Chapter 1: The Three-Day Deadline (And One Very Confused Villain)
[Host consciousness loading…]
[0%… 14%… 47%… 99%… 100%. Host consciousness loading complete.]
[Host Name: Xie Yu.]
[Book loading…]
[Book Title: "Imprisoned Relationship"]
[Book Genre: Modern, Pure Love, Protagonist-Abuse, Forced, **, **, beep— beep beep—]
A harsh screech of static tore through the air like a cat being sat on.
The system hiccupped.
[System detected violation words. Automatically replaced with mosaics for your comfort and legal protection.]
Xie Yu, brand new employee of the Transmigration Bureau, recently deceased via sudden cardiac arrest at the tragically young age of twenty-six while eating instant noodles at his desk, rubbed his aching temples and sat up.
Bubbles rioted off his body. A small waterfall cascaded over the marble rim of the bathtub and splashed across the floor.
He was lying in a bathtub.
A very expensive bathtub, in a very expensive bathroom, in what his newly inherited memories helpfully informed him was the penthouse suite of the Grand Jiang Hotel — five stars, floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the entire Jiang City skyline, neon lights bleeding warm gold across the horizon, imported stone floors that cost more per square meter than his old apartment's monthly rent.
The bathtub alone probably cost six figures.
Xie Yu sat there dripping in rose-scented essential oil bubbles and stared at the fluorescent blue system panel floating in the humid air in front of him.
"So," he said. "Let me confirm. I died. A system found me. I agreed to roleplay as an NPC villain in a protagonist-abuse novel. And in exchange, I get resurrected and go home."
[Correct, Host.]
"And the novel is called 'Imprisoned Relationship.'"
[Correct.]
"And these—" he waved at the wall of black squares currently occupying most of the plot summary— "are all censored."
[The Transmigration Bureau operates under a strict content policy. Please understand.]
Xie Yu had spent twenty minutes reading the plot summary. He had found, through dedicated archaeological effort, enough un-mosaic-ed text to piece together the following:
One. The female protagonist of this novel was named Shen Cixi. Poor, brilliant, working three part-time jobs to fund her grandmother's medical treatment, scholarship student at University A, the kind of person who made everyone around her feel personally ashamed of their life choices.
Two. The villain of this novel — his role — was named Xie Yu. Rich, idle, profoundly useless by design, spent his days racing cars and clubbing and being the cautionary tale parents told their children about. His father, Xie Yuanshan, had hired Shen Cixi as a "study companion" to babysit his disaster of a son. Xie Yu had responded to this by intercepting Shen Cixi at the school gate and presenting her with something called a "Sugar Baby Agreement" full of conditions that were, judging by the density of the mosaics, deeply unpleasant.
Three. The first half of the novel involved Xie Yu doing many, many censored things to Shen Cixi, which the system had helpfully blacked out entirely, leaving Xie Yu with absolutely no script to work from.
Four. The second half of the novel involved Shen Cixi's revenge arc, where she rose through Xie Yuanshan's company after his death, had Xie Yu detained at this very hotel, broke his fingers one by one in front of this very floor-to-ceiling window, forged his medical records, and had him committed to a mental institution for the final twenty years of his life until he died.
Xie Yu read this last part twice.
Then he looked at his own fingers, currently intact and pruning slightly from the bathwater.
"And the system will block my pain receptors when she breaks my fingers," he said.
[Correct.]
"And I only need to show up at the mental institution when she visits."
[Correct. The rest of the time, Host may live normally.]
"Okay." Xie Yu exhaled. "Okay. So I just need to survive the first half of the plot, go abroad, come back, get my fingers theatrically broken, check into the mental institution occasionally, and then I'm done and I get resurrected."
[A concise summary, yes.]
"The problem," Xie Yu said, standing up and reaching for the bathrobe hanging on the heated towel rail, "is that I have absolutely no idea what I'm supposed to do in the first half because you've censored every single line of dialogue."
The system made a sound that, had it been a person, would have been a guilty cough.
[I am unable to display content that violates public order and good customs.]
"You've censored the word 'sugar.'"
[That particular usage of 'sugar' was contextually—]
"You've censored the word 'room.'"
[In conjunction with the surrounding text, the word 'room' became—]
"The contract heading is a mosaic."
The system went quiet.
Xie Yu pulled the bathrobe belt tight and stared at the floating panel with the patience of a man who had already died once today and had very little left to lose. "What can you actually tell me."
[Xie Yu's character is an arrogant, unrestrained playboy with no redeeming qualities as written. Host does not need to match the novel precisely. Simply act in that general direction. You are the villain NPC. The protagonist is meant to suffer. Whatever you do should further that narrative.]
"Right." Xie Yu looked at himself in the enormous gilded bathroom mirror. The Original Host's face looked back at him — sharp features, dark eyes, expensive haircut still somehow perfectly tousled despite having just been in a bathtub. The kind of face that made it very easy to believe he'd never worked a day in his life.
At least the costume was convincing.
[Host,] the system chimed. [Plot alert. Estimated time until protagonist arrival: four minutes.]
Xie Yu froze.
"Four minutes?"
[She is currently in the elevator.]
"I thought I had an hour—"
[She arrived early. She has been sitting in the hotel lobby for forty-seven minutes. She appears to have spent the time rehearsing something.]
Xie Yu stared at the system panel with the hollow expression of a man watching a tsunami approach while standing on a beach with no shoes on. He had been planning to spend this hour carefully constructing a characterization. A believable arc. Some working villain lines.
He had four minutes and a bathrobe.
"Okay," he said, voice very calm. "Okay. Arrogant. Unrestrained. Playboy. No redeeming qualities. I can do this."
He could absolutely not do this.
He had been, in his previous life, a mid-level civil servant at the Transmigration Bureau who ate convenience store sushi for lunch and watered his office succulent every Thursday. The most morally questionable thing he had ever done was once take the last parking spot at a supermarket when an elderly woman had been waiting.
He had felt bad about it for three years.
Now he was supposed to convincingly portray a man who handed a college student a contract full of mosaic-worthy conditions and said you'd better think it through.
[Two minutes.]
Xie Yu walked out of the bathroom into the main suite. The penthouse was enormous — high ceilings, modern furniture in tones of charcoal and ivory, a living area big enough to park several of the sports cars the Original Host apparently owned. The city spread out beyond the floor-to-ceiling windows like a lit painting.
He surveyed his options.
Option one: sit on the sofa like a normal person.
No. Too approachable.
Option two: stand dramatically by the window.
...That was exactly what a villain in a novel would do.
Xie Yu walked to the window and stood in front of it, arms loosely at his sides, looking out at the city. The neon lights were very cooperative. He looked, objectively, quite menacing.
[One minute.]
He arranged his face into what he hoped read as cold disdain and not anxiety-induced constipation.
A knock at the door.
Xie Yu did not move.
The knock came again, polite but firm.
He waited three seconds the way he imagined a person who was not nervous at all would wait, then said, in the flattest, most disinterested voice he could produce:
"It's open."
The door opened.
And Shen Cixi walked in.
Xie Yu had read the novel's description of her. It had said: ordinary-looking, quiet, unremarkable at first glance. He had formed a mental image accordingly.
The mental image was immediately fired.
The girl who stepped through the doorway was wearing a white shirt that had been washed until it had taken on a slightly grey tint and dark slacks that had clearly seen better semesters. Her hair was pulled back neatly. She was carrying a paper document folder held in both hands, held the way someone holds something they have made a decision about and are not allowing themselves to reconsider.
She was — the Original Host's memories supplied this automatically — undeniably pretty. The kind of pretty that didn't announce itself, that lived quietly in the line of a jaw and the steadiness of dark eyes. She looked like a person who had been through something difficult and was not going to mention it.
She stepped into the suite and took in the penthouse with one sweeping glance. Something moved in her expression — so fast Xie Yu almost missed it — before going still again.
Then she looked at him.
Xie Yu stood by the window in his bathrobe and tried to radiate villain energy.
Shen Cixi looked at him for a long, steady moment.
She walked forward, crossed the living area without hesitation, and set the document folder on the coffee table between them with a soft, definitive sound.
"I've signed it," she said.
Her voice was very calm. The kind of calm that took practice.
Xie Yu looked down at the folder.
He looked at her.
She met his eyes without looking away.
Right. Okay. She had signed it. He had to respond to that. He had to say something that an arrogant, unrestrained villain would say to a girl who had just handed over control of her own dignity on a piece of paper.
In the novel, this was presumably where a large block of mosaic-ed dialogue occurred.
Xie Yu had no mosaic.
He had a bathrobe and a civil servant's conscience.
"..." he said.
Shen Cixi waited.
"Good," Xie Yu said finally, because it was the most neutral villain-adjacent word he could find in the blank panic of his brain. He reached out and picked up the folder without opening it. Tilted it slightly in his hand the way he imagined a powerful person would do with paperwork. "You're smarter than you look."
He immediately wanted to retroactively delete himself from existence.
You're smarter than you look. What was that. What was that sentence. Was that a villain line. Was that something a human being said.
Something shifted in Shen Cixi's expression. It was very small and gone so quickly he couldn't read it.
"Are the conditions the same as what's written?" she asked.
"Yes," Xie Yu said, because he had no idea what was written and could not admit this.
She nodded once. Then she said, "There's one clause I want to amend."
Xie Yu looked at her.
Most people, he suspected, did not walk into the penthouse suite of Jiang City's top playboy villain and immediately start negotiating amendments to his contract. Most people, based on the emotional tenor of the novel's unreadable first half, were probably too shaken to speak.
Shen Cixi was looking at him the way someone looks at a math problem they intend to solve.
"...What clause," Xie Yu said.
She opened the folder — apparently she had memorized the exact page — and pointed to a section buried somewhere near the middle. He glanced at it. Mosaic. Obviously.
"This one," she said.
Xie Yu stared at the column of black squares. He had approximately no idea what it said.
"What about it," he said, because refusing to read aloud the thing you cannot see was technically not a lie.
"I want a written guarantee that my grandmother's volunteer spot in the trial is secured before I fulfill this condition." Her eyes came back up to his. "Not after. Before."
Xie Yu blinked.
A pause stretched between them.
In the novel, the protagonist was not supposed to be negotiating. She was supposed to be suffering. She was supposed to be on the back foot, trembling, barely holding herself together, so that the narrative weight of her eventual revenge would land properly.
She was not supposed to be looking at him like she was performing a quiet, internal cost-benefit analysis.
"You're negotiating," Xie Yu said, somewhat involuntarily.
"Yes," Shen Cixi said. "Is that a problem?"
Xie Yu looked at her. He looked at the contract folder. He looked at the floor-to-ceiling window and the glittering city beyond it, which continued to be atmospherically lit and completely unhelpful.
He was the villain. She was supposed to be in a worse position than him. Narratively, logically, by every law of the protagonist-abuse genre, he should have laughed at her, said something cutting, and made it clear she had no leverage.
Except she had the leverage of his needing to complete this plot, and she was apparently aware that she had leverage, and she was using it with the calm of someone who had been conserving their energy for a very long time specifically for this moment.
"Fine," Xie Yu said.
Shen Cixi nodded. If she was surprised, she did not show it.
"I'll have the guarantee letter drafted tomorrow," he continued, because he was committed now and the villain of this story would phrase it like he was doing her a favor. "Don't mistake that for generosity."
"I won't," she said.
"You can leave."
She picked up the unsigned amendment page from the folder—apparently she had prepared one—and set it on the table in front of him. "I'll need your signature on this one first."
Xie Yu stared at the paper.
Then he picked up the pen from the coffee table, because there was a pen on the coffee table, presumably because the Original Host had left it there, and signed his name where she'd indicated.
Shen Cixi picked it up. Folded it twice. Put it in the pocket of her grey-white shirt.
Then she turned and walked to the door.
Xie Yu watched her go with the vague sensation of a person who had intended to play chess and had instead found themselves in a different game without fully understanding when the rules changed.
At the door, she paused.
She did not turn around.
"The study sessions start Monday," she said. "I'll be here at nine."
And then she left.
The door clicked shut behind her with a very soft, very final sound.
Xie Yu stood in the empty penthouse holding a document folder he couldn't fully read and thought about what had just happened.
[Plot progression: 3%.] The system chimed pleasantly. [Protagonist has accepted the contract. First stage is underway. Well done, Host.]
"She negotiated."
[Yes.]
"She negotiated with the villain."
[She did.]
"Is that in the novel."
A beat.
[...The relevant sections are censored.]
Xie Yu put the folder down on the coffee table. He walked back to the window. He looked at the city.
Something about the way she had looked at him—quietly, steadily, like she was filing information away and had no intention of discarding any of it—sat in the back of his mind the way a small stone sits in a shoe.
He didn't know what she was thinking.
He wasn't sure, in fact, that the novel he'd been given had adequately prepared him for what Shen Cixi was actually like.
Somewhere in the building below him, she was probably in an elevator going down, holding an amendment clause she'd had pre-prepared, tucked in the breast pocket of a washed-out white shirt.
Xie Yu leaned one shoulder against the cool glass and exhaled.
"System," he said.
[Yes, Host?]
"Are you absolutely certain there's nothing useful in those mosaics."
The system made a sound like a machine pretending it hadn't heard the question.
Xie Yu closed his eyes.
Arrogant. Unrestrained. Playboy. No redeeming qualities.
Monday at nine, a girl who had already outmaneuvered him once was going to show up at his door with a study schedule.
This was going to be a very long arc.