Modern Day

Song Qi drew a dare: check his phone.

Of everyone in his contacts, who had he told “I love you” the most?

The class beauty: three times.

Me: 972 times.

The jeering around us died at once.

The class beauty burst into tears.

In front of everyone, Song Qi deleted my contact information, then smiled as he coaxed her.

“That’s worth crying over?”

“You know I only dated her for three months to keep up an act.”

“Nothing I said to her was real.”

Those nine hundred-odd declarations had all come from one drunken night.

Song Qi had crouched by the roadside, impossible for anyone to pull away, his head bowed as he sent me the same three words over and over.

“Once I send you ‘I love you’ 999 times, the bet is off.”

“Then we’ll be together for real, okay?”

My son was being pestered by another boy.

The teacher called and asked me to come to the school.

When I arrived, he shouted at me for the first time. “Mom, what’s wrong with me liking boys?”

I looked at him, feeling neither anger nor resentment.

I crouched down and asked him in a low voice, “Then how can you be sure that you like boys?”

My first love, a man who had clawed his way out of poverty, murdered me.

Then I was reborn inside his beautiful, wealthy wife’s womb.

If nothing went wrong, once I survived the pregnancy, that bastard would lift me tenderly into his arms and say, “Look at this little darling.

Daddy’s sweetheart from a past life.”

That’s right.

I was your sweetheart.

And I’ve come to collect.

My best friend and I ended up inside the same novel.

She was the scheming second male lead’s hopeless admirer.

I was the obsessive villain’s substitute lover.

In public, we pined for men who didn’t love us.

In private, we spent their money like there was no tomorrow.

After three years of living it up, the heroine—the woman they supposedly truly loved—came back.

Once we learned that both men would lose their minds over her, my best friend packed a little bag and knocked on my door late at night.

“I’ve saved enough.

Have you?”

“Not quite,” I said.

“But I can spend yours.”

So we faked our deaths and ran away together.

Three years later, she had the misfortune to run into her ex-husband.

“I’ll cover for you!”

I told her.

“Run!”

Then I turned around and walked straight into a solid chest.

The obsessive villain calmly undid his tie and bound my hands.

“Try getting away yourself first.”

After graduating from college, I moved into a shared rental with my rich second-generation boyfriend and started a business from scratch.

I was the one building the company. He was the one suffering through it with me.

Every day, I came home exhausted to our small apartment.

And every time, he would have a fragrant, steaming meal ready for me.

Life was hard, but we both felt happy.

Until one day, I saw the barrage comments:

[Oh my god, the male lead is still here suffering through this startup with his ex-girlfriend. When is the female lead finally going to show up?]

[The male lead is still too young. His parents already paved a golden road for him, but he refuses to take it and insists on staying in a rental eating instant noodles with his ex.]

[It’s fine. Once the ex-girlfriend’s startup fails and she starts drinking and getting violent, and later even cheats on him right in front of him, he’ll obediently go back and inherit the family business.]

[But honestly, summer, a rental apartment, bare skin, heads down and working hard… the sexual tension between these two is insane.]

“I once blew thirty-five thousand on a man in a single night.”

Everyone thought I was drunk and talking big, and the room burst into laughter.

Only one person remained expressionless. He was the star of the night.

The entire department had taken turns playing Truth or Dare, all for the sake of buttering him up and securing the seven-figure ad placement case in his hands.

When the drinking was over and everyone had left, the man looked at me, the only one who had stayed behind.

His gaze was indifferent, his tone laced with mockery.

“Director Yu, how many years ago was that? And you still remember it so clearly?”

“Sis, you can have the female lead role!”

At the wedding venue, I clutched the hand of the male lead’s unattainable first love, sobbing my heart out.

“Whoever wants it can take it. I sure don’t!”

After transmigrating into a docile-wife romance and learning that I was expected to give the male lead eighteen children, I immediately started looking for someone to take my place.

Who would’ve thought that the frail first love, who’d always seemed one breath away from death, would sit bolt upright from her sickbed and cry: “If you don’t want it, then I don’t want it either!”

As if by tacit agreement, our gazes both turned toward the trembling third female lead.

My boyfriend was ruthless and vicious, with no end of evil deeds to his name.

And he had a childhood friend who was every bit as wicked.

Two of a kind, they joined forces and left the whole of Haicheng in turmoil.

I was his kindhearted girlfriend, destined to die young.

His wicked childhood friend had a first love too—a reserved, upright man with little time left to live.

After he and I died, the two villains would finally see the error of their ways, mourn us, comfort each other, and spend the rest of their lives fabulously wealthy.

When I became aware of the plot, I was gently trying to reason with my boyfriend.

“They helped you before.

Why do you have to destroy them completely?”

He lazily lifted his eyelids.

“Kindness is the most useless thing in the world.

And so are you, Ruoruo.”

I froze for a moment.

Then I lowered my eyes to the message I had just received.

[Want to set a time to look at burial plots together?]

In my fourth year as Song Jingyuan’s kept woman, he tired of me and asked to break up.

I had meant to cry, make a scene, and threaten to kill myself to keep him, putting on the same devoted performance that had pleased him countless times before.

But the floating comments before my eyes said he meant it this time.

He had fallen for someone else, and this truly would be the last time we ever met.

I fell silent at once.

While tears slipped down my face, I hooked a bill from the floor with my little finger, rolled it into my palm, and tucked it deeper into my sleeve.

My roommate was a professional bride.

She said she’d landed a big job recently, and the client was incredibly generous.

When I saw the fee wrapped in red paper, I tried to talk her out of taking it.

But on the day of the event, my roommate still snuck off.

And she never came back.

What she didn’t know was that every one of the event’s organizers…

wasn’t human.