The mountain road was smooth and gently sloping. The nanny van drove into the landscaped estate, the canopies of trees lining either side of the road thick as banks of clouds, lush and verdant beneath September’s fine rain.
Duan Feihong spritzed another pump of perfume. The rich scent of roses slowly filled the air.
“When we see them later, remember to greet everyone properly.”
The car had been quiet all the way there. Her sudden voice sounded almost jarring in the silence.
“Your Uncle Huo is a very kind man. He’s no idea how many times better he is than that useless father of yours.”
Ji Jie gave a quiet acknowledgment. Only after she had responded did she register the second half of the sentence, and she fell silent.
“Of course, he has three children, so it might be a little noisy.” Duan Feihong fiddled with her earrings while looking into the mirror. “The eldest has already started his own company. The other two are still in school, just like you. When you meet them later, remember to call them Big Brother and Big Sister. Be sweet about it.”
The driver kept his eyes fixed on the road, completely ignoring the woman’s stream of instructions.
The car entered the villa compound. Duan Feihong couldn’t help sighing again.
“Look at that lawn. It has to be several mu, doesn’t it? And there’s even a swimming pool. You can swim at home to lose weight from now on. Don’t waste the opportunity.”
“…”
Ji Jie said nothing, obediently looking outside.
She was nearly three hundred degrees nearsighted and wasn’t wearing her glasses, so all she could see through the rain-blurred window was a wash of indistinct green.
When they got out of the car, Duan Feihong took her hand and strode toward the main hall with high spirits.
No matter how many rumors were circulating outside, no matter how little others thought of the marriage, in Duan Feihong’s heart, bringing her daughter into Yuzhang Mountain was absolutely one of the high points of her life.
Ji Jie narrowed her eyes and looked up before entering the brilliantly lit mansion.
Indeed.
It was as large as a palace.
Huo Jinge stood beneath the portico waiting for them. He wore a casual suit, his hair carefully styled. Though already past fifty, he was still energetic and impeccably put together. From head to toe, he radiated effortless ease and old-money refinement.
“Jinge.”
Duan Feihong’s face blossomed into a smile. Her imposing air instantly melted into a woman’s delicate charm as she hurried forward and slipped her arm through his.
“Have you been waiting long? Why didn’t you go inside? It’s raining out here.”
Ji Jie paused for a moment, then immediately followed suit.
“Hello, Uncle Huo.”
“Not long. I was worried you two might not be comfortable.”
Huo Jinge patted his beloved’s hand, then turned to his stepdaughter. His gaze was warm.
“Hello. Welcome.”
The girl standing before him was fairly tall, with a sturdy build. Her face, however, was completely bare of makeup, and she looked listless and tired, with an uneasy air about her. Even her expression had the stiff, mechanical quality of someone simply completing a task.
She was probably just shy around strangers.
“This is my daughter, Baoni. She definitely can’t compare with your Xiaoyu.”
Duan Feihong turned around and laughingly scolded her.
“I told you, be more relaxed. From now on, we’re family.”
“Exactly. Don’t be so reserved. Treat this place as your own home.”
Huo Jinge smiled as well. Reassuringly, he reached out and patted her back.
“You’re still young. You can exercise more in the future and it’ll be fine.”
Huo Jinge was actually somewhat surprised.
Most girls her age had already learned how to dress themselves up and wear makeup. His own daughter and her friends were particularly particular about such things.
He had heard Duan Feihong mention this daughter twice before, and the impression he’d formed was that she was a girl who cared quite a bit about her appearance.
He hadn’t expected the real person to look completely bare-faced, with slightly thick, blunt bangs and her hair tied into a low ponytail with a black elastic. She was so plainly dressed that she bordered on dowdy.
Duan Feihong added, “You should learn more from Xiaoyu in the future.”
Ji Jie dutifully said yes and followed the adults into the dining room for dinner.
The household wasn’t noisy at all.
If anything, it was almost unnaturally quiet.
The round dining table was easily large enough to seat more than ten guests, yet tonight only three chairs had been pulled out.
Huo Jinge had her sit between the two of them. He rotated a plate of stir-fried shrimp toward her and said warmly, “Try this. It’s light, so it won’t make you gain weight.”
“Thank you, Uncle Huo.”
Ji Jie picked up two pieces with her chopsticks. When he turned another dish toward her, she took two more.
Seeing how reserved she was, Huo Jinge gave a quiet sigh.
But inwardly, he was quite pleased.
Quiet was good.
At least she would be easier to deal with than the few little hellions he had at home.
After dinner, Ji Jie followed the adults on a brief tour of the house and was shown the absurdly spacious master bedroom.
There, Huo Jinge found a family photograph and began introducing everyone to her.
He had one daughter and two sons. Clearly, however, the family relationships were rather ordinary. Whether they were at school or working, the children generally went about their own business. None of them had come home to have a family dinner with their father and his new wife.
That, too, was a clear signal.
As far as the other members of this family were concerned, she and her mother were not welcome.
They had school the next day, so the adults didn’t keep her for long. The housekeeper was told to take her back to her room to rest.
The moment the door closed behind her, Ji Jie released an almost inaudible sigh of relief.
Her head felt like it was about to explode.
The instant she stepped into the Huo residence, the contents of more than a hundred chapters of a novel had flooded into her mind without warning and begun scrolling through it.
Throughout dinner, she had been forced to read the story inside her head while simultaneously dealing with the adults in front of her.
Now, at last, she was somewhere she could be alone.
Ji Jie leaned against the door, her brows furrowed. She lowered her head and waited.
A moment later, the final page finally vanished.
Exhausted, she let out a sigh, slowly got to her feet, found the bathroom, and went inside.
As hot water poured over her and steam rose around her, her memories returned to a week ago.
It had been the day before she was due for a promotion.
As usual, she had worked overtime until late at night. On her way home, she had gotten into a car accident.
When she opened her eyes again, she had already become Duan Feihong’s daughter.
At first, she had thought she had simply been reborn into someone else’s body.
She hadn’t expected anything quite so outrageous.
She had transmigrated straight into the world of a novel.
It had taken her a full week to accept the reality of it. She knew Duan Feihong would take her into a new marriage, but she hadn’t expected things to move so quickly that she would already be moving into someone else’s home.
And she certainly hadn’t expected that coming here would mean facing a second trial.
After her shower, she felt somewhat better.
Wrapped in a bath towel, Ji Jie walked out and slowly adjusted herself to the reality before her.
Compared with the master bedroom, this guest room was considerably less impressive. Even so, it was already a level of luxury that an ordinary office worker like her had never experienced.
A digital bathroom scale sat beside the full-length mirror.
She stepped onto it and took a look.
She didn’t think she was overweight at all, much less in need of dieting.
It was simply that years of working overtime and eating irregularly had ruined her appetite. Even now, she hadn’t fully adjusted. She had already lost several pounds in the week since arriving.
Her complexion wasn’t particularly good either. It was only after soaking in a hot bath that a healthy flush had returned to her cheeks.
Ji Jie slipped off her towel and quietly admired her well-proportioned, slender body in the mirror.
Not only had she become ten years younger, she had also grown ten centimeters taller, and her skin was smoother and firmer.
Every time she looked in the mirror these past few days, she found herself thinking that perhaps losing the director’s position by a single step wasn’t quite so regrettable after all.
But—
Ji Jie raised her eyes slightly.
In the upper-right corner of her vision floated a line of tiny, translucent text, like a photographic watermark.
【Current — 10/100】
It had been there ever since she woke up.
She had no idea what it meant.
There was no one else around.
Ji Jie cleared her throat.
“System?”
“…”
“Are you there? System. Xiao Du, Xiao Du? Hey, Siri?”
“…”
Wonderful.
She had apparently been assigned a deaf-and-mute system.
Ji Jie accepted the fact with perfect calm.
Being reborn was never supposed to come without a price. Usually, these things came with some kind of strategy mission or task system attached.
She still didn’t know exactly what she was supposed to do, but there was no harm in preparing herself first.
Ji Jie changed into her pajamas and sat down at the desk. She took the newly prescribed glasses from her schoolbag, put them on, and switched on the desk lamp.
She opened a blank notebook.
Using the most primitive method—and, as it turned out, the most useful one—she began writing down every bit of the plot that had flashed through her mind and that she could still remember.
The pale yellow light bathed her face. Her expression was calm and focused.
She didn’t just write down the events. She also drew a relationship chart for several of the complicated families in the novel.
Actually, after reading through the entire novel, her overall impression was—
A bunch of half-grown kids putting on a melodramatic teenage circus.
There was nothing she could do about it. She had been out of school for many years, and it was difficult for her to empathize with the love and hatred of teenage boys and girls.
In this novel, the heroine was Huo Yuxi, the daughter of Huo Jinge and his second wife.
She was the kind of girl who could be called a campus beauty at an international school—a classic cold and glamorous heiress.
And Ji Jie had transmigrated into the heroine’s stepsister, moving into the Huo household with Duan Feihong and embarking from that moment on a villainess’s life of scheming, competing, and snatching whatever she could get her hands on.
In the story, she didn’t even qualify as the second female lead. There were several other wealthy young ladies at school who excelled both academically and morally, and they were the ones who truly competed with Huo Yuxi.
The role Ji Jie had been cast in was the most inept schemer and the most disgraceful of the lot. She couldn’t even hold a candle to those girls.
The story revolved around campus life, and most of the other characters, including the male lead, were also children of wealthy families, each acting out their own version of youthful rebellion.
But the character Ji Jie cared about most was someone who didn’t appear very often.
The eldest son of this family.
Huo Zhenyan.
He was Huo Jinge’s only son with his first wife. Unfortunately, he had drawn the short straw when it came to his birth. He had been born just as the family was on the verge of decline.
Fortunately, he himself was more than capable.
The younger generation surpassed the older, and through sheer ability, he had somehow dragged the declining family back from the brink and brought it roaring back to life.
The novel described him as having “turned the tide when the great building was about to collapse.” His abilities and methods were both top-tier, and even amid his endless work, he had cleaned up more than a few messes left behind by his younger siblings.
He appeared as one of the major forces determined to tear the lovers apart after the protagonists’ relationship was exposed.
Ji Jie quickly formed a clear picture of him.
Unlike the average wealthy heir who had grown up pampered and relied on his family to carry him, a businessman capable of reversing a family’s fortunes and rebuilding everything through his own abilities usually had at least a touch of a tyrant’s personality.
In plain terms: cold, self-interested, and utterly centered on himself, with an overwhelming need for control.
Ji Jie had been fortunate enough to serve several clients like that in her previous life.
What they wanted was obedience.
Absolute obedience.
Even in front of their closest relatives, they had the final say. First came the calculation of benefits and losses; feelings could be discussed afterward.
Which meant that if Ji Jie were to rank the people in the Huo household whom she absolutely could not afford to provoke, Huo Jinge would certainly not come first.
The man who was utterly indifferent to everything outside his own world, whose sole ambitions were getting married and then getting married again.
Nor would it be the two siblings who were the stars of the show at school.
It would be Huo Zhenyan.
The man who actually held the family’s economic lifeline in his hands, whose authority dwarfed even that of his own father, and who could treat the male and female leads of the novel like a couple of little brats, tossing them around and giving them a good lesson whenever he pleased—
She would call him the family’s real Big Daddy.
He had to be worshipped like a client.
Just in case, Ji Jie recorded every detail she could find about his character, along with her own analysis.
By the time she was finished, she had filled a full sixteen pages.
She read through them twice, going over and over the details until she had everything firmly in mind.
She had lived to nearly thirty in her previous life and spent years being tempered by society. Her temperament had long since been honed into something steady.
She had never been particularly stubborn to begin with, nor was she overly self-centered.
Most of the time, she viewed things with a detached calm and rarely got into conflicts with anyone.
And at her current age, her main task was simply to go to school.
What could the head of a family demand from a girl barely in her teens, no matter how strict he was?
At most, he would want the child to behave, study properly, and stay out of trouble.
If the heroine wanted to date, it had nothing to do with her.
If the family wanted to punish or financially sanction the heroine, that had nothing to do with her either.
Once she got through these last two years of high school, she could simply follow the plot and go abroad to study.
After that, she would have her own life.
As long as she avoided every single melodramatic plotline and managed to make it to the day she left the country, an entirely new future would open before her.
Thinking about how, in her previous life, she had studied while working part-time to pay for her living expenses, whereas in this life she could actually go abroad to study, stroll leisurely through New York, and spend her afternoons visiting exhibitions, Ji Jie couldn’t help smiling.
It had been pouring that night when she was hit by the car. She could vaguely make out that the vehicle responsible was a luxury car.
As she lay in the ambulance, consciousness fading in and out, her resentment toward the rich had reached its absolute peak.
But the moment she discovered that she had become a rich second-generation heir herself, that temper melted faster than butter in the sun.
Her new school had issued three complete sets of uniforms alone: a formal dress uniform, a regular uniform, and a sports uniform.
They had all been freshly pressed and hung neatly inside her wardrobe.
Ji Jie took out the clothes she would wear the next morning and pinned her name badge onto her chest in advance.
On the left was the crest of Huading International School.
On the right was her name:
Duan Baoni.
In the novel, she was constantly mocked for having such a tacky name.
Ji Jie thought it was fine.
Back at her old company, one of her coworkers had been a fan of a member of a hugely popular Korean girl group. She always called the girl “Nini,” too.
Ji Jie had always thought it sounded rather cute.
Everything was ready.
It was the night before she would return to school after years away, and somehow, she was actually a little nervous.
She lay there for two hours without feeling sleepy at all. Eventually, she got up and went downstairs for some water.
The house was extremely quiet at night.
The enormous crystal chandeliers had all been switched off, leaving only the soft glow of the ambient light strips.
It took Ji Jie some effort to find the kitchen.
She had just been about to walk over when she saw a man come out first.
Excellent physique.
That was her first impression.
He was holding a bottle of water as well, lazily leaning against the kitchen island as he drank and typed on his phone.
His black hair was still half-wet. His smoky-blue-gray silk robe wasn’t tied tightly either, the fabric hanging loosely around him. Beneath the light, the broad line of his shoulders gleamed with a subtle sheen.
Even though all she could see was his back—
Ji Jie instinctively took two steps backward.
Looks like I’ve run into the family’s Big Daddy.