Dim light washed over the room. Under the thin blanket on the big bed, the outline of a graceful figure could just be made out.

The woman asleep looked anything but peaceful. Her black hair was spread across the white pillow, and a fine layer of cold sweat dampened her forehead.

Vivienne Calloway jolted awake from the nightmare again, her long lashes trembling nonstop.

Only after she saw clearly where she was did the sharp rise and fall of her chest slowly settle down.

She pushed herself up bit by bit and walked barefoot toward the bathroom.

Warm water slid over her skin. When the steam finally thinned out, she stood in front of the mirror and quietly studied herself.

Reflected there was a face so beautiful it was almost dangerous, black hair spilling down to her waist like a waterfall, skin pale and flawless to an almost unreal degree.

This face was stunning.

But the strange part was that her whole vibe and figure were totally at odds. She had that soft, delicate, almost gentle kind of aura, yet her body was absurdly alluring—full and lifted in all the right places, a slim waist, curves so shapely they looked almost unfair.

"Sigh."

The beauty in the mirror let out a soft breath.

She was a widow. A brand-new widow who had just lost her husband.

Her fingers unconsciously rubbed the diamond ring on her ring finger, the symbol of marriage. The cool touch slowly cleared the haze in her mind.

She didn’t feel grief. Not really. If anything, what she felt was relief, like a massive weight had finally come off her chest.

Because she wasn’t originally from this world.

Her fingertips brushed over that face in the mirror, one that felt both familiar and weirdly unfamiliar.

The same shell, but two completely different souls had lived inside it.

Back in that other world, her face had looked almost the same as it did now,

but her status there had been even higher, the kind of spoiled, untouchable rich heiress people could only dream about.

And yet, in that world, her personality had been nothing like the one she had now.

To her, the words “spoiled” and “overbearing” had never been insults.

They were a badge of privilege she’d been born wearing.

In her eyes, anyone who didn’t carry her family name was basically just living wallpaper with a voice.

But the owner of this body now—

was a soft, graceful young lady from a refined scholarly family, the kind raised on books and good manners.

Totally different. Like, not even in the same universe.

She only remembered that, right when she’d been living her best life, some massive unknown thing had yanked her into this world without even asking.

A bronze compass floated in midair, glowing with a ghostly blue light. Its pointer clicked and spun so fast it made her scalp tingle. That thing called itself the “Heavenly Dao.”

Its voice sounded like rusty gears grinding through silk, weird and creepy enough to make anyone’s skin crawl.

“Sin value exceeded. Atonement program activated.”

It said it in this self-righteous tone, like it was the law of the universe, claiming she’d done too much evil in her old world, so she’d been thrown here to repent.

What a joke.

Sure, she did enjoy picking on people.

A lot, actually.

But every single one of them had it coming.

“That Zhang family idiot tried to peek while I was changing. Wasn’t he asking to get stripped and dumped into the pool?”

“And Miss Li spread rumors that I stole her fiancé. Wasn’t she overdue for a few slaps and a butchered haircut?”

They were the ones who came after her first.

So why the hell should she be the one atoning?

“You damned thing—let me go back right now!”

Damn it. Damn it all.

The pampered young heiress who had always been waited on hand and foot was now collapsed on the floor like a stray dog that had nowhere left to go, cursing at empty air until her voice turned ragged.

If it weren’t for her reddened eyes and those faintly trembling shoulders giving her away, anyone really might’ve thought this spoiled rich girl was vicious to the core—looking fierce on the outside, scared stiff underneath.

After cursing herself tired, she finally realized, way too late, that none of it meant a thing. So she simply dropped to the floor without caring about her image at all, trying to calm the fire burning in her chest.

She flat-out refused Heaven’s demand that she accept the plot.

["Resistance will trigger the punishment mechanism,"] the mechanical voice announced coldly.

With the system threatening her like that, the young lady could only hold back tears and agree, feeling miserable and wronged.

A ghostly blue screen suddenly lit up before her eyes. Densely packed words flooded toward her like a rising tide.

["Forced plot loading in progress,"] the system voice buzzed with static.

["Please finish reading the main storyline within 12 hours."]

She bit down hard on her lip, forcing her tears back. She had barely skimmed a few chapters in a rushed blur when the light screen suddenly crackled with white noise, and the mechanical voice cut off mid-sentence.

The whole world dropped into dead silence. The only sound left was her breathing, echoing through the empty room.

The system had unexpectedly gone offline. She hadn’t even finished reading the full plot, and no matter how many times she called out, Heaven gave her nothing back.

Luckily, she still clearly remembered the blurb page. Exclusive Adoration from All the Big Shots was a classic NP romance novel.

The story revolved around the heroine, Melody Sinclair—a special-admission student raised by an elderly trash picker, struggling to survive in an elite aristocratic school packed with privileged heirs.

Then, at twenty, the gears of fate abruptly shifted. A DNA test exposed her as the long-lost true daughter of a top-tier wealthy family.

Once she returned to her roots, she used the power of her family to strike back hard at everyone who had once humiliated her.

Fate had lined up several male leads for her—men standing at the top of the pyramid, the kind whose last names alone symbolized power.

The class system in this world was terrifyingly rigid.

The great wealthy families were the sky above everyone else. Each male lead controlled an enormous family empire, their influence seeping into every corner of the nation: the economic lifelines, political operations, even military power all sat firmly in their hands.

But none of that had much to do with Vivienne Calloway.

She was only the wife of one of the novel’s male leads, Sebastian Blackwell—a minor side character destined to die in an accident early in the story.

Her death was basically there to clear the field for the male lead, put him back on the market, and kick off that whole wife-chasing crematorium arc.

The original Vivienne Calloway’s wish was so simple it hurt: spend the first half of her life devoted to education, then the second half being a wife and mother, living the most ordinary life possible.

That was all she was in the story anyway, a disposable cannon-fodder side character, nothing more than a stepping stone on Sebastian Blackwell and Melody Sinclair’s road to romance.

Vivienne was so mad she wanted to flip the table. If this world had handed her a script where she was doomed from the start, then what was the point of dragging her here? Just to sit around and wait for death?

Even though she had cursed the male and female leads a thousand times over in her head, she still knew when to fold and chose survival.

Wasn’t the plot asking for one thing only—that she disappear on her own and stop getting in the way of the leads’ development?

Fine.

She’d step aside like a good little extra.

Her survival rule was dead simple: follow the plot honestly to the end, and Heaven’s Will should send her home.

As for becoming a widow, to Vivienne, that was pure stray-bullet damage.

Before the main plot officially began, timid as she was, she stayed low-key and obedient, just going to college like normal.

Honestly, life in that scholarly family wasn’t bad. Sure, they weren’t on the male lead’s family level, but her parents doted on her a lot.

Since her life had been smooth enough, why would she go looking for trouble by trying to fight fate?

Then everything went sideways in her sophomore year.

That was when her husband found her.

He was two years older than her, a senior in his fourth year. His name was Elliot Yale.

She only vaguely knew that his background was anything but ordinary. At the very least, crushing the Calloway family would’ve been easy work for him.

But Vivienne didn’t dare stray from the plotline, so when Elliot confessed, she turned him down without hesitation.

Worse, her old spoiled temper slipped out for a second, and she humiliated him hard, mocking him for reaching way above his station, like some delusional toad dreaming of the swan.

Who would’ve thought the guy was completely insane?

He actually dared to kidnap her.

And then he locked her up.

He even used her family against her, flat-out saying that if she didn’t obey, the whole Calloway family would be wiped off the map.

Vivienne panicked again. She was scared, scared of dying just like that, and even more scared of dragging her current parents down with her.

So in the end, she gave in and stayed with him. She didn’t like him, not even a little, and from that moment on, her life turned into pure hell.

Little by little, under the man’s constant threats and pressure, she learned how to behave, how to be obedient.

But who could’ve guessed that after only half a year together, that lunatic would force her into marriage too. She came up with excuse after excuse, tried every way she could to dodge it, but none of it worked.

And just like that, the two of them ended up standing in a wedding hall. Through all of this, Vivienne’s parents knew absolutely nothing.

They even thought she had found the one.

In their eyes, she was marrying a man with a flawless family background, outstanding ability, a handsome face, and a gentle, considerate personality.

They liked that fake, polished husband of hers a lot. Only Vivienne knew how, in countless dead-of-night hours, she had been tortured by him.

Just when Vivienne thought this was what the rest of her life would look like, her husband suddenly died.

He had been on a business trip, and his private plane exploded mid-flight. Plane destroyed, no one survived.

She didn’t even stay for the man’s funeral before she ran.