The truck came hurtling straight at her.
The high beams were blinding, impossible to look at.
A deafening crash split the air.
Amid the shriek of brakes and the shatter of glass, a pain beyond anything she had ever known tore through her body. Wen Li’s vision went black, and her consciousness plunged into total darkness.
In the pitch-black void, she saw a glowing book.
A line of large text was printed across the cover. Trending Out of Nowhere! The D-List Actress Went Viral After a Contract Romance!
Wen Li stared at it.
Wasn’t this exactly the kind of trashy webnovel I love?
But ever since she’d married Ji Zongting, she rarely read novels like this anymore. Her phone’s reading apps were filled with classics and business titles. In short, she hadn’t touched a webnovel in years.
She hadn’t expected webnovel titles to have grown so explosive, so dramatic, so impossible to ignore. It made her want to flip it open and start reading on the spot.
No sooner had the thought crossed her mind than the book opened on its own. Her perspective drifted uncontrollably onto the pages, and she began to read.
She didn’t know how much time had passed. Eventually, Wen Li finished the novel, whose title was riveting and whose content even more so.
Only then did she realize. She had already died.
In that car crash not long ago.
She had been living inside this book all along.
She was a nameless cannon fodder NPC in the book.
So why had I died?
Because of her husband. Her husband in name only.
Ji Zongting, heir to the Ji Group, was the novel’s arch-villain, a man who could summon clouds and rain with a turn of his hand.
This was a standard entertainment-industry sweet-pampering novel.
The female lead was a D-list actress who had refused the unspoken casting-couch rules and been shelved for it. By chance, she met the male lead, a rising tech magnate. He fell for her at first sight and proposed a contract romance to get close to her. He protected her at every turn while feeding her resources. In the end, she rose to become a film empress of the entertainment world. Through his repeated rescues, she came to understand his feelings, and the two of them walked happily into the sunset together.
The arch-villain Ji Zongting was a business titan who, in the middle-to-late part of the novel, inexplicably began to move against the male lead.
The male lead came from an ordinary background and had started with nothing. He had built his company from the ground up on his own. Naturally, he was no match for the arch-villain, a man worth trillions and the heir to a conglomerate. The male lead was brutally crushed, driven to the brink of bankruptcy.
By then, the female lead had fallen in love with him. She offered up her own acting fees to ease the company’s crisis. In hardship, their true feelings came through. The male lead picked himself back up, determined to rise again.
By any normal logic, with the power and status Ji Zongting commanded, the male and female leads could never have hoped to bring him down in a lifetime. But just then, Ji Zongting got into a car accident.
A single car crash left the arch-villain in a vegetative state. He was knocked offline on the spot. Happy ending.
When Wen Li reached this part, she wanted nothing more than to curse the author out.
Could the author spare a single thought for the cannon fodder’s life?
I was in that car too!
Her. Wen Li.
Her entire presence in the book amounted to a single line.
According to reports, at 18:32 on the evening of [date], a traffic accident occurred on the elevated highway in Haishi. Three people died: Ji Group heir Ji Zongting, his wife, and his assistant…
Fuck!
Wen Li couldn’t help but curse.
Fine, she was cannon fodder. She couldn’t be bothered to act out an idol drama with the male and female leads anyway. But what the hell was this, getting dragged to death for no reason?!
If the arch-villain was killed off by the plot, was it really necessary for her, a wife in name only with no feelings involved, to be buried along with him?
I died so unjustly! So unjustly!
If she’d known, she wouldn’t have gone with Ji Zongting to that banquet that day.
But it was too late now. Nothing she said could change it.
She was already dead.
Wen Li was filled with frustration, anger, and resentment. It pressed down on her until her vision swam with black spots.
Then, faintly, a gentle voice called out beside her ear.
“Madam? Madam Ji?”
Wen Li’s eyes flew open, and she jerked upright.
“Madam Ji, you’re awake.”
The soft female voice suddenly became clear.
Wen Li turned her head stiffly and met a familiar round face.
Her pupils contracted.
“Xu Fei?”
The round-faced woman was perfectly pleasant, greeting her with a smile. “Sorry for waking you. It’s time for your manicure. What design would you like?”
Xu Fei set a design catalog in front of Wen Li.
Wen Li stared blankly at her, then at the nail art catalog in her hand.
Xu Fei was the personal assistant Ji Zongting had arranged for Wen Li after she married into the Ji family. She didn’t just do nails. She also handled styling, makeup, and wardrobe coordination. Basically, every time Wen Li went out, she’d have Xu Fei come over to do her styling. Even when she stayed in, Xu Fei would come by on schedule to bring her the latest luxury bags, clothes, and accessories each season. In plain terms, Xu Fei was the private stylist the Ji family had hired for the lady of the house.
But Wen Li remembered that around the third year of her marriage, Xu Fei had temporarily resigned to get married and have a child. After that, her stylist had been replaced by Song Qing.
So why was Xu Fei here now?
Was I dreaming?
Wen Li stared blankly at Xu Fei for a full half minute. Until Xu Fei’s cheeks flushed under the stare and she mumbled, “Madam, is there something on my face?”
No wonder she blushed. Madam Ji’s beauty surpassed anyone Xu Fei had ever seen.
Wen Li was breathtakingly beautiful.
Her brows and eyes were naturally vivid. Her brows were dark without a trace of pencil, her lashes black without a touch of dye. She had a pair of peach-blossom eyes with thick lashes, the outer corners tilting slightly upward, carrying a lazy, aloof charm. Her nose was high and delicate, her lips a natural vivid red. Against skin as white as porcelain, she looked like a red plum blossom blooming in snow.
Her beauty was of the aggressively striking kind. As if she had plundered all the light around her, leaving only a breathtaking sweep of vivid color.
Even now, bare-faced and without a trace of makeup, her skin was so white it was nearly translucent, so fine that not a single pore was visible. Just startled awake from a deep sleep, her black hair spilled over her shoulders, making her skin look even whiter than snow.
Since she was at home, Wen Li wore only a loose silk dress. The thin fabric clung softly to her, tracing the curves of her figure. Her collarbones were slender and straight, her shoulders and neck as graceful as a swan’s. The stretch of forearm exposed was white as snow, bone and flesh in perfect proportion. It looked cool to the touch. Truly skin like ice, bones like jade.
Xu Fei had always thought that a man like Ji Zongting, cold and severe and deep, a man of immense power who probably saw only profit and territory, was not the type to be swayed by beauty.
But the first time she saw Wen Li, that notion was completely erased.
A beauty like this belonged with a man like that. In ancient times, she would have been a beauty who could ruin a kingdom. She would have been matched with an emperor who held the world in his palm. Now she was matched with the Ji family’s heir, and it seemed only natural.
Never mind the rumors outside, saying this Madam Ji came from an ordinary background, that her family was no match for the Ji family. Xu Fei found such talk laughable.
With a face like that, what did family background matter?