Chapter 28
Chapter 28
Zhao Xiuming had already suspected as much. Now it was confirmed.
He’d noticed early on that the plot the System had given him differed from reality. Then the System had offered a hint: [Of course you should trust your own memories.]
That had made him suspicious and prompted him to pay attention to the smaller details.
Back at the hot pot restaurant, Zhang Xueya had noticed something different about him. She’d been so surprised that she’d reached out to check for herself.
He’d noticed something strange about her too. Someone else in his position might have suspected that the plot was an adaptation of reality, deliberately flattering its protagonists, and that this explained the enormous discrepancies.
Zhao Xiuming didn’t think so. He simply felt that something didn’t fit.
He’d lived in a haze since childhood, but he’d certainly been nothing like his counterpart in the plot.
Both their personalities and behavior were different. They were completely different people.
Yet Zhang Xueya had been so astonished at the hot pot restaurant. Was she really only surprised that he’d fought back?
Given the temper he’d had all his life, even in his foggy, unawakened state, he’d never been a fool.
He’d merely overlooked many strange things and been remarkably slow to notice them.
Besides, in his memories, Zhang Xueya had never been a reckless, innocent little simpleton who could do nothing but cry. Even when she’d spread rumors and stirred up trouble, she’d covered her tracks well. She’d never openly given the unawakened Zhao Xiuming anything to use against her.
Even her seduction of Li Zhehan had been flawless. She’d played him like a fiddle.
Only the hot pot restaurant scheme, in which she’d tried to use someone else against Zhao Xiuming, had been riddled with holes. He hadn’t needed any special advantage to refute it. His own memories had been enough.
Why had she been so certain he’d take the loss?
It was as if… she’d known the upcoming plot in advance.
As if she’d been certain that, as an NPC, he would submit, even though they hadn’t been dating, even though he wasn’t weak by nature.
The question wasn’t whether he would resist. It was why her scheme had so many holes. She shouldn’t have been foolish enough to devise something like that herself.
His suspicion had proved correct. There really was something wrong with Zhang Xueya, and it was no small matter.
“I’ve been reborn.”
She repeated it, then briefly described her previous life, the plot Zhao Xiuming already knew.
A tangled romance between a female student from a small village, with nothing to her name but beauty, and a wealthy heir.
The student had a gambling father, a mother who played favorites, a useless younger brother, and a scumbag ex-boyfriend named “Zhao Xiuming.”
That ex-boyfriend in particular had endlessly contributed to the leads’ romance. He’d created misunderstanding after misunderstanding, obstacle after obstacle, making their love ever more unbreakable and desperate.
He chased, she fled, and their anguished romance consumed their entire university years.
“In my previous life, I worked hard to get into university too. But my parents refused to give me money for tuition or living expenses.”
“Even when I decided to take out a loan myself, they wouldn’t let me. They tore up my acceptance letter.”
“Because they thought I’d have to repay the loan eventually, and every penny I earned ought to belong to them. Paying it back would mean spending their money.”
Zhang Xueya felt neither shame nor embarrassment, only resentment. “Then I got engaged to the Zhao Xiuming from my previous life. My parents even took a bride price.”
“That Zhao Xiuming was no good. Every rumor I spread in this life was a fact in the last one.”
“He didn’t treat me well. He saw me as his property and constantly reminded me that I was a slave he’d bought.”
“And once he’d seen life in the city, he became terrified I’d run away.”
Then Li Zhehan had appeared, fallen for Zhang Xueya despite her having a boyfriend, and forced his way into her life to claim her.
She didn’t want to discuss that part and summed it up in a few sentences. What the plot had presented as a burning, passionate romance filled her face with disgust.
“Anyway, we ended up together. Li Zhehan was madly in love with me, and after we married, we’d have an adorable child.”
“That’s where the story ends. If my previous life was a book and I was its female lead…”
“Then that book definitely ended at the wedding. At most, there’d be a few bonus chapters about married life.”
“In reality, once we lost our halos, both Li Zhehan and I changed drastically. Our family backgrounds were too different. Everyday life was full of conflict.”
“Every disgusting thing you can imagine happening in a marriage happened to me.”
“Emotional abuse, physical violence, constant cheating, mockery, contempt. You name it.”
She mocked herself. “If I’d been a gold digger trying to marry above my station in that life, I’d have accepted it.”
“But Li Zhehan loved me. And then… the love was gone.”
“After that, I had a breakdown and killed myself. When I opened my eyes, I was a child again.”
She sighed. “Nothing had changed. Only Zhao Xiuming was different.”
“I can’t remember what the Zhao Xiuming from my previous life looked like. I had a severe mental illness before I died. My memory wasn’t very good.”
She spoke calmly of her troubles, even finding room for a joke. “He must have been good-looking. Otherwise, how could he have been the female lead’s ex-boyfriend?”
The words “female lead” dripped with irony. She continued, “In this life, I tried to change my fate.”
“It didn’t go as I’d hoped. The world seemed to have a fixed framework. Minor events and details could change, but the overall direction and key plot points couldn’t.”
“For instance, my parents still ended up getting a lot of money from Zhao Xiuming’s family.”
“And I didn’t attend this university in my previous life. After being reborn, I studied even harder. My scores were much higher this time, so I got into a much better university.”
“The trouble was, all the characters who were supposed to appear (my ex-boyfriend Zhao Xiuming, the male lead Li Zhehan, my best friend Zhou Qingyan) were here too. They all followed me to the same university so we could meet.”
“There was nothing I could do. I tried to change my relationship with Li Zhehan as much as possible. At least we flirted instead of him forcing himself into my life. It spared me a lot of the humiliating entanglements from last time, made university more bearable, and kept the disruption to my studies to a minimum.”
Understanding dawned on Zhao Xiuming. He rested a hand against his chin. “So the hot pot restaurant was an unavoidable turning point in the plot. You never thought I’d be able to escape it.”
“I wondered why you’d do something so stupid. So that’s why.”
She didn’t argue. She even sounded a little envious as she said, “Tell me, why?”
“Why can you escape the plot when I can’t, no matter what I do?”
“Fate really does put a price on everything in advance. Sometimes I feel like a puppet on strings. Whatever I do, I can’t break free.”
Zhao Xiuming had never been good at telling whether someone was venting or asking a serious question. He answered naturally, “Because you’re a protagonist. The plot restricts you more. I’m just cannon fodder.”
Of course Zhang Xueya knew that. She was only complaining.
She was about to make a sarcastic remark when she saw several lines scroll across the goggles of the biker towering behind Zhao Xiuming. [Get to the point.]
[Or give us some completely irrelevant, unhinged bullshit.]
[I like that stuff.]
She pointed behind Zhao Xiuming, her hand shaking with anger.
He raised an eyebrow and turned. The biker resumed his well-behaved demeanor.
He even lowered his head to meet Zhao Xiuming’s gaze, displaying a pair of smiling eyes on his goggles: [(∩_∩)].
Zhao Xiuming looked back at Zhang Xueya in confusion, as if asking what was wrong.
She took a deep breath. She felt certain they were both pretending.
One was pretending to be good. The other knew perfectly well what that bastard had done and was pretending he didn’t.
She stopped dwelling on her feelings and skipped to the point. “To change my fate, I made a deal with this hospital to kill Li Zhehan.”
“I had no choice. In the real world, I couldn’t kill him even as the female lead.”
Assistant Li couldn’t help looking up in disapproval.
“What are you looking at?” Zhang Xueya snapped. “You think you got a happy ending last time?”
“At first, Li Zhehan had the protection of his protagonist halo. Everything went smoothly. He could accomplish anything he wanted.”
“But once that halo disappeared, all his flaws were laid bare.”
“The male lead’s special advantages and abilities vanished. Events no longer favored him at every turn, handing him good luck and getting him safely out of trouble.”
She didn’t need to explain in detail or give examples for Assistant Li to guess what came next.
Disasters too big to cover up, bad luck, missed opportunities, one failure after another.
The entire Li family might become easy pickings for other powers to carve up. They might even lose everything, including their lives.
As an adopted son and a shield for their dirty dealings, Assistant Li figured his best possible future would be taking the blame and going to prison. If he was unlucky, he might lose his life too.
Zhao Xiuming pointed at the nearly mature cocoon above them. “You just said you and Li Zhehan would have a child after you married.”
“You’re using that child to bargain with this anomaly hospital instance.”
The doctors here were nothing like ordinary people. They were anomalies of unknown origin and might possess unusual abilities.
They could help bring forward the birth of the child Zhang Xueya would otherwise have only after marriage, and help dispose of the male lead.
The price she had to pay was the child’s life and Li Zhehan’s protagonist halo.
No wonder the anomalies in this instance couldn’t be killed. No wonder the doctors could heal themselves and resurrect endlessly.
They could even leave the hospital and invade an entire street in the real world. This deal was probably about more than simply killing Li Zhehan.
The anomalies might want more than to borrow the halo’s protection against the players. They might also want to invade the world of the romance novel.
That suspicion wasn’t unfounded. After entering the instance, Zhao Xiuming had learned that players from different games could log into it.
Too many players logging in would reduce its fortune, decreasing the rewards available to players.
That was precisely why the players killed one another: to reduce their numbers and increase their own rewards.
There was no question that players logging in damaged the instance. After all, why would Horror Game and Terror Game have been founded if there were no profit to be made?
Games profited from their players. If they could profit from the natives or NPCs as well, they’d make money on both ends.
Whether the instance’s anomalies or the players won, the games couldn’t lose.
Zhao Xiuming realized things might be bad. “Did you really trade your own child’s life?”
Zhang Xueya looked grim and chose her words carefully. “Don’t make it sound so ugly. I wasn’t planning to stay with Li Zhehan. That means the child we had together would never be born.”
“But I love my child. I wanted him to exist.”
“I’m not trading away his life. I wanted him born sooner, preferably with the power to protect both himself and me. I’m giving him a new life and a new future.”
“I may not be able to give him a life of privilege, but I can give him great power.”
“Hmm…” Zhao Xiuming’s expression turned peculiar.
Her innocent face was full of mockery. “Are you going to judge my morals?”
“What a shame. Just like you, I don’t have any.”
“No.” He grimaced as though he had a toothache. Combined with his strange appearance, the expression was striking.
Things that looked too much like people could trigger the uncanny valley effect. Zhao Xiuming was distinctly inhuman now, scarcely human-looking at all, yet his expressions were lively.
Instead of being unsettling, he resembled a mysterious creature out of legend. “I wasn’t going to judge you.”
“It’s just what you said about me.”
“Intuition. A taste for gambling.”
He spread his hands and announced with enthusiasm, “The thing you were worried about has happened.”
Zhou Qingyan was still trying to go over everything she’d just heard. Her brain couldn’t process another thing.
Assistant Li spoke instead. “The thing we were worried about?”
“You mean…”
“You bet wrong.”
Zhao Xiuming accepted a margin of error in his actions. He allowed for things to go out of control and for the possibility of failure.
In short, he’d taken his game too far. Something he hadn’t anticipated was about to happen.
With an excited tone, he casually dropped a bombshell. “You’ve been tricked, Zhang Xueya.”
“That isn’t your child in the cocoon.”
“This hospital hasn’t brought your child’s development forward, either.”
“You’ve been fooled.”