Chapter 1
Sunlight streamed in through the floor-to-ceiling windows, tracing a bright arc along the smooth edges of the furniture.
Jiang Shangxue stood before the mirror and took out a handkerchief to wipe the moisture from her palms. Then she meticulously fastened the frog buttons of her qipao all the way to the top. For several nights in a row, the same nightmare had startled her awake.
After washing up, Jiang Shangxue went downstairs as usual and read the business paper over breakfast.
At exactly nine o’clock, she appeared at the entrance of the company. The new employees she passed stared at her in amazement. Jiang Shangxue’s curled hair was pinned up, revealing a mature, sophisticated face adorned with just the right amount of light makeup. She looked immaculate and elegant, with a few loose strands of hair resting against her neck. Every movement she made possessed a gentle grace, like ripples spreading across water.
Yet her ink-dark eyes appeared extraordinarily cold whenever she was not paying attention, instantly extinguishing any improper fantasies people might have entertained.
Gentle yet commanding.
She was absolutely stunning!
One employee secretly photographed Jiang Shangxue from behind in her qipao and posted it on Rongcheng’s anonymous business forum.
Caption: Among all the business giants in Rongcheng, who could possibly be more beautiful and gentler than President Jiang?!
The Mingchuang Group logo was clearly visible on the right side of the photograph. Within seconds, someone replied to the post.
[She’s so beautiful. Both her net worth and her looks are way out of my league.]
[Give me a break. I’ll admit she’s beautiful, but forget about gentle. I hereby award President Jiang the title of “fake sweetheart, genuine femme fatale.”]
[Agreed with the poster above. The Greenland Project has already given us a thorough demonstration of President Jiang’s methods. Beautiful businesswomen are no less ruthless behind the scenes than we men are.]
[Greenland? The Greenland Project jointly developed by Hongyuan and Mingchuang?]
It had originally been nothing more than a casual post expressing admiration, but as soon as Greenland was mentioned, the atmosphere in the thread immediately became subtle.
Who in Rongcheng’s business community did not know that the Greenland Project had been personally spearheaded by the chief executives of Hongyuan and Mingchuang? If they were going to discuss the underhanded tactics employed during the project, only the executives involved had any right to speak.
Several replies quickly pushed the thread back to the top.
[May I ask whether the gentleman above is President Lin Yuan of Hongyuan?]
[Shocking! Doge.jpg. A big shot is actually lurking in the same thread as me and watching the drama unfold!]
[Well, that escalated quickly. So even domineering CEOs are on the front lines of gossip.]
Lin Yuan looked at the screen with a silent smile, clicked the × in the upper-right corner, and exited the forum.
Even now, remembering the Greenland Project he had worked on with Jiang Shangxue still left Lin Yuan with lingering fear. The woman appeared beautiful, gentle, and easy to manipulate, but he had been thoroughly deceived by appearances. The moment he tried to pull a few tricks to secure more profit for Hongyuan, she had taught him a brutal lesson.
That one in-depth collaboration had been enough for Lin Yuan to grasp Jiang Shangxue’s way of doing things. If you played by the rules, she naturally did the same, allowing both sides to benefit. But if you started scheming, she would openly poach your people, seize your resources, trip you up, and wage commercial warfare against you. No tactic was off-limits. In her own words, anything was permissible as long as it was not illegal and did not provoke public outrage.
Kindness for kindness, ruthlessness for ruthlessness.
All in all, she was an exceptionally calculating she-wolf.
By the end of the morning, the casual thread had been pushed onto the hot page. Meanwhile, Jiang Shangxue, the woman at the center of the discussion, was sitting in her office reading the script for 《I Just Had to Fall for You》.
《I Just Had to Fall for You》 was one of the biggest and hottest intellectual properties Mingchuang Group had invested in that year. Filming was scheduled to begin at the end of the month, and the villainous stepmother in the story happened to share Jiang Shangxue’s name.
Ordinarily, no one would have specifically consulted Jiang Shangxue about such a trivial matter. However, Su Yue wanted both time off and a bonus, so she had deliberately used the script as an excuse to visit Jiang Shangxue and hint at what she wanted in every conceivable way.
After Jiang Shangxue skimmed the plot, the nightmares began that very night. For several nights in a row, she had the exact same nightmare.
A girl in a red dress leaped from the roof with tears streaming down her face. Her body shattered upon impact, and blood splattered everywhere. Jiang Shangxue stood beside her, but no matter how loudly she shouted or how desperately she tried to stop her, nothing worked. She could only watch helplessly as the girl jumped.
In the dream, someone called out the girl’s name—Yun Wu, the name of the main villain in 《I Just Had to Fall for You》.
Su Yue, who had originally been sprawled lazily across the sofa, felt her heart tighten when she saw Jiang Shangxue’s expression growing increasingly grave. She sat upright, though her tone remained teasing.
“No way, President Jiang. You don’t seriously mind that some cannon-fodder character in the drama shares your name, do you? I’ll have them change it in a moment.”
Without looking up, Jiang Shangxue continued flipping through the script and said,
“Director Su must have far too much free time if she can come to my office for a casual chat. It seems you haven’t been working enough overtime.”
“Don’t! Please, have mercy! I’m leaving right now.”
Su Yue’s expression twisted for a moment. Her body reacted faster than her brain, and by the time she finished speaking, her hands had already deftly closed the door to Jiang Shangxue’s office behind her.
She had not been working enough overtime? Even capitalists would shed tears upon hearing such words.
Jiang Shangxue continued reading the rest of the plot, her brow furrowing more deeply with every page.
The drama was positioned as a sweet romance. Villains in such stories were generally either stupid and troublesome or utterly wicked.
But no matter how Jiang Shangxue looked at her, Yun Wu did not fit the mold of a conventional villain at all. She was quite simply the most pitiful and tragic soul imaginable.
An orphan abandoned by her biological mother when she was only five months old, Yun Wu had been taken home and raised by a deranged old man who survived by scavenging garbage.
A cramped little room that never saw daylight in any season, the stench of garbage that perpetually clung to her body, and an old corridor plastered with advertisements and littered with visible patches of spit—these were the things that made up her twisted childhood.
By the time Yun Wu was four or five years old, her delicate features had begun to take shape. Although years of malnutrition had left her excessively thin and small, she still attracted the attention of certain scum in the building.
Those scumbags tried to lure Yun Wu into doing vile, obscene things in exchange for a few pieces of cheap candy. Perhaps her life of hardship had forced Yun Wu to mature unusually early. By crying, making a scene, and voicing a muddled accusation, she narrowly escaped.
From that point onward, however, the gossiping shrews in the building began speculating about Yun Wu’s origins with the utmost malice.
Right in front of Yun Wu, they hurled all manner of vicious, disgusting abuse. They said Yun Wu’s mother must have sold her body and had therefore thrown her away. They called Yun Wu a cheap little vixen from birth and claimed she might even have inherited some filthy disease from her mother.
Those malicious rumors, combined with her desperately impoverished living conditions, made Yun Wu excessively sensitive and insecure from an early age.
She lived in this world with the utmost caution.
Yet even that could not extinguish Yun Wu’s inherently kind nature. She would wipe or wash the garbage she scavenged before bringing it home to lessen the smell in the corridor. When officials from the local community office came to take her away, she refused to leave and insisted on staying to care for the deranged old man.
Fortunately, the local community office eventually decided to fund her education and provide her with a certain amount of money for living expenses each month.
Although it was only two hundred yuan, to Yun Wu at the time, being able to attend school and eat her fill was already an unimaginable luxury.
This was the first turning point in Yun Wu’s life.
Jiang Shangxue’s slender, fair fingers paused at the bottom of the page. She picked up the cup beside her and took a sip of water, then another, before continuing to turn the pages.
Yun Wu was very intelligent, and this advantage became evident after she began school. Her grades consistently ranked among the best. Although she still had no friends, people would sometimes point at her from behind and say,
“Look, that’s her. Her grandfather is a crazy old man who scavenges garbage.”
“No wonder she smells so awful.”
She was always alone and rarely spoke even once throughout an entire semester. Both her teachers and classmates regarded her as a strange, antisocial student, yet her name could always be found among the top three after every examination.
Yun Wu seemed on the verge of grasping the light, but how could a villain’s life ever truly improve? When she was seventeen, her biological father found her and took her home.
The luxurious villa and its meticulously considered details left her completely at a loss.
At the slightest provocation, her stepmother would order the servants to slap her or force her to kneel as punishment. Those were the lighter punishments. Whenever her stepmother was in a bad mood, she would even make Yun Wu kneel and eat like a dog.
Her so-called biological father merely sat back and ignored everything.
The young woman’s already fragile sense of dignity and shame was completely shattered by the torment she endured day after day.
When Jiang Shangxue reached the scene where Yun Wu was ordered to crouch on all fours and eat like a dog, her beautiful fingers abruptly creased the page. She tugged at her collar, a trace of irritation appearing between her brows.
Suppressing her distaste, she continued reading.
After her father brought her home, Yun Wu was sent to an elite private school to attend high school. This marked the beginning of a new nightmare, and it was there that she met the male and female leads.
The novel described Yun Wu as exceptionally beautiful. Her pure black eyes curved upward at both the inner and outer corners, and she possessed a naturally cool, aloof air. The stubbornness embedded in her bones was irresistibly alluring.
Yun Wu attracted the male lead’s attention as soon as she enrolled. Dissatisfied, the female lead would always make a few seemingly innocent, provocative remarks, and a group of supporters would naturally charge into battle on her behalf.
The escalating bullying and discrimination from her peers made Yun Wu even more insecure and vulnerable. Even when she was forced to kneel in the bathroom and drink water from a toilet, the school’s teachers merely brushed the incident aside.
The male lead witnessed everything from beginning to end. Yet each time, he would only appear after Yun Wu had already been bullied, putting on an act as he comforted and counseled her.
Having never experienced kindness from anyone her own age, Yun Wu fell for him just like that. She willingly submitted to the male lead’s emotional manipulation. Later, with his help, Yun Wu continued to grow. Within only two years of graduating from university, she became the fully controlling shareholder of Yun Group, wielding unquestioned authority over the company.
It was then that the male lead revealed his true objective. Exploiting Yun Wu’s trust, he acquired Yun Group without the slightest difficulty.
Looking over the entire story, the only reason Yun Wu was labeled a villain was that she loved the male lead and served as a convenient tool for the male and female leads to flirt through whenever they quarreled.
In the end, Yun Wu attempted to take revenge out of resentment. She tried to burn the male and female leads to death, but through a twist of fate, she killed other people instead. Driven into a corner with no way out, she put on a red dress and committed suicide by jumping from a building.
Jiang Shangxue: ……???
This was the scene that had repeatedly appeared in Jiang Shangxue’s dreams. Her expression turned grim.
With a sharp rip, one page of the script tore beneath her hand. Jiang Shangxue ripped out the final page, crushed it into a ball, and threw it into the trash. A moment later, she tossed the entire script in after it.
There was unquestionably something wrong with this script. Both leads had completely warped morals. How could they possibly film this?!
Just then, Su Yue sent her a message.
[Su Yue: President Jiang, the name has been changed. Taking credit, Doge/Doge/Doge.]
[Jiang Shangxue: Starting tomorrow, the entire Planning Department will have one week off, and everyone’s year-end bonus will be doubled. Director Su is excluded.]
Looking at the message posted in the work group, Su Yue had not even had time to rejoice before she saw the second half. She immediately sent Jiang Shangxue a private message.
[Su Yue: President Jiang, pitiful.jpg. I know you have always treated all your subordinates equally and would never discriminate.]
Jiang Shangxue arched a brow slightly. Without replying to Su Yue, she continued posting in the work group.
[Jiang Shangxue: Director Su will remain behind to discuss revisions to the plot with the screenwriter of 《I Just Had to Fall for You》.]
[Su Yue: Dead inside. The joke was me all along. Black Guy Question Mark.jpg.]
[Su Yue: I don’t have a hard job. I just have a hard life.]
Su Yue raised her head and wailed toward the heavens, completely out of place amid the festive atmosphere in the Planning Department.
Before falling asleep that night, Jiang Shangxue inevitably thought of the same nightmare she had experienced over the past several nights. She believed this strange episode was finally coming to an end.
Never in her wildest dreams did she expect to awaken the next morning and discover that she had transmigrated into the novel—as the vicious stepmother who shared her name.
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