately turned off my direct messages.

Sure enough, netizens quickly swarmed my comment to attack me.

Liu Shuoshuo didn't reply, but she liked every comment insulting me.

I looked at the baseless accusations and only shook my head.

Whatever a person did, Heaven was watching.

We hadn't just moved—we had relocated more than half a province away from the old city.

The place was remote, with fewer residents than most other neighborhoods.

Mom said it would be enough to move to a nearby city. But for some reason, Dad insisted on going hundreds of kilometers away.

Mom couldn't talk him out of it, so she went along.

Although I believed Grandma, I was still curious about how my parents had reacted.

At dinner, I asked, “Mom, Dad, what exactly was the ‘unprecedented calamity’ Grandma mentioned?”

They had been cheerful, but their expressions stiffened at once. Mom put a piece of braised pork into Dad's bowl.

“Xiaotang has grown up. We can tell her now, can't we, dear?”

Dad hesitated, but eventually nodded. “Go ahead.”

My curiosity was piqued. “An unprecedented calamity? Is there going to be a natural disaster?”

“Do you remember Sanjia Village?” Mom asked seriously.

I nodded. “Yes. Grandma told me about it back then.”

Mom's expression turned strange. “Sanjia Village had several hundred people. It was only a dozen kilometers from our village, yet in a single night the whole village hanged themselves. The entire place was wiped out.”

The moment she finished, the warm atmosphere at the dinner table froze.

“Hanged… themselves?” I was so shocked I could hardly believe it.

I had thought Grandma's “unprecedented calamity” meant a flood or an earthquake.

I never imagined something so eerie.

I hurried to ask, “Why?”