Happy lives are all alike; every scumbag’s ending is different.
Gu Xizhou jolted awake from yet another nightmare, and that single thought crystallized in her mind.
In the darkness, she clutched her thin air-conditioned blanket, her slight frame curled on the bed and trembling violently. She pressed the blanket to her chest, gasping for breath. A cold, sticky sweat soaked the back of her shirt.
Too terrifying… utterly, unbearably terrifying.
Everything in the dream remained vivid.
It was herself, fifteen years older, bound to a bed with a white sheet by a crazed woman. Pinned beneath her, knife stabbing down again and again…
With each thrust, blood gushed out, and the agony tore at her. She lay there, eyes lowering to watch great blooms of crimson stain the sheets. All she felt was a rushing warmth draining away, her heartbeat frantic and fast.
Was she dying? This brief, miserable life of hers, ending in such a pathetic way at a woman’s hands.
Dazed, she looked up through the searing pain and saw a face—strikingly cold and beautiful, yet utterly deranged and despairing.
“Su Zhiyi…”
Gu Xizhou hugged the blanket tighter, burying her face deep into it, murmuring that name as a violent palpitation seized her heart.
Boundless remorse and loneliness closed in around her with the night. Gu Xizhou hugged her knees, sitting in the icy darkness. After a long while, she finally took a deep breath, threw off the blanket, and walked toward the bathroom.
With a click, the light came on. Soon, cold water cascaded from the showerhead, drenching her face.
The icy stream soaked her thick black hair. She tilted her head back, swept the wet strands from her face, and greedily gulped down gulps of cold water like a parched wanderer finding sweet rain. She swished it around her mouth, trying to rinse away the metallic taste of blood trapped in her mouth from the dream.
Blood… everywhere blood. The moment she closed her eyes, all she saw was her own blood.
And that woman kneeling over her, raising the bloodied knife as she stabbed down, sobbing over and over: “Gu Xizhou… you devil in human skin…”
“You should rot in hell!”
What had she said back then?
She seemed to have gritted through the pain, blood trickling from the corner of her mouth, her eyes fierce as she spat: “Su Zhiyi, it’s your sister who belongs in hell!”
“It’s Su Nanfeng! Everything is Su Nanfeng’s fault!”
Recalling that name again, Gu Xizhou switched off the shower, wrapped herself in a towel, and walked out of the bathroom. She stopped before the mirror and wiped her dripping hair.
Lifting her gaze, she saw in the reflection a sixteen-year-old face—still so young.
Long, straight black hair. Deep, dark eyes. A thin, pale, harmlessly innocent look. And…
Gu Xizhou lowered her head to examine the physical changes that had appeared the previous week after her differentiation. She patted her cheeks, giving herself encouragement: “It’s fine, Gu Xizhou. You’ve differentiated into an Alpha. Classes start at a new school. You won’t run into Su Nanfeng again.”
“These are all dreams. All dreams.”
She dried the excess water from her body, wrapping the towel around herself as she walked back to bed.
Slumping onto the mattress, she felt the soft bedding dip slightly. Blankly, Gu Xizhou turned to look at the alarm clock by her bedside. The quartz hands pointed to “3.”
August 20, 22XX. 3:25 AM.
She had woken from the nightmare and would not sleep again.
In that dazed state, a cold, electronic, mechanical voice sounded in her mind: “Gu Xizhou, in five hours, you’ll reach a turning point in your life.”
“At 9 AM on August 20, you’ll encounter Su Nanfeng again and enter the fate you cannot avoid.”
“I am System 0820. I’m here to help you. Link with me now!”
Help?
How could it help?
No, she didn’t need help.
This was just an aftermath of her differentiation, a hallucination.
Besides, she had already tested into No. 1 High School, so far from Pine Mountain District. With Su Nanfeng’s dog-crap grades, the girl couldn’t possibly get into that school.
This time, she would definitely escape her…
As if reading her thoughts, System 0820’s voice grew even colder: “She also differentiated into an Alpha and was admitted as a music prodigy.”
“Just like everything I’ve been showing you over the past few days—once you two end up in the same high school, her bullying of you will only get worse.”
“Beyond the usual cruelty, she’ll force you to do all sorts of illegal things…”
As 0820 spoke, the memories of all the torment Su Nanfeng had ever inflicted on Gu Xizhou began flooding back.
Adolescent malice could be terrifyingly simple.
In her second year of middle school, Gu Xizhou transferred to City Experimental Middle School after her Alpha mother’s job relocation.
On her first day, the new transfer student saw a clique of rich girls maliciously pouring milk over a chubby kid’s head and righteously intervened.
Naturally, the clique’s bullying shifted from the chubby kid to Gu Xizhou.
At first, it was intentionally toppling her lunch tray. Gu Xizhou got angry and immediately went to report it to a teacher.
The teacher looked utterly surprised: “Nanfeng might be a bit lively, but she wouldn’t do that kind of thing. She’s always so helpful normally.”
“I’ll ask her about it.”
When the teacher summoned Su Nanfeng to the office, the girl with long, straight black hair covered her mouth in exaggerated shock: “How can Gu Xizhou say something like that? Her tray clearly just fell, and I was helping pick it up.”
“Ding Yi and the others can vouch for me.”
With a whole group of classmates backing her up, Gu Xizhou became a liar in the teacher’s eyes. All she could do was clench her fists, filled to the brim with injustice and fury but utterly helpless, tears only swirling in her eyes.
With that start, Su Nanfeng’s “pranks” grew more and more unbridled.
Scribbled graffiti, thumbtacks in the locker room, snipped-up swimsuits, ruined shoes, a desk crammed full of garbage…
If anything could disgust a person, Su Nanfeng did it to her.
She endured it… for an entire month. Then, when Su Nanfeng knocked over her lunch tray yet again, Gu Xizhou picked up the tray and smashed it against the girl’s head.
An ambulance wailed. Su Nanfeng was hospitalized. Both sides called in the parents.
In the meeting room, Gu Xizhou watched her mother, Gu Jing, bow to Su Nanfeng’s Alpha mother, addressing her as “Director Su.” Only then did Gu Xizhou learn that this mother was the chairwoman of Star City’s medical machinery company—and the investor of the laboratory where Gu Jing worked.
Adolescent fights and bullying shrank to absolute insignificance when weighed against the brutal survival struggles of adults.
In the end, Gu Xizhou lowered her head before Su Nanfeng and, choked with humiliation and pain, apologized.
After that came a year and a half of silent endurance.
The teachers didn’t care. The parents didn’t care. Toward what they called childish “pranks,” they all held the same attitude.
—Su Nanfeng is a bit mischievous, but she’s not bad-natured. You already cracked her head open, and she didn’t even send anyone to beat you up.
—Can we transfer schools? No. Mom is too busy with work. If you go to another school, I won’t be able to look after you.
—Board at school? That won’t work either…
—Ah, Director Su’s daughter just likes to play. Why don’t you just play along with her…
—Once you reach high school, everyone will have grown up. No one will play these pranks anymore.
Not a single adult cared about the torture she was enduring. All they cared about was that this child not cause them any unnecessary trouble.
So Gu Xizhou endured. She endured until middle school graduation. Until she differentiated into an Alpha. Until the day before she started high school.
Yet seven days after her differentiation, a voice had appeared in her head, stuffing it full of dream after dream—telling her that those dreams were her future.
In those futures, the same things repeated over and over.
On the first day of high school, Su Nanfeng appeared in the same class. That evening after school, Su Nanfeng cornered her in the restroom, stripped off her clothes, and took photos of her lower body.
Su Nanfeng began treating her as a fun plaything again, resuming her cat-and-mouse games.
The childish “pranks” morphed into far more vicious tricks.
Su Nanfeng made her write love letters to Omegas she’d taken a liking to. She made her lure those Omegas out. She made her use her own ID to book hotel rooms with them.
Su Nanfeng made her hack the school’s system to change grades. She made her steal exam papers.
By the time they were in their second year of high school, Su Nanfeng had one of her sudden changes of mood. After a birthday banquet, she forced herself on Gu Xizhou.
The instant the visions of that future played to that point, Gu Xizhou—still sitting on her bed—recalled the dream image of a slender Alpha holding her down with terrifying strength, forcing her legs open. Cold sweat erupted down her back, and she nearly vomited.
Her gorge rose. Gu Xizhou immediately got up, tightening the towel around herself and racing into the bathroom. Bending over the sink, she retched violently.
The sheer nausea had her vomiting up bile.
Hunched over, Gu Xizhou looked up into the mirror. Her eyes were brimming with tears, their corners flushed red. She heard System 0820’s voice, unfeeling and relentless, continuing in her mind: “In senior year, Su Nanfeng beat someone to death in a brawl. Her mother pulled strings to have her sent to the military, dodging the law…”
“To get revenge on Su Nanfeng, you began a revenge plan.”
The cold, robotic voice echoed inside her head, so icy that Gu Xizhou clutched her towel tighter. “At Su Nanfeng’s seventeenth birthday banquet, you met her twin sister for the first time—Su Zhiyi.”
“Su Nanfeng’s parents were divorced. Su Zhiyi had been raised by their Omega mother all along. Unlike the willful, cruel Su Nanfeng, Su Zhiyi was a gentle, docile Omega.”
“Su Nanfeng cared deeply about her Omega mother and her twin sister.”
“So you devised a plan—you would obtain Su Zhiyi, and after marrying her, you would torment and destroy her, using her to exact revenge on Su Nanfeng.”
What had she done in that future?
She got into the same medical university as Su Zhiyi and approached her under the guise of being Su Nanfeng’s good friend.
With ill-intentioned pursuit and a pretense of tender care, after graduation she leveraged her own excellence to pass the family’s vetting and become the Su family’s live-in son-in-law.
She bided her time, endured, and laid her plans step by step. She kept at it until she reduced Su Nanfeng’s mother, Su Tianyu, to a vegetative state.
Then she staged a fake affair, letting Su Zhiyi “catch her in bed.” The shock caused Su Zhiyi to miscarry. Their one and only child, the one they had tried so many years to conceive, was gone.
Finally, she drove Su Nanfeng into ramming her with a car, successfully using the law to send the wretched Su Nanfeng to prison.
She ruined the Su family and drove Su Zhiyi insane.
One night, Su Zhiyi drugged her with sleeping pills, tied her to the bed, and sliced her up, one cut at a time.
Luckily, a secretary broke down the door in time and saved her from Su Zhiyi’s blade.
For numerous reasons, she didn’t sue Su Zhiyi—she merely confined her to the villa.
But Su Zhiyi had gone completely mad.
Every night after being discharged from the hospital, Gu Xizhou would return to that villa, holding that innocent woman—so like the Su Nanfeng who had harmed her the most, the resemblance a full eight parts—in her arms. She would tell her about their first meeting, about their child, about loving her.
She didn’t hope for Su Zhiyi to get better. She only wanted this Omega—the one who could so easily throw her into a heat cycle—to live.
As long as Su Zhiyi was alive, it felt as if her own life could somehow go on.
But she never expected that Su Zhiyi, in her madness, would jump.
The dream’s final moment was an abnormally gloomy afternoon. Thunder rolled through leaden gray clouds. Amid an ethereal, floating song, Gu Xizhou woke naked from the dream.
She opened bleary eyes. Through the window curtain, whipped into a wild rustling by the gale, she glimpsed a pure, pale figure like white jade.
It was a woman…
The woman’s head of glossy black hair flew wildly in the wind. The gale billowed her loose white shirt, outlining her thin, frail silhouette.
She was sitting on the windowsill, facing the wind, her head tilted up to the sky as she hummed a haunting, eerie melody.
Staring at that slender back, Gu Xizhou’s heart instantly leaped into her throat.
Her chest seized, her throat going dry. “Zhiyi… what are you doing up there? Come down right now.”
Carefully, she got up and moved toward the woman. “It’s dangerous up there. Please, come down.”
Su Zhiyi turned her head. The wind swept her hair aside, revealing a face even purer than a white lily. “Xizhou…”
It had been so long since Gu Xizhou had heard her say her name. In an instant, tears filled her eyes. “Zhiyi…”
A flash of lightning split the black sky. Su Zhiyi’s eyes, brimming with tears, shone like the brightest stars. “In your next life, I hope you grow up well.”
Su Zhiyi opened her arms like a broken-winged bird, leaned into the wind, and plunged backward.
Boom!
Thunder crashed. Rain poured down in an instant, its torrent masking Gu Xizhou’s heartrending scream: “Zhiyi!”
She sprinted toward that vanished silhouette, racing to the windowsill. Looking down, she saw her little caged canary, fallen among the shrubs, stained scarlet with blood, staring up at the sky with hollow, empty eyes…
“No!”
Thirty-two-year-old Gu Xizhou instantly dissolved into an avalanche of tears.
And now, at only sixteen, Gu Xizhou stared blankly ahead, the final image from that “dream” still before her eyes. Two clear streams of tears rolled down her cheeks.
Endless pain and hatred surged inside her, stabbing at her sensitive heart, as if she had truly lived through it all—filled with regret, filled with despair.
Through the blur of tears, Gu Xizhou heard 0820 say: “At thirty-two, you lost the love of your life.”
“Gu Xizhou, I ask you one more time. Do you want to link with me and let me help you?”
Gu Xizhou did not answer. She only clenched the towel in her hands.
The voice doggedly pursued her, sounding both sorrowful and seductive. “For your own sake. For Su Zhiyi.”
“Sign the contract with me.”
