The woman drifted off to sleep, feeling her body swaying gently in a dream while mosquitoes continuously bit her neck, causing an unbearable itch…
Half-asleep, the woman raised her hand and slapped the spot on her neck where a mosquito had bitten her.
Muttering under her breath, she grumbled, “Damn mosquitoes…”
Just as she wanted to roll over and go back to sleep, a heavy weight suddenly pressed down on her chest, making it hard to breathe.
Oh crap, sleep paralysis.
She had finally finished work, made it home, and fallen into bed completely exhausted without even having time to take a shower.
Right before drifting off, her heart had been beating frantically, feeling like she was on the verge of sudden death.
She was too tired to even open her eyes, and her immediate instinct was that she was experiencing sleep paralysis.
“Mmph…” She tried hard to pry her eyes open, but both of her wrists were firmly seized by a large, strong hand and pinned above her head.
Warm breath brushed against her face, snapping her completely awake. In the dim room, a figure loomed over her.
“Let—Mmph…” Her clothes were already gone. The man covered her lips, and her strength was too weak to break free.
Perhaps finding her responsiveness pleasurable, the muffled sounds she made only spurred the man on further, driving him deeper down.
In her dream, she also had the sensation of riding a roller coaster, her head spinning dizzily.
The faint scent of soap lingered on the man, and his heavy breathing echoed right beside her ear.
As a woman in her early twenties who had never been with anyone, she initially thought the man had quite a bit of stamina. Having read plenty of web novels, she figured heaven must be taking pity on her and granting her a vivid sex dream—otherwise, why couldn’t she speak?
After all, people couldn’t speak in dreams.
Shifting from passive to cooperative, she originally thought it would be a pleasurable erotic dream full of tingling, heated waves. Tears of physical reflex welled up in the corners of her eyes, and she finally bit her lip and let out a muffled groan.
He was basically an uncommunicative human-shaped machine.
No matter how she called out or beat her fists against the man’s back, he refused to let her go.
Eventually, she drifted off into a heavy sleep.
Right before passing out, she kept trying to reach for her phone, but she could never find it. This definitely wasn’t her own house—the wooden bed board was way too hard and kept creaking noisily.
At dawn, a bell rang. The sound went on for a long time, just like a morning reveille back in school.
With her eyes still closed, she weakly muttered, “So annoying!”
She tried to roll over to go back to sleep, but her body ached and felt sore all over, as if it was about to fall apart.
“Hurry up and get up. If anyone finds us like this, both of our reputations will be ruined!” The voice was cold, yet remarkably pleasant to the ear.
The man switched on the bedside lamp, and the woman locked eyes with his dark, anger-laden gaze.
The man had a crew cut, exuding an aura of pure masculinity. With thick eyebrows and large eyes, his looks were entirely to the woman’s taste. She stared at him dumbfounded, completely forgetting her current predicament.
The man had wheat-colored skin, marked by the hickey and scratch marks left by the woman the night before. Calmly, he put his clothes back on.
At that moment, a flood of memories rushed into the woman’s mind.
The good news was that she got to look at an extremely handsome man. The bad news was—she had transmigrated into a book!
She had transmigrated into the troublesome female supporting character, Cheng Mengzhi, who currently worked as an archivist in the military region. The setting was the 1960s, right during the third year of the cultural movement.
Cheng Mengzhi’s family had all been sent down to the countryside. She originally had an arranged marriage with the male lead of the book, Lin Shuyan.
During the political turmoil, her father had been criticized and struggled with blood pressure issues in the hospital before passing away shortly after. Upon learning that a close friend had been tortured to death, unable to bear the loss of his dearest friend and the torment, he threw himself off a hospital building and died. Meanwhile, her mother was suspended from work and confined to the family compound, unable to leave.
Her eldest brother and sister-in-law were university professors who had been sent down to labor in a factory in a remote city.
Because her father had held a significant position before his life ended, her younger siblings fell into a special category of youth sent to the countryside—specifically, teenagers sent to labor on farms in the high-altitude regions, much like the children of many other families. Fortunately, they were looked after by nearby military corps dependents. Among those thirteen- and fourteen-year-olds were either the children of high-ranking commanders and leaders, or the offspring of highly respected scientists.
In the past, Cheng Mengzhi had looked down on the male lead, Lin Shuyan, feeling that a rough-hewn soldier like him wasn’t good enough for her, and she had always been dissatisfied with the match.
It wasn’t until the day they called off the engagement that she caught sight of Lin Shuyan’s handsome face and fell deeply in love with him.
Later, desperate to win Lin Shuyan back, she begged her father to pull strings so she could get a job in the military. Yet, she continually offered her warm face to his cold shoulder. After their breakup, Lin Shuyan ended up getting together with Qin Junyao, a dancer from the cultural troupe.
When Cheng Mengzhi found out, she constantly made things difficult for the female lead, ultimately alienating everyone in the military region.
Lin Shuyan was injured during a mission and remained unconscious for several days. While he was in a coma, it was Cheng Mengzhi who stayed by his side and took care of him the entire time.
With the female lead’s parents both facing disaster and being sent down to the countryside, Cheng Mengzhi was also implicated. She lost her job at the cultural troupe, even though she had been counting on Lin Shuyan to return from his mission and marry her so she could follow him on military dependents’ housing, sparing her from being sent to the countryside.
When Lin Shuyan’s life hung in the balance after his injury, Qin Junyao—desperate to avoid being sent to the countryside—married a political commissar in the troupe who had loved her for a long time, thus abandoning the comatose Lin Shuyan.
When Lin Shuyan woke up and couldn’t accept the reality, only Cheng Mengzhi stayed by his side.
After a year of healing, Lin Shuyan finally moved past it and wanted to start fresh with Cheng Mengzhi.
Who would have thought that Qin Junyao’s husband would heroically sacrifice his life while trying to save someone else?
Looking for a meal ticket to lean on, Qin Junyao went straight back to Lin Shuyan and framed Cheng Mengzhi, claiming that her marriage to her late husband had been engineered because Cheng Mengzhi had slipped her a drug, forcing them into a physical relationship. She claimed she had intended to tell Lin Shuyan the truth upon his return, only to learn of his severe coma, leaving her with no choice but to marry someone else.
Believing the female lead’s lies, Lin Shuyan insisted he had to marry Qin Junyao to make amends.
Determined to spite Lin Shuyan, Cheng Mengzhi decided to find another man in the military to marry.
She wanted to provoke Lin Shuyan and see if he actually cared about her at all.
Thus, she targeted the minor male supporting character in the book, Xu Jingyun. Xu Jingyun had joined the army in his teens and participated in several battles, achieving victory in all of them.
Later on, he rose to become the military region’s chief of staff, and shortly after, a regimental-level political commissar.
Cheng Mengzhi approached Xu Jingyun under the pretense of crying and begging him to uphold justice for her. Since Xu Jingyun was serving as the acting political commissar and was also Lin Shuyan’s superior, she planned to catch him off guard and get close to him where others could see, ensuring the news reached Lin Shuyan’s ears to test whether he cared.
Unfortunately, her methods were far too clumsy, and the shrewd Xu Jingyun saw right through them.
Instead, Xu Jingyun brought in the regimental commander’s wife to comfort her and went to talk to Lin Shuyan, hoping he would handle his relationship maturely rather than acting out of impulse. Angered, Lin Shuyan tracked Cheng Mengzhi down, demanding that she step aside and bless his relationship with Qin Junyao—something Cheng Mengzhi flatly refused to do, leading to a bitter argument between them.
Furious, Lin Shuyan actually reported Cheng Mengzhi for the old incident involving drugging the female lead.
At first, Cheng Mengzhi wasn’t too worried, but people spoke with such conviction that her job was suspended.
She quickly realized Qin Junyao was framing her. The witnesses were all gone, leaving no one to prove her innocence, especially after an entire year had passed.
Unwilling to lose her job—which would mean being sent to the countryside to do the hardest and most grueling physical labor—she cast her sights on Xu Jingyun once more.
She slipped a drug into Xu Jingyun’s tea, but in her nervous state, she accidentally drank from her own cup as well. Both of them ended up ingesting the drug, and one thing led to another.
The female lead’s ultimate fate in the book was tragic: she married Xu Jingyun, only for Xu Jingyun to be denounced shortly after as the adopted son of a disgraced senior official. Implicated in the fallout, he was suspended from his post. Convinced she couldn’t escape being sent to the countryside, Cheng Mengzhi hastily divorced Xu Jingyun.
She used her money to buy a job assignment, only to be told that the seller was a scammer. She was lured to an isolated spot, drugged, and sold off to a remote mountain village to be someone’s wife.
It wasn’t until twenty years later that her family managed to track her down. By then, she had given birth to several children for her captor, was plagued by gynecological diseases, and had been broken beyond recognition by two decades of torment. Upon returning home, she faced endless mockery and gossip, ultimately committing suicide.
Meanwhile, Lin Shuyan and Qin Junyao lived happily ever after, even having a lovely daughter and enjoying a complete, harmonious family life.
True to form, the main characters could do wrong and still be forgiven, while the cannon-fodder simps were not only used, but framed as well.
After their divorce, Xu Jingyun never married again. Less than two months after the divorce, his position was reinstated, and his life remained smooth sailing all the way through.
The fate of a super-simp is truly miserable!
Drugging herself out of nervousness and dying of sudden heart failure—what a fragile tolerance for stress.
Meeting Xu Jingyun’s gaze, the transmigrated soul found herself way out of her depth, completely unable to argue her way out of this mess.
Her lips parted and closed, but she had no idea what to say.
In a panic, she pulled the quilt up to shield her chest.
Noticing the marks on her body, Xu Jingyun’s icy gaze softened just a fraction.
“I’ve already drawn the others away. Get dressed and leave this place. If anyone finds out, your reputation will be ruined. As for what happened today, I’ll come find you after my shift.” Since things had reached this point, they had to be faced.
He put on his cap and uniform and left the room.
Fortunately, Xu Jingyun had a private room. Last night, she had snuck in under the pretext of looking for Lin Shuyan, only to end up in Xu Jingyun’s quarters instead.
She had already spiked the teapot beforehand, and when Xu Jingyun tried to chase her away, she burst into tears, begging him to help her out.
To soothe her, Xu Jingyun poured two glasses of water, and in her nervous state, the original owner drank the poisoned cup as well.
“You really are inhuman! Pulling a stunt like drugging someone… I screamed for so long last night, someone definitely must have heard!”
Now was not the time to dwell on that.
She stood up, got dressed, and gritted her teeth against the physical discomfort as she forced herself to leave.
Glancing at the clock, it was 6:30 AM—still an hour and a half before the original owner’s shift started.
Returning to the dormitory, she carefully slid back into bed. She couldn’t let anyone discover she had been out all night; she had to wait until someone else woke up first.
Less than half an hour later, Wen Qi, her dormitory roommate and a logistics clerk who was a neat freak and showered an hour early every single morning in the summer, woke up.
Pretending to have just been stirred by the noise, Cheng Mengzhi woke up too and gave a theatrical stretch.
“What time did you get back last night?” Wen Qi asked out of curiosity.
“I went to see the leadership to explain the situation and didn’t get back until the middle of the night,” Cheng Mengzhi replied, feeling a bit guilty.
“Ah, I see.” Wen Qi knew Cheng Mengzhi had been wronged and had been looking for any opportunity everywhere lately to plead her case and clear her name.
Picking up her wash basin, Wen Qi prepared to head to the bathhouse.
“Wait for me, I’m coming too.”
Wen Qi looked at Cheng Mengzhi with a hint of confusion.
“It was too late last night, so I didn’t get a chance to wash up, and the bathhouse closes at 10 PM,” Cheng Mengzhi explained guiltily.
From what she remembered, bathhouse hours were indeed strictly regulated.
Wen Qi didn’t think much more of it.