The rain lashed against the cracked window of Su Wan's eighth-floor apartment, a rhythmic drumming that matched the hollow ache in her stomach. She sat at her cluttered desk, the blue light of her phone the only thing illuminating the dark, cramped room.
She was currently hate-reading the final chapters of The Fall of the Great Su Family, a web novel that was so poorly written it made her blood boil.
"Useless... absolutely useless," Su Wan hissed, her thumb aggressively scrolling.
In the story, the Matriarch of the Su family was a weak-willed, crying woman who sat by and prayed while her greedy sons sold her grandchildren into slavery and the family estate was burned to the ground by debt collectors.
She reached Chapter 123. The description was agonizingly slow. The Matriarch was lying in a cold, rotting bed, coughing up blood while the building literally began to groan and collapse under the weight of a storm.
"If I were her," Su Wan muttered, "I would have broken my sons' legs before they even thought about selling the kids. How can someone be so pathetic?"
She tossed the phone onto a pile of laundry and reached for the only good thing that had happened to her all year: a crumpled lottery ticket. She had been fired from her job that morning, her landlord had threatened to throw her out by Friday, and her bank account was at zero. This ticket was a desperate, five-dollar gamble.
She pulled up the winning numbers on her laptop.
One match. Two. Three...
Su Wan's breath hitched. Four. Five. Six.
"Three... three hundred million?"
Her voice was a ghostly whisper. Her heart, which had felt like a lead weight for months, suddenly hammered against her ribs. She wasn't just surviving; she was a billionaire. She could buy this whole building. She could buy a hundred buildings.
"I'm moving out," she laughed hysterically, clutching the ticket to her chest as if it were a holy relic. "I'm buying..."
CREAK.
The sound didn't come from her phone. It came from above.
A deep, structural groan echoed through the floorboards. Su Wan looked up, her joy turning to ice. A massive crack webbed across her ceiling. Dust began to rain down like snow.
"No way," she whispered, her eyes widening. "My building... is collapsing?"
It was exactly like the chapter she had just read. The irony was a cruel joke. She had just won 300 million, and now the world was falling on top of her.
CRACK!
A support beam snapped like a toothpick. The lights flickered and died. In the chaos, Su Wan lunged for her desk, her hand reaching out for the lottery ticket that had slipped from her fingers.
"Not now!" she screamed. "Give it back! I haven't even cashed it yet!"
The floor gave way. As Su Wan plummeted into the darkness, her last thought wasn't about her life it was a curse directed at the heavens and the pathetic Matriarch whose death she had just been mocking.
__________________
"The Old Matriarch is dead! The Su family is finally finished!"
The shriek dragged Su Wan back to consciousness. She expected the taste of drywall dust and the sound of sirens. Instead, the air was thick with the cloying, heavy scent of cheap sandalwood and bitter, herbal medicine.
Her head felt like it had been split open with an axe. She tried to move her fingers, but they felt heavy, stiff, and... dry.
"Quiet, you useless girl!" A man's harsh voice barked. "If she's dead, we sell the girl to the Blossom House and the boys to the mines before the debt collectors arrive. We have less than an hour before the Black Tigers get here!"
Su Wan's eyes snapped open.
This was wrong. The ceiling above her wasn't concrete; it was dark, rotting wood carved with intricate, ancient patterns. She was lying on a hard bed draped in moth-eaten red silk.
Blossom House? Black Tigers?
The realization hit her like a physical blow. Those were lines from the novel. Chapter 123.
"Grandma? Grandma, please wake up..." A small, trembling hand clutched her sleeve.
Su Wan looked down and nearly choked. Her hand the one that had been holding a 300-million-dollar ticket seconds ago was wrinkled, skeletal, and pale. A heavy, cracked jade bracelet hung loosely off her bony wrist.
She wasn't in her apartment. She was in the book. And she was the very woman she had just finished cursing.
"Old Madam! You're awake!" A maid gasped, though her face was pale with terror.
Su Wan sat up, the heavy ancient robes weighing her down like a suit of armor. She ignored the gasps of the people in the room. Her mind was a whirlwind of rage and confusion.
"My ticket..." she rasped. Her voice sounded like grinding stones. "Where is it? My three hundred million!"
The room fell into a deathly silence. Two men stood at the door her "sons," Su Ren and Su He. They didn't look like grieving family members; they looked like vultures.
"She's truly gone mad," Su Ren sneered, crossing his arms. "Three hundred million? Mother, the only thing you have is three hundred gold pieces of debt and a family that's about to be sold into slavery. Stop dreaming and give me that jade bracelet. It's the only thing left that's worth a copper."
Su Wan looked at him. Su Ren. The eldest son who, in the novel, would eventually betray the family to their rivals for a bag of silver and a title.
She looked at her reflection in a nearby bronze mirror. A woman in her late fourthes stared back haggard, sharp-featured, and clearly on the brink of death. She had gone from a 23-year-old billionaire-to-be to a bankrupt, dying widow in a "ruined" story.
"Grandma, don't be scared," a little boy whispered. It was Xiao Chen, the only grandchild who remained loyal in the original story. "I'll hide you when the bad men come."
Su Wan looked at the boy, then back at her greedy sons. A cold, familiar fire began to burn in her chest. She had spent her first life being a victim of bad luck. She had just lost a fortune in a building collapse. She wasn't going to lose a second life to these parasites.
"You," Su Wan pointed a trembling, wrinkled finger at Su Ren. Her eyes flashed with a lethal coldness that made the man actually take a step back. "If you mention selling my grandchildren one more time, I will personally ensure you are the first one the debt collectors take to the mines."
She didn't have her lottery ticket. But she had the entire plot of this world memorized in her head, and a modern mind that knew how to make money out of thin air.
If this family is ruined, she thought, gripping the silk sheets with her newfound resolve, then I'll just have to rewrite the ending myself. And I'm going to make it expensive.