Chapter 3
Several new topics shot straight onto the trending list.
Countless people were fighting in the comments.
#Chi Yan and Ji Mo—The Couple That Never Was# — Explosive
#Chi Yan Responds# — Explosive
#Shen Jiayan, Forever Playing Doctors# — New
#Ji Mo’s Unedited Airport Photos# — Boiling
It was the usual boring routine. The photo from the group chat had spread everywhere, and hordes of fans and casual onlookers had joined in to ship them.
Riding the wave of attention, netizens dug up Chi Yan and Ji Mo’s youthful romance.
Then Chi Yan left an ambiguous reply under one of Ji Mo’s comments.
Their shippers went wild.
As for me? I had stayed beside Chi Yan for six years without ever receiving so much as a proper title. Given the contrast, who could resist saying, “No one can compete with a man’s first love”?
The topic about me always playing doctors existed because I genuinely couldn’t act.
I had studied medicine in the real world. Being a doctor was what I actually knew.
It was the only role I could play without pretending, because I had once been the real thing.
And now people were dragging me out to ridicule me for it.
I scrolled through the comments, then pulled yesterday’s untouched takeout from the fridge and reheated it.
The delivery had arrived far too late, and seeing Chi Yan had ruined what little appetite I had.
But Zhou Xingye had ordered it for me. I didn’t want it to go to waste.
I took the hot container from the microwave and scooped up a spoonful. By the time I sat down, I still hadn’t put it in my mouth.
I finally took the bite and mumbled around it, “No one can compete with a man’s first love.”
Halfway through the meal, my manager, Vivian, sent me a barrage of messages.
When I didn’t answer, she switched to bombarding me with calls.
The instant I picked up, her penetrating voice poured from the phone in an anxious torrent.
“Have you come to your senses yet? Did you see what’s trending?”
“You and Chi Yan had a fight, didn’t you? Stop throwing a tantrum. Go make nice with him and put this behind you.”
“Otherwise, you’ll carry the stain of Chi Yan for the rest of your career.”
I set the phone aside and ate another bite before answering.
“No.”
The other end went quiet for two seconds. Then her voice erupted louder than before.
“What are you playing at now? Good Lord.”
“Your contract expires this month. If you keep this up, your rating will probably drop.”
A lower rating meant worse resources across the board, a smaller share of the money for me, and harsher exploitation.
“I’m not renewing. I never liked acting anyway.”
“Vivian, I’m leaving the industry. I hope every artist you manage after me becomes a huge star.”
She tried to reason with me.
“You’re being a fool, Shen Jiayan. If one man is no good, find another. Chi Yan hurting you is his problem. Why punish your own bank account?”
“If you quit acting, what are you going to do?”
I finished the last bite, narrowed my eyes against the sunlight outside the window, and swung my legs happily.
“Me? I’m finally going to do what I truly love.”
Saving lives, for example.
And Zhou Xingye.
The original Shen Jiayan had majored in acting. In this world, returning to medicine myself would be nearly impossible.
But I had plenty of money. I could help people who wanted to study medicine take one step forward.
Then another, until they reached heights humanity had never touched.
Vivian insisted I had lost my mind. When she realized she couldn’t change it, she told me not to regret my decision.
I logged onto Weibo and posted with a sense of release:
[Thank you all for your support. It’s the only reason I managed—just barely—to make it this far. I am leaving the entertainment industry and will not work in a related field again. This is my decision alone and has nothing to do with anyone else. Lastly, I hope every day brings you happiness.]
The post exploded the moment it went up.
The internet went into an uproar. Chi Yan began calling like a madman.
Every time I blocked one number, another called.
“Stop calling. Didn’t you always say I annoyed you?”
“Aren’t you being annoying now?”
I kindly advised him not to become the kind of person he hated.
That only made him angrier.
“Shen Jiayan, who do you think you are?”
“You think you can walk away just because you say so? You don’t get to choose.”
I watched my mission bar creep backward.
Zhou Xingye wasn’t there. Only the system’s cold mechanical voice answered me again and again: the data had been checked and was correct.
I ignored the circus online and went ahead with my plan to fund medical care in remote, underdeveloped regions.
I didn’t touch the money that belonged to the original Shen Jiayan. To this day, I had no idea what she had wanted to do with it.
But after becoming her, I had felt the force of her love and hatred.
She wasn’t the tragic heroine described in the novel—a woman abused in body and heart, driven to the brink time after time, yet forced back each time to spend her life begging for Chi Yan’s love.
She had a career she loved, a mind of her own, and a free soul.
How could her life have been so small that it revolved around one man?
She wouldn’t accept that.
Neither would I.
I visited village after village that people dismissed as poor and backward.
In each place, I set aside two grants: one for local educational facilities and one for medical services.
When I had studied medicine, people constantly told me it was too hard.
Someone desperate to change their fate might choose that path, they said, but I didn’t need to.
I studied medicine anyway.
For one simple reason: I wanted to save people.
While signing a restricted-donation agreement with the local authorities, I told my contact earnestly:
“If you know anyone studying medicine who can’t continue because of their family’s finances, you must tell me.”
“I’ll do everything I can to help.”
Training an excellent doctor required years of investment. For a family in financial difficulty, those early years could be brutally hard.
Perhaps what I offered was only a drop in the bucket. My rule was simple: if I could help one person, I would.
To save one person was to save an entire world.
The people across the table thanked me over and over, saying I had done more than I knew.
See?
There was so much we could do.
Yet some people only wanted to watch me grovel at Chi Yan’s feet, then watch him grovel his way back to me.
If I were the original Shen Jiayan, I wouldn’t want to remain in that book orbiting Chi Yan either.
I assigned a purpose to every last sum, keeping only enough to live on for two more weeks.
When I thought about it, knowing exactly when I would die was actually rather cool.