The heavy, stifling silence of the private hospital room was broken only by the rhythmic, hollow hum of the life support machinery.
Beep…
Beep…
Beep…
Every slow tone felt like a agonizing countdown, echoing off the clinical white walls.
Resting motionless on the center bed lay Shen Hao.
His face was devoid of color, his chest rising and falling only through the mechanical breath of the equipment—trapped deep within an endless, dark coma.
It had been three agonising days.
Three days since that horrific, blood-soaked encounter with Shen Tian.
When the paramedics arrived at the scene, Yui Ling had miraculously escaped without severe physical injuries.
But Shen Hao…
Shen Hao had collapsed immediately after, slipping into a deep abyss from which the doctors feared he might never awaken, the chances are low.
Sitting right beside him on a metal stool was Yui Ling.
Her once-vibrant, silken hair hung in tangled, dry wisps, completely neglected after days without a single moment of rest.
Her signature, breath-taking silver eyes—once so brilliant and full of life—were now heavily bloodshot, swollen, and stained red from an unceasing torrent of tears.
With trembling, pale fingers, she clasped both of her hands tightly around Shen Hao’s limp, ice-cold palm.
She squeezed it against her cheek, as if the sheer warmth of her tears could somehow thaw his freezing skin and drag him back to the living world.
She refused to let go.
Not for a second.
If she loosened her grip even a fraction, she feared he would drift away forever into the dark.
Uncle Sheng and Shen Hao’s heartbroken parents had spent every agonizing hour trying to comfort her, even while their own spirits were crushed by the horrifying diagnosis.
But Yui Ling wouldn’t move.
She couldn’t.
Leaving his side felt like abandoning him in the dark, and she would rather break into pieces than let him face the void alone.
“Shen Hao…
please…”
Her voice broke into a raspy, agonizing whisper that pierced through the cold room.
She pressed his lifeless knuckles harder against her trembling lips, her hot tears soaking into his skin.
“I’m right here…
I promised I wouldn’t leave you.
So please…
open your eyes…
“I promise you…
I swear if you just open your eyes, I will never ignore you again.
I won’t push you away.
I won’t run from what I feel, and I will never…
ever say that I don’t want to be bound by your love…”
“Just wake up and take my hand…
please!”
Inside the white space:-
Shen Hao slowly lowered his hand.
The floating Black Sphere, which had held the remnants of his enemy’s soul, flickered one last time before dissolving into tiny, dark specks of light that vanished into nothingness.
The memory assimilation was finally complete.
A cold, mocking smile played on Shen Hao’s lips as he digested the absurd truth he had just witnessed.
“So that’s what you were…
a transmigrator,” Shen Hao murmured, his voice echoing in the absolute quiet of the space.
Through the memories, everything about Shen Tian’s sudden rise and unnatural knowledge made sense now.
In his previous life on Earth, Shen Tian was nothing more than a pathetic office worker who had been fired after getting caught embezzling company funds.
Devastated and lazy, he turned into a leech, locked in his room and surviving off his parents’ hard-earned money while spending his days reading fantasy webnovels.
And then, he transmigrated—thrown directly into the world of the novel he was reading: immortal Empress Returns as a mortal.
“And in that story…
I was just a third-rate villain,” Shen Hao scoffed quietly, his eyes narrowing.
When Shen Tian first arrived in this world, he was terrified.
But panic quickly gave way to toxic arrogance and greed.
Even though the system or fate had dropped him into the body of a side character, Shen Tian refused to accept it.
He was obsessed with becoming the absolute Main Character of this world.
To hijack the original protagonist’s destiny, his very first move had been to locate the ancient Fox Shrine.
He violently destroyed the sacred seal, freeing the trapped Fox Spirit so that she would feel indebted to him and form a soul contract—stealing a legendary cheat that was never meant to be his.
“That dirty, manipulative bastard…” Shen Hao muttered, his voice dropping into a dangerous, icy whisper as the full scope of Shen Tian’s plot unveiled in his mind.
After securing the Fox Spirit, Shen Tian’s next target had been the Shen Family.
Using the Fox Spirit’s shadowy curses, Shen Tian had secretly poisoned Shen Hao’s father, causing a sudden, mysterious illness.
Then, playing the heroic savior, he stepped in with a staged cure, forcing the patriarch to owe him a massive debt of gratitude.
And that wasn’t even the end of it. Get faster updates on g.com.
Shen Tian’s ultimate ploy was to poison his father a second time—only this time, the price for the “cure” would be demanding the cancellation of Shen Hao’s engagement with his fiancée, Liu Ruoxin.
In the pages of the original novel Immortal Empress Returns, the character named ‘Shen Hao’ was portrayed as a profoundly arrogant, egoistic fool—a typical third-rate villain destined to be a stepping stone for the protagonist.
He was rash, blinded by pride, and easily manipulated.
Of course he was…
Shen Hao scoffed inwardly as his consciousness drifted upward through the void.
That version of Shen Hao was just an arrogant young master written into a story.
But the soul inhabiting this body now was entirely different.
And Liu Ruoxin—the supreme genius, the destined heroine of Immortal Empress Returns, and the future Empress herself.
Knowing that the original Shen Hao was arrogant and resented being tied down by an arranged marriage, Shen Tian calculated that Shen Hao would foolishly agree to break off the engagement without a second thought.
Once the match was shattered, Shen Tian planned to sweep in, play the white knight, and claim the future Empress as his own heroine.
Shen Hao let out a cold, mocking laugh, the sound ringing throughout the empty White Space.
“My instincts were spot on from the very beginning.
Erasing a parasite like him…
wasn’t a crime.
It was justice.”
Shen Hao’s hands and feet began to turn translucent, slowly dissolving into particles of soft light as the infinite void began to fade around him.
It was always like this.
The moment he absorbed the memories bound to the space, his consciousness was yanked back toward the physical realm.
Shen Hao let out a weary breath, a faint sense of urgency swelling in his chest.
‘I need to wake up now…
Yui Ling, my parents…
they must be out of their minds with worry.
‘
‘And about this novel world , i need to do many to survive…i will think about it later ‘
For now, He couldn’t wait to get out of here.
As the light engulfed his fading figure, Shen Hao remained completely oblivious to the shadowy presence lurking in the void behind him.
Barely a few feet away, stood a dark, sinister silhouette.
The shape of its body and the outline of its face were an exact, eerie replica of Shen Tian.
But unlike a living being, this entity was forged entirely out of writhing, ink-black shadows.
It stood in absolute silence, its face featureless except for two horrifying, pitch-black hollows where its eyes should have been—completely empty, staring directly at Shen Hao’s disappearing back as he faded out of the White Space.