Chapter 1: The First Day of the Rest of Her Death

The first thing Shi Nian registered was the smell. Not the antiseptic clean of a hospital or the dusty air of a dressing room, but the cloying, expensive scent of peonies. Hundreds of them. Arranged in crystal vases around a bedroom the size of a basketball court.

Her eyes snapped open.

Silk canopy. Four-poster bed. A vanity with a lightbulb-lined mirror that looked like it belonged in a period drama.

Okay, she thought, her post-retirement, post-nap brain struggling to catch up. Did I sleepwalk onto a film set?

Then the memories hit her like a truck—or rather, like a poorly written novel. She hadn’t just fallen asleep. She had died. A freak accident involving a runaway Roomba, a spilled mug of tea, and her own discarded Best Actress trophy. And now, she was inside the very book she’d been mock-reading for a laugh: Revenge of the Real Heiress.

She was Shi Xi.

The fake daughter. The disposable villainess. The girl whose sole purpose in the plot was to be jealous, scheming, and ultimately, “fed to the fish” at the male lead’s lakeside villa party in Chapter 48.

Shi Nian—no, Shi Xi—sat up slowly. Her reflection in the vanity mirror showed a girl with a delicate, fox-like face, huge dark eyes, and hair so long it pooled on the mattress. Pretty. In a tragic, Victorian-ghost kind of way.

“Right,” she whispered to the peonies. “So I have approximately six weeks to live.”

[DING!]

She flinched as a neon-blue holographic window exploded in front of her face.

[SURVIVAL SYSTEM ACTIVATED]
Host: Shi Xi (formerly: Shi Nian, retired menace)
Mission 1: Avoid the Original Male Lead, Lu Cheng, for 72 consecutive hours.
Reward: 100 points + 1 week of plot armor.
Failure: Immediate karmic drowning. (The fish are very excited.)

Shi Xi stared. “Excuse me? The fish are excited?”

[The author of the original novel had a dark sense of humor. Do not question the fish.]

“I’m questioning the fish.”

[Questioning the fish docks points.]

“You’re lying.”

[……]

The system went silent. Shi Xi took a breath. She was a retired celebrity. She’d survived three divorces (in a drama), a scandal about a fake designer bag (real), and a live interview where a koala attacked her hair. She could survive a badly written novel.

But she wasn’t going to do it as Shi Xi, the pitiful fake heiress waiting for the Shi family to discard her. No. She was going to do it as herself. The legendary Shi Nian. Only… incognito.

She swung her legs out of bed. The marble floor was cold. On the nightstand, her phone buzzed with a text from the original female lead, Ning Yu (the real daughter, currently living in poverty and being tragically noble about it). It read: “I don’t need your charity, Shi Xi. Stay away from my family.”

Shi Xi typed back: “K. Good luck with the tragic nobility. x”

Then she heard it. Footsteps. Heavy. Angry. Mr. Shi, the adoptive father, storming down the hall to yell at her about some imagined slight. The original plot. The first domino that led to the lake. To the fish.

“Nope,” she said.

She grabbed a designer duffel bag (she was fake rich, not stupid), stuffed it with cash, a single change of clothes, and a bar of expensive dark chocolate. Then she looked at the window.

It was a two-story drop onto a manicured hedge.

[System Note: Window egress is undignified. Recommend front door.]

“The front door is where the drama is,” she muttered, throwing a leg over the sill. “And I retired from drama.”

She jumped.

The hedge broke her fall with a satisfying whump. Twigs in her hair. A gardener’s sprinkler soaked her silk pajamas. She lay there for a moment, staring up at the mansion’s looming silhouette, and laughed.

“Goodbye, fish food,” she whispered.

And then she ran.

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