Chapter 1

Qin Yao: Wen Jiu, are you still sick today?
A message pops up. Wen Jiu doesn’t reply.
Thirty seconds later, another one appears.
Qin Yao: Wen Jiu, when are you coming back? I still have things for you to do.
A third message follows hard on its heels.
Qin Yao: Wen Jiu, I’m uneasy. I keep feeling someone is around Chu Yan. Hurry back and help me tail him. See what he’s doing.
On the cloud-soft double bed, a girl with an oval face and almond eyes rolls over, her pale skin nearly blending into the white sheets, glowing faintly in the morning light.
Wen Jiu clutches her phone, rolls one direction, rolls back the other, struggles for a long moment, then slowly types:
Of course, Miss. I’ll get better soon and return as quickly as possible to ease your burdens.
Absolutely not. She had no intention of returning, now or ever.
Just hearing the word “tailing” was enough to make her break out in hives.
In real life, that kind of thing would get you locked up by the authorities. In a novel… the ending was even more tragic.
After she replies, Qin Yao’s mood clearly improves. A moment later, a transfer request arrives.
Wen Jiu lifts her hand, she tries not to look, but her eyes still dart over.
Her half-lidded gaze snaps wide open. Her pupils dilate. She bolts upright in a cross-legged heap.
One, ten, a hundred, a thousand… ten thousands!
A whole ten thousand yuan!!
Qin Yao: [Transfer]
Qin Yao: Buy something nourishing. Get well soon, okay?
Spineless as she is, Wen Jiu swallows hard, eyes misting over. She nearly bursts into tears.
She wants to accept it, but she doesn’t dare.
Because once she accepts that money, she’ll have to go back. And going back means doing sneaky, underhanded villain-sidekick work. Which leads to cannon-fodder doom. In a few months, not even her ashes would remain.
Qin Yao: Take it quickly. I’m going to sleep now. Don’t message me later (unless it’s about Chu Yan).
Wen Jiu’s eyes fill again.
Suddenly, Qin Yao’s earlier pushy messages don’t feel harsh at all.
As long as the money flows, even curses sound heavenly.
But why, why, does the young lady have to be the evil supporting character?!
And Wen Jiu, as her loyal lackey, is a purebred cannon-fodder who doesn’t dare report back to work.
Clutching her phone, she collapses onto the bed like a corpse.
Ever since she transmigrated yesterday, that’s been her default state: half-dead, half-alive.
She didn’t just time-travel, she traveled into a book.
The novel, “Mistook the Boss for My Boyfriend,” was one she’d read in college. The plot revolved around Lan Mingyan, an employee who mistakes CEO Chu Yan for her boyfriend in a parking lot, sparking a chain of sweet misunderstandings.
In the novel, the male lead Chu Yan had one unhinged admirer, Young lady Qin Yao of Qin Jewelry.
After learning Chu Yan might have a girlfriend, Qin Yao spirals. She orders her lackey, Wen Jiu, to sabotage the heroine Lan Mingyan’s work and even tries to drug Chu Yan…
Wen Jiu and the lackey role are essentially accelerants, pushing the main couple together in record time. They get their happily-ever-after; Qin Yao gets exiled overseas; the lackey gets blacklisted across the entire city and has to crawl home in disgrace.
Awaiting her is a family that favors sons and wants to sell her off.
Back then, young and naive, Wen Jiu had loved Cinderella-meets-prince stories. Reading the novel, she naturally imagined herself as the heroine, fantasizing about a wealthy young heir falling for her.
Who could’ve predicted that four years later, barely out of school, she’d transmigrate… not into the heroine, not even the villainess, but the villainess’s disposable sidekick?
From yesterday until now, she hasn’t stepped outside. She can’t accept reality.
And that salary she was supposed to receive, her first paycheck after being cheated out of wages at her old job! She didn’t even get to read the number before she was yanked into a fictional world.
After a sleepless night, dark circles under her eyes, Wen Jiu drags herself to the kitchen to forage.
Return? Impossible. But she still has to live.
And no matter what, she refuses to mistreat her stomach.
“Ding-dong”
“Ding-dong”
The doorbell rings twice. Wen Jiu opens the door to find her landlady, a middle-aged woman with a head of curls.
“Wen Jiu, dear, you didn’t transfer the rent the day before yesterday. I was worried something happened, so I stopped by to check.”
“Sorry, Auntie. I was sick the day before yesterday. I’m only feeling better today, I forgot.”
She reuses the same excuse she gave the Young Lady.
Lowering her head, she pulls up the woman’s WeChat and transfers the rent: 7,500 yuan.
The landlady beams, then hands over some vegetables and eggs.
“You’re sick, eat something light. I bought too much at the market this morning; take a bit.”
7,500 yuan gone. Wen Jiu stands there holding two bundles of lettuce and three eggs as she watches the landlady walk away. The sound of high heels fades at the elevator, along with Wen Jiu’s pulse.
She shuts the door, presses a hand to her heart, and nearly cries.
Seven thousand five hundred. Seven. Thousand. Five.
The original Wen Jiu certainly never wronged herself…
But Wen Jiu can’t afford this. She needs to move.
She opens the rental contract in the chat history,
The lease lasts another year and a half. Leaving early means forfeiting the deposit.
The deposit… is 30,000 yuan.
One side is rent; the other is a 30k deposit.
She can’t let go of either. Both hurt equally.
Setting down the vegetables and eggs, she picks up her fully charged phone and opens a job-hunting app.
Even in a transmigrated world, she must remain a working woman. The bitterness makes her hug herself for comfort.
Thirty resumes later, the clock hits 9 a.m.
Her stomach growling, she heads into the kitchen to wash the lettuce. No knife needed, just rinse and crunch.
She boils water and, unable to part with all three eggs, puts in only two.
Seven minutes later, she cools them and peels them.
As she savors her precious boiled eggs, her phone rings nonstop.
No contact name. Who could it be?
Completely unguarded, she answers.
“Jiujiu! Finally, I reached you. I tried with my phone, your father’s, your brother’s, nothing went through. I had to borrow the neighbor’s to get you!”
“Jiujiu, ever since you graduated, you haven’t contacted home. We don’t know how you’re living out there. You graduated from Beicheng University, surely you make ten thousand a month by now? You must even be a manager already.”
“Your brother still hasn’t found a proper job. Help him get one in Beicheng. Nothing too demanding, seven or eight thousand a month, meals and housing included, two days off a week, nine-to-five schedule with a nice two-hour lunch break.”
“I did the math, you’ve been out of school almost a year. Ten thousand a month is 120,000 a year. You’re a girl; you don’t need that much money. Give Mom 110,000, I’ll save it for you.”
“Your brother is seeing a girl, might get married soon. Needs a house, needs a car. You’re his only sister; of course you should take out a loan to help him. Thirty to fifty thousand should be enough for the car.”
“Your brother will never forget how good you were to him. He’ll leave a room for you in the house. And your future nieces and nephews will honor their aunt!”
Wen Jiu feels nothing.
She sets the phone on the table, calmly eats her eggs, and listens to her mother’s shameless demands.
A faint, needling ache creeps through her chest, the last sliver of hope dissolving into foam.
She blinks slowly.
Ah. This must be the original Wen Jiu’s leftover emotions.
“Jiujiu, why aren’t you talking?”
Oh, she’s finally done, now it’s her turn.
Wen Jiu drinks a few sips of water, clears her throat, and begins the counterattack.
“Mom, these years have been awful for me. Someone scammed me out of a million. I was terrified to go home. I deleted all your numbers from my contacts so they wouldn’t find you if they checked my phone.”
“I’ve been working three jobs a day just to survive. I just got home from a night shift, look at my eye bags. This morning’s breakfast was from my landlady. Two vegetables and an egg. If she hadn’t given me food, I wouldn’t have eaten at all.”
“Give me ten more minutes and I’ll head out. I need to go work my second job.”
No lies there, her eye circles were bruised blue, not because she’d worked a night shift, but because she’d stayed up all night unable to sleep after a night shift. And once she stepped outside, she’d still have to hunt for yet another job; otherwise, she wouldn’t be able to afford her precious, overpriced shoebox of an apartment.
“Mom, since you called, you must be worried about me!” Wen Jiu’s voice suddenly lifted into enthusiasm. “Could you… help me pay off the one million I owe? I’ll definitely repay you with even more filial piety. Once I get back on my feet, I’ll buy my brother a house, a car, and upgrade you to a villa.”
“You money-wasting burden! How do you even rack up that much debt? Don’t contact this family again, just die out there.”
“Oh, Mom, don’t hang up yet. Even if you don’t want me, I still love you very much. Please remember to delete this call from your phone, or in a few days my creditors will come looking for you in South City. They’ll definitely use my brother to threaten me… maybe even cut off one of his fingers.”
“You cursed, worthless girl! Don’t you say such things about your brother!”
Beep. Beep. Beep,
The call disconnected instantly, and Wen Jiu vaguely heard the distant shrieks of her son-obsessed mother, panicking and screaming for her brother.
Good. Let her be angry. Let her lose sleep for days, terrified someone will come knocking.
The more miserable they were, the happier she felt.
Her brows slowly relaxed, brightening by the second. A long-held tightness in her chest diffused like smoke. For the first time since arriving here, Wen Jiu felt light.
Only now did she realize the original body’s emotions would no longer overwhelm her.
In the blur of that relief, a voice, hysterical at first, softened into calm:
“I’m leaving now. Thank you for coming. You let me see that I didn’t have to tremble at the sound of my family’s voices. Please don’t give them a single cent, and don’t force yourself to be kind to them.”
“My last wish is that you treat the Young Misses well… sincerely. Even if I approached them for the sake of money, they were the only people who gave me peace throughout university.”
When the voice faded, Wen Jiu steadied herself against the mirror. Somehow the gloom had lifted from her forehead, her features clearer, prettier. Smooth and glossy, like the egg she’d peeled earlier. It made one want to reach out and poke her cheek just to test the bounciness.
After changing clothes and heading for the door for another round of interviews, Wen Jiu suddenly froze mid-step.
Young Misses?
Plural?
Misses?!