Chapter 21

“I’ll be waiting. Maybe you want to know more about Ling Ze… other parts of his story. Or about you and the girl on his pedestal,” Jiang Wei said, smiling with a sultry tilt to her lips.
Once, she’d despised herself for bending and flattering anyone. She’d believed that if a person stood upright beneath the sky, kept a clear conscience, things would work out.
Now she knew better.
Mu Yang’s footsteps faltered. He snorted, leaving her only a cold, sharp silhouette.
But Jiang Wei was certain he’d be back. Ling Ze wasn’t a good person, and Mu Yang wasn’t much better. Given time, she could prepare.
First, though, she had to check in with her benefactor.
“Weiwei? I’ve been busy lately…”
When her call came through, Ling Ze froze for a second, then glanced at the fiancée he’d just forcibly reclaimed.
Ever-considerate, Wang Zhi Ning slipped away to give him privacy.
“Senior, could you… come see me?” Jiang Wei’s voice floated through, airy and distant. “I’m pregnant…”
Ling Ze’s brows snapped together. His heart stuttered. His first instinct wasn’t to tell her to get rid of it.
Instead, he found himself wondering if it was possible to keep the child.
After all, Weiwei had been with him for so many years.
But Zhi Ning… Zhi Ning was a kind and gentle heiress. She’d saved his life twice.
He…
Before he could finish tangling himself up, Jiang Wei continued on her own, voice light, unreadable.
“But I’ve already gotten rid of it. Don’t worry, Ling Zong. It won’t affect you.”
Anger and a strange, hollow disappointment slammed into him.
“Why didn’t you talk to me first?” he snapped. His voice came out rougher than he meant.
“Would it have made a difference?” Jiang Wei asked calmly. “Ask or don’t ask, the ending would’ve been the same, wouldn’t it?”
He fell silent.
She was right. In the end, it would’ve been a lot of drama ending in an abortion all the same.
A faint sigh drifted through the line.
“If there’s anything you want, just tell Dong Tezhu to buy it for you,” he said at last. “Take care of yourself.”
“But the only thing I want is for you to come see me,” Jiang Wei said softly. “Just this once, Senior…”
She was almost pleading.
In the end, Ling Ze gave in.
When he arrived at the villa where Jiang Wei was kept, she looked… fine. Too fine. Her complexion was good, her movements steady; she didn’t look like a woman who’d just had a miscarriage.
A flicker of doubt crossed his mind, but vanished when she came over, smiling gently as she set a bowl of porridge in front of him.
Her lips curved in that same demure smile. For a moment, she was exactly like the girl he’d first seen back in high school.
“Senior, why do you keep staring at me? Drink your porridge,” Jiang Wei said lightly. “I made it especially for you.”
She scooped up a spoonful, blew on it slowly until the steam thinned, testing the temperature with the tip of her tongue.
This feeling, coming home to someone who’d cooked and was quietly waiting, wasn’t bad at all. Something in Ling Ze’s chest seemed to soften.
He obediently opened his mouth.
So they went on like that, one sip for him, one spoonful from her. For a moment the scene was so warm it could’ve come straight out of some domestic drama.
Until a sudden, vicious cramp twisted through Ling Ze’s abdomen. His face went white as he collapsed to the floor. “W–What… what’s going on?”
“Does it taste good?” Jiang Wei tilted her head, porcelain spoon turning in the small bowl. “I simmered it myself, just for you.”
Her thick lashes trembled slightly. Those clear eyes were as limpid as ever, reflecting back Ling Ze’s miserable state.
“You… Weiwei, what did you put in the porridge?” he gritted out, forcing himself upright, fighting the pain. “Why?”
He genuinely didn’t understand. Was this jealousy? Was she throwing a tantrum over another woman?
But he’d already spelled everything out for her. Had she gone back on her word and gotten greedy?
Jiang Wei’s smile widened, bright and lovely. “I stirred rat poison into the porridge.”
“You hate me that much?”
If she’d gone this far, the place was clearly already cleared out. No one would be coming. At this point, Ling Ze only wanted to die knowing why.
“I don’t hate you,” she said calmly. “I’m just confirming something.”
She set the bowl aside, squatted down beside him, and gently smoothed the hair from his forehead. Then she covered his eyes with one hand.
With the other, she drove a fruit knife straight into his heart.
Ling Ze stopped breathing on the spot.
The moment he died, Jiang Wei’s legs buckled. She went down hard, dragging the tablecloth with her. Dishes crashed to the floor in a clatter of porcelain and glass.
Agony clamped around her heart like a giant fist. She couldn’t draw a full breath. Her whole body convulsed.
The space around her flickered like an old snow-flecked TV screen. The world shook, shuddered, until at last she could breathe again.
The corpse at her feet was gone.
Every news article, every trace of Ling Ze on her phone, vanished without a trace.
Jiang Wei covered her face and laughed.
“Good. Good. Very good,” she whispered. “Let’s see what happens when I kill all the leads from that dream.”
Then she dialed Mu Yang’s number, took the gun she’d stashed in the drawer, and went to their rendezvous.
When the bullet punched through Mu Yang’s brow, reality finally snapped.
The world twisted, space folding in on itself like an empty box being crushed. Men and women, skyscrapers and streets, everything cracked apart inch by inch, shards of reality breaking off like frames from an old film reel.
Her own body began to come apart too, like a puppet being disassembled, joint by joint. Pain detonated in her skull as if hundreds of blades were churning through her brain. Her soul felt like it was being ripped to pieces,
And Jiang Wei felt… relieved.
Free.
A voice boomed out of the void, majestic and furious:
How dare you!
…So that’s what you are.
The instant that voice sounded, everything that had felt wrong suddenly had an explanation.
“I don’t care what you are,” Jiang Wei shouted back. “But I, Jiang Wei, refuse to dance on your strings.”
“Are Ling Ze and Mu Yang the ones you’re trying to protect? If this world is built around them, and no one else is allowed to defy the script, then I’ll destroy them.”
The sky fractured like glass, spiderweb cracks racing across it. Lightning split the clouds. A gale howled.
The god of this world, it seemed, was very unhappy that someone had smashed its masterpiece.
Jiang Wei braced herself for death.
A flash of white consumed everything.
She disappeared.
“Where is this?”
When Jiang Wei woke, all she could see for a moment was blankness. Her head swam. She lifted her hands, patted her legs.
She was… not a pile of splintered bones.
Didn’t I just get blown to pieces?
[Welcome to the Void World, vicious supporting actress from Rose-Kissed Scars, Jiang Wei.]
“What the hell?” Jiang Wei snapped her head around. There was nothing there. Just emptiness.
[No need to look around. I’m in your mental sea. As long as you exist, this system exists.]
A system?
The next few minutes shattered everything she thought she knew.
She was a vicious supporting character in a campus Mary Sue reverse-harem story. She was supposed to fall hopelessly in love with Ling Ze, then grow jealous of her half-sister, the heroine, and commit a string of increasingly stupid, vicious acts, ruining others and herself, before dying miserably.
So that was it. She was “The Vicious Supporting Role.” A disposable, tragic marionette.
Jiang Wei gave a short, humorless laugh.
The thing in her head kept talking, voice flat and mechanical.
She’d killed the “sons of fate.” By the rules of the world, she should have been erased, her data wiped out… but the Female Supporting Role Division had fished her out instead.
Turned out the quick-transmigration department wanted to cull useless taskers, but outright deleting them sparked rebellion and spiritual backlash, enough to collapse entire clusters of pocket worlds.
After negotiations, they’d decided on a competition model instead.
Three-part scoring. Lowest scores get erased.
No one wanted to die, and some genius in the Supporting Characters Department had come up with a nasty little workaround: find one powerful, self-aware stray data point, label her a “new recruit,” and throw her into the arena as a scapegoat. When she died, find the next one.
Eventually, they’d found Jiang Wei, a rogue data anomaly who’d woken up on her own, killed two male leads, and shattered an entire narrative world.
And because she was their sacrificial pawn, they’d armed her with the best possible support: the strongest, fully upgraded system.
They needed her to last. They didn’t want to be erased, and finding replacements was annoying. There was no guarantee the next person would be usable.
“So I’m the scapegoat.” Jiang Wei’s expression went flat with cold anger.
No one would be happy to learn they’d been “saved” just to die in someone else’s place.
[Not necessarily. If you can beat the other departments’ taskers, you get to live.]
“And when does this end?”
[When the Main God decides there are no useless taskers left among the survivors. I am your assistant and will report your scores in real time. Three-part scoring, as follows:
1. Task completion: max 10 points.
2. In-character consistency (OOC level): max 10 points.
3. Audience rating across all small worlds: max 20 points.
The third is the most important, not only is it worth the most, but satisfied viewers can tip you with special items that taskers need.
Are you ready, rookie?]
The system, named Victor, delivered the rules in that same chill monotone.
Did she have any right to refuse?
Fine then. She wanted to see what kind of world the final victor got, and what kind of power they’d be allowed to wield.