Awakening, I’m Actually a Cannon Fodder Villain?
Lin Jin opened his eyes groggily. Above him was an unfamiliar ceiling, stark white and cold.
A faint, pungent smell lingered beneath his nose. It took him a moment to realize it was the unmistakable scent of disinfectant that never seemed to leave a hospital.
Lin Jin tried to sit up, only to find his whole body weak and aching. He couldn’t even make his fingers move.
Then he sensed something strange beside him. A moment later, two figures came into view from the left.
His parents.
Father Lin’s hair was neatly combed, and he wore a tailored suit. Mother Lin had on impeccable makeup and an equally expensive designer outfit, her earrings and necklace glittering.
They looked down at Lin Jin with stiff, expressionless faces.
He knew that look well. Sometimes at home, he would feel someone watching him and catch sight of Father or Mother Lin wearing that very expression in a mirror, a pane of glass, or some polished steel surface. But whenever he turned around, they would already have looked away.
He wanted to ask them what was going on, but his lips only trembled faintly. Not a sound came out.
He didn’t need to ask. Father Lin spoke in a flat voice. “Your brother needs a kidney to save his life. We’re taking one of yours for the transplant. Just bear with it.”
Lin Jin: “?”
Brother? Kidney? Transplant? What was this supposed to mean…?
While Lin Jin was trying to make sense of it, another person came into view from the right.
He was a young man in a custom-tailored casual outfit every bit as expensive as the Lins’. His face was just as rigid, his gaze cold as he looked down at Lin Jin.
Lin Jin moved the only part of himself he could control, his eyes, and looked over. His confusion only deepened. He didn’t know this man.
The young man spoke, his tone even harsher than Father Lin’s. “Your whole purpose in life is to save him.”
Lin Jin: “…”
The man looked perfectly normal, but the second he opened his mouth, out came a line so melodramatic it could make your ears burn. Lin Jin wondered if his mental age was even half his actual age.
A clatter sounded nearby, like a sliding door being pulled open, followed by footsteps.
Soon, a doctor wearing a mask appeared in Lin Jin’s field of vision.
The doctor nodded to Father and Mother Lin and the young man, then turned and said, “Take him to the operating room.”
The next moment, Lin Jin felt the bed beneath him start moving, its wheels squeaking against the floor.
The operating room was close by. Before long, someone transferred him from the bed to the operating table, and a nurse began fussing over him.
He couldn’t turn his head, and his view was limited, but he could still make out the spacious operating room. Once the attendants who had brought him in wheeled the bed away, only a doctor and a nurse remained to prepare for surgery.
A thought occurred to Lin Jin. He wanted to laugh, but he couldn’t even make his lips curl.
Soon, the doctor came over and fitted a clear mask over his nose and mouth. Lin Jin’s eyelids grew heavier and heavier, until at last he could no longer keep them open. They slowly closed…
*
Lin Jin’s eyes flew open. He quickly rolled over and sat up, his back drenched in cold sweat, a chill running through him.
That nightmare!
After that…
The doctor had pulled off the clear mask and patted his face. A muffled voice came from behind the surgical mask. “That’s what you get for crossing Young Master Huo. You won’t be keeping either kidney.”
On another operating table lay someone who bore a fair resemblance to him: his younger brother, Lin You, whom their parents had treasured like the apple of their eye since childhood.
The doctor and nurse had been bribed to remove both of Lin Jin’s kidneys and transplant them into Lin You.
What happened after that had nothing to do with Lin Jin anymore.
But, strangely, he had dreamed what came next.
When the operation was over, Lin You was wheeled out. Young Master Huo, waiting outside, immediately hurried after the bed.
Father and Mother Lin started to follow, but the doctor stopped them.
Speaking hoarsely through his mask, the doctor said, “The donor suddenly suffered a drug allergy reaction during surgery. I did everything I could, but… I’m sorry for your loss.”
Father and Mother Lin didn’t so much as twitch an eyebrow. Their faces were once again stiff and expressionless, completely unlike the worry they had shown for Lin You moments earlier. Perhaps they had known all along how this would end.
Father Lin only nodded and said blandly, “Take him to the morgue. I’ll have someone handle the rest.”
Mother Lin couldn’t be bothered to listen any longer. “How is Youyou?”
“You have nothing to worry about,” the doctor replied. “The operation was a complete success, and the patient is responding well. As long as we keep the rejection under control, he should recover to the point where he’ll be almost indistinguishable from a healthy person. You can go see him outside the ICU now.”
Father and Mother Lin’s expressions visibly softened. They left together.
Remembering it, Lin Jin curled his lips in a mocking smile. Those were his parents.
Lin You would always be their darling. As for Lin Jin, they hadn’t even considered going to look at his body.
He pressed a hand to his chest. The shock of waking from the nightmare had passed, and now, thinking back on it, his heartbeat was steady.
That made sense. In all his twenty-five years, he had never felt any affection from those two. Without expectations, there was nothing to be hurt by.
What shocked him more was the rest of the dream. The world he lived in was apparently a story, and he was just a supporting character in it.
Lin Jin furrowed his brow slightly and closed his eyes, carefully absorbing the information.
*
It was an everyone’s-darling heartthrob novel, and the male lead (bottom) was Lin Jin’s younger brother, Lin You.
Lin You’s protagonist halo was incredibly powerful. Every character in the story who wasn’t a villain was predisposed to adore him. His parents’ doting was a given. At school, he was the teachers’ favorite and the most popular boy among his classmates. People were always rushing to do things for him.
After graduating from university, Lin You debuted as an idol. Along with gaining countless fans, he also met plenty of talented young men, and naturally became the apple of their eye. With people from every corner looking out for him, Lin You’s career went smoothly, and he became famous all across the country.
Of course, no story could be without its twists. As was standard, one or two villains would show up now and then to bully Lin You. But Lin You didn’t have to worry about any of that. His knight squad always stepped in and took care of every problem for him.
And Lin Jin was one of the cannon fodder characters sent in to be humiliated by Lin You.
As Lin You’s biological older brother, Lin Jin was one of the earlier and more prominent cannon fodder characters to appear. More importantly, he was the one who introduced the story’s other lead, Huo Jianting, the male lead (top).
Huo Jianting was Lin Jin’s fiancé.
In the novel, Lin Jin was starved for affection. When he brought his fiancé home for dinner, he went on and on about the benefits of an alliance between the Lin and Huo families, hoping to get his parents to pay attention to him. What he didn’t know was that he was acting as a matchmaker for the two leads. His parents also thought it would be better to have Lin You marry into the Huo family instead.
That dinner set Lin Jin on the path to misery.
Lin You and Huo Jianting fell in love at first sight. Before long, Huo Jianting confessed to Lin Jin that he had fallen for Lin You and asked to end their engagement, but Lin Jin refused, no matter what.
Lin Jin not only clung to his engagement to Huo Jianting, but also began building up his influence in Lin Group, trying to sideline Father Lin and take full control. After all, he had been personally groomed as a successor by the previous chairman. Once he started making moves, Father Lin was no match for him.
To appease Lin Jin, Lin You had no choice but to leave home for a while and make his own way. Huo Jianting continued to endure their engagement, able to see Lin You only in secret. Naturally, this made him hate Lin Jin.
In the end, Huo Jianting and Father Lin joined forces and crushed Lin Jin’s faction within Lin Group. When Lin You fell ill and needed a kidney transplant, Huo Jianting persuaded Father and Mother Lin to help him abduct Lin Jin, then took the opportunity to bribe the doctor and have Lin Jin die on the operating table.
*
After sorting through all the details of the story, Lin Jin opened his eyes. His first reaction was sheer exasperation. He refused to accept that the “Lin Jin” in the novel, who spent the entire story acting like an idiot, was supposed to be him.
And Huo Jianting. Ending an engagement only required a public announcement. It wasn’t as if “Lin Jin” had to press his thumbprint on anything. All the humiliation Huo Jianting supposedly endured in the novel was a joke.
The two leads’ relationship had been illogically muddled into a secret relationship, purely to make it easier for Lin You to flirt with all kinds of talented young men later on.
Almost every elite man fell in love with Lin You at first sight. Lin You, meanwhile, calmly enjoyed the male supporting characters’ devotion, all while being touched by their “sincere friendship.” Now and then, things would get a little too close and leave him blushing, but afterward he would tell himself, “That was just an accident. The one I love is Jianting.”
Remembering that, Lin Jin gave another mocking smile.
That menace Huo Jianting might have been devoted, but in the end he still never got to be with Lin You openly. Just as they were about to make their relationship public, the author stopped updating.
The author had written every male supporting character so well that each one had a group of readers rooting for him. Huo Jianting had been established from the beginning as the official male lead, but his past engagement was a “blemish,” and his methods were too ruthless for some readers’ tastes. By the end, fans of the different pairings were tearing each other apart in the comments. The author got so fed up with the fighting that they abandoned the story altogether.
Lin Jin wasn’t the least bit interested in how the two leads’ relationship ultimately turned out. What puzzled him was something else: why couldn’t he remember Huo Jianting at all?
In the novel, “Lin Jin” made his appearance a month after Lin Group signed a contract with one of the Huo family’s subsidiaries.
Lin Jin remembered signing that contract a little over a month ago. In other words, the timing now roughly matched the point in the story when he appeared with his fiancé.
As far as Lin Jin was concerned, the contract hadn’t been anything particularly important. He remembered that he hadn’t even negotiated it himself. He had simply given it a final review and signed on the dotted line. As for the representative who had signed on the other side, he couldn’t remember at all.
The novel hadn’t said anything about the contract’s details or why Lin Jin and Huo Jianting were engaged.
Could it all have been a nonsensical nightmare, and was he not actually a character in a story?
But everything in the dream had felt terrifyingly real. The sensations were still etched clearly in his mind: the helplessness of lying in bed unable to move, and the suffocating pressure of the mask clamped over his nose and mouth.
Lin Jin slowly lay back down and stared at the familiar light fixture on the ceiling, confirming once more that he was in the room where he had lived since childhood.
Today was the first anniversary of his grandfather’s death. After visiting his grandfather’s grave alone that afternoon, Lin Jin had returned home feeling sleepy and gone to bed in his room. Then he’d had that bizarre dream.
Was his grandfather protecting him?