Shen Yuan’s hand froze, the spoon hovering mid-air.
Here it was.
The question she dreaded most.
She could explain looking for a job.
She could explain paying back the money.
She could explain not wanting to use her life-saving favor to trap him anymore.
But she couldn’t explain why a person would become someone else overnight.
She couldn’t say that the original Shen Yuan was already gone.
She couldn’t say she was just an unlucky worker who had transmigrated into a book.
Saying any of that out loud would only make her look like a madwoman.
Shen Yuan set down her bowl.
“People always have regrets.”
Xu Anran looked at her. “Do you have regrets?”
“Yes.”
“What do you regret?” he pressed.
Shen Yuan looked up.
There was still lingering exhaustion from her illness in her eyes, but no evasion.
“I regret everything I did before.”
Xu Anran felt a stir in his chest.
When she said those words, there was no trace of performance.
No tears either.
She was just calm.
So calm it was as if she had already sentenced herself.
“Including me?” Xu Anran asked.
Shen Yuan froze.
Xu Anran stared at her. “Do you regret keeping me here?”
Shen Yuan lowered her eyes.
“Yes.”
That single word fell, and the room suddenly went terrifyingly quiet.
Xu Anran’s fingertips tightened.
He should have felt relieved.
She had finally admitted it.
She regretted it.
She didn’t want to trap him anymore.
But why—why did hearing that make his chest feel so unbearably tight?
Shen Yuan continued, “If I could start over, I wouldn’t have done any of it.”
Her voice was soft.
“I wouldn’t have used my favor to pressure you.”
“I wouldn’t have spent your money.”
“I wouldn’t have made you do things you didn’t want to do.”
“And I wouldn’t have kept you here.”
Every sentence was not a defense of herself.
Xu Anran could tell.
She wasn’t asking for forgiveness.
She was laying out the past piece by piece, and owning every single one.
Xu Anran looked at her and found himself momentarily speechless.
She stated everything clearly.
It didn’t sound like an apology.
It sounded like a confession.
Xu Anran’s voice turned cold. “Does saying all this now even matter?”
Shen Yuan nodded. “Maybe not.”
She actually admitted it.
“But it’s all I can do.”
Xu Anran suddenly felt restless.
Before, when she was unreasonable, he was annoyed.
Now that she was too reasonable, he was even more annoyed.
She was as sharp as a knife.
Every word was cutting away the past.
And cutting into him too.
He stood up. “Whatever you say.”
Shen Yuan didn’t stop him.
She just placed the bowl back on the coffee table.
“Get some rest.”
Xu Anran’s footsteps halted.
He didn’t answer.
He walked to the bedroom door and gripped the handle.
In that moment, he actually wanted to turn around.
To ask her if the pain was still bad.
To ask her if she needed to go to the hospital.
And to ask her if she planned to leave once she’d paid everything back.
But the words reached his lips and were swallowed back down.
He wasn’t sure if Shen Yuan had truly changed.
Xu Anran closed his eyes briefly, and in the end, said nothing.
The door closed.
…
Hearing the door shut, Shen Yuan leaned back against the sofa and slowly closed her eyes.
She was exhausted from the pain.
But Xu Anran’s question—”Why did you suddenly change?”—kept echoing in her ears.
Why?
Because she wasn’t her.
Because she couldn’t keep making the same mistakes.
Because she wanted to live.
And she wanted him to be free too.
In the middle of the night, the medicine finally took effect.
The pain in her stomach gradually receded.
But Shen Yuan didn’t sleep peacefully.
She dreamed of the plot from the original book.
She dreamed of Xu Anran regaining his memory, dreamed of him returning to the Xu family to resume his life as the young master.
She also dreamed of Xu Anran coming to settle accounts with her.
She denied it hysterically, but Xu Anran still wouldn’t let her go…
Until finally, she was strangled with a rope by the fraudsters in northern Myanmar…
“Don’t!”
She jolted awake, cold sweat instantly soaking her clothes.
She gulped down several mouthfuls of water before the suffocating sensation slowly subsided.
She steadied herself and looked around.
The living room was still quiet, the bedroom door closed.
The rain outside had stopped, and a faint sliver of moonlight filtered through the clouds.
Shen Yuan stared out the window, sitting for a long time, before finally reaching into the drawer to pull out a notebook.
She flipped to the first page.
It was covered in dense rows of numbers.
This was the account she had compiled over the past few days.
The original body had spent far too much of Xu Anran’s money.
Some records could be traced through bank transfers; others could only be estimated from memory and chat logs.
She knew this debt couldn’t be wiped clean just by paying it back.
But money was the only thing she could repay right now.
Shen Yuan picked up her pen and added today’s medicine and congee.
After writing down the amounts, she noted the date beside them.
By the time she finished, she couldn’t hold on any longer.
Her stomach still ached faintly, and her eyelids were heavy.
She meant to put the notebook away, but drowsiness washed over her, and her fingers went slack, leaving the notebook spread open on the table.
She fell asleep leaning against the sofa.
…
The next morning.
When Xu Anran was heading out, he noticed a notebook spread open on the living room table.
Shen Yuan was still asleep—she must have been too exhausted from the pain last night to put it away.
He shouldn’t have looked.
But the dense rows of numbers on the page were too conspicuous.
Xu Anran paused mid-step.
He lowered his gaze and glanced at it.
The first page read:
【Debt to Xu Anran: Itemized List.】
Below were entries, one by one.
Clothes.
Cosmetics.
Rent.
Living expenses.
Transfers.
Each item had an amount after it.
The total was circled in red ink.
Thirty-seven thousand six hundred forty.
Below that was another line.
【Goal: Pay off within six months.】
Xu Anran stared at that line for a long time without moving.
So she really had been keeping track.