After the blade pierced his heart, Marcus Chen's life reached its final page. It was an unmistakably vivid sensation of obliteration.
The excruciating pain didn't detonate all at once. Rather, it unfurled like creeping ivy—beginning at the epicenter of impact in his chest, carrying with it a searing torment that coiled and radiated outward, inch by agonizing inch, through every limb and fiber of his being. The sensation was both immediate and eternal, a cruel paradox of time stretching and collapsing simultaneously.
The metallic coldness of the weapon lingered inside him, a foreign presence that didn't belong. Close behind came the marrow-deep chill of blood draining from his body at an alarming rate, as though someone had opened a floodgate he couldn't close. His body temperature plummeted with each passing second, the warmth of life itself abandoning him in steady, inevitable waves.
His five senses began extinguishing themselves in succession, like lightbulbs shorting out one after another on a failing circuit. First, his vision descended into an endless void of darkness, the world vanishing as if someone had drawn a black curtain across reality. Then his hearing dissolved, replaced by an all-consuming ringing that swallowed every other sound. Finally, even his awareness of his own existence—that fundamental certainty of being—scattered like smoke on the wind.
Everything surrendered to absolute silence, plunging into the bottomless abyss of pure nothingness.
He couldn't say how much time elapsed in that void. It might have been seconds. It might have been centuries. Time had lost all meaning in that dark between-place. But then, without warning, cacophony crashed into his consciousness like a violent tide breaching a dam. Thunderous electronic music pounded against his awareness, punctuated by the mingled sounds of male and female laughter, shrill screams, and the crystalline chime of glass striking glass. These sounds tore through the peaceful darkness with brutal force, dragging him back toward something that resembled existence.
Marcus curled his fingers experimentally. His fingertips made contact with something smooth and cool—the supple texture of leather upholstery beneath him.
Driven by instinct and gripped by the primal fear of someone who had just escaped death's grasp, he pressed his palm hard against his left chest.
Through the thin barrier of shirt fabric, he felt it—a steady, powerful rhythm pulsing beneath his palm.
Thump-thump... thump-thump...
A heartbeat?!
Shock jolted through him like an electrical current, and he lurched upright as if yanked by invisible strings! He was unharmed? His chest was completely intact—no wound tearing through flesh, no white-hot agony radiating from a fatal injury. There was only the dull, throbbing headache of a hangover and the nauseating churn of his stomach rebelling against whatever he'd consumed.
"Yo, Marcus, you're finally awake? It's your turn, man. Don't tell me you actually drank too much!" A young man with badly dyed yellow hair leaned into his personal space, thrusting a glass of amber liquid toward him. His tone carried that particular brand of casual mockery that passed for friendship among certain crowds.
Another companion nearby, sporting a garishly patterned floral shirt that clashed with everything in the vicinity, burst into raucous laughter. "Ha! Not spending your wedding night at home with that 'Porcelain Doll' of yours, but running out here to get wasted instead—isn't it because you can't stand the one at home with the useless legs? Can't have any real fun with damaged goods, right? We totally understand, bro!"
Wedding night... Porcelain Doll... useless legs...
These phrases struck like keys turning in locks, instantly throwing open Pandora's box. A deluge of chaotic memory fragments crashed over him in overlapping waves—
A lavish yet emotionally frigid wedding ceremony. Guests whose eyes held either pitying sympathy or barely concealed mockery. And at the center of it all... a pale young woman seated in a wheelchair, drowning in white wedding lace—Elena Nightshade.
Marcus's head felt stuffed with cotton, his stomach performing violent acrobatics. But the nausea wasn't purely from alcohol. There was something else—a profound sense of wrongness, as though his soul had been forcibly crammed back into a body that no longer quite fit, like trying to wear clothes that had shrunk in the wash.
Suppressing the waves of discomfort, he forced his heavy eyelids open.
The sight that greeted him was pure sensory chaos—the garish spectacle of a high-end nightclub in full swing.
Rotating laser globes carved the air into intersecting beams of colored light that strobed across surfaces in dizzying patterns. Long, slender legs—some wrapped in sheer black stockings, others bare and gleaming—swayed and shifted around the glass coffee table in his immediate vicinity. High heels struck the floor in rhythm with the pounding bass, and the entire atmosphere reeked of ambiguity and barely restrained desire.
A woman in a form-fitting crimson dress with a figure that could stop traffic suddenly dropped into a crouch directly in front of him.
Her skin was porcelain-fair, her features classically beautiful. The plunging neckline of her dress revealed a tantalizing glimpse of pale cleavage that would make a saint reconsider his vows. Her lips were painted the color of fresh blood, and her voluminous waves of hair tumbled over her shoulders in studied disarray. She regarded Marcus with unmistakable predatory interest gleaming in her dark eyes.
Marcus was, objectively speaking, a complete mess in that moment. He'd been sprawled across the sofa in an ungainly heap, dead drunk. His expensive tailored suit jacket lay crumpled and forgotten on the floor nearby. The hem of his dress shirt had worked itself free from his waistband, exposing a firm, toned abdomen marked by the distinct definition of well-developed abs.
Despite his disheveled state, his natural advantages were impossible to disguise. He was tall with proportions that fashion photographers would kill for—even slouched in drunken disarray, his build was impressive. The club's erratic lighting skimmed across his high-bridged nose, casting dramatic shadows that transformed his normally cool, refined features into something edged with decadent danger.
What made the picture even more contradictory were his unconscious movements, which broadcasted anything but restraint. His left hand rested with casual possession on the bare shoulder of a sweet-faced girl beside him, while the fingers of his right hand had hooked themselves through the metal chain adorning a punk-styled woman's collar.
This striking juxtaposition—the tension between aloof composure and unrestrained indulgence—created a magnetic pull in this particular environment. It was the kind of contradiction that made people stare.
The woman in red allowed a slow smile to curve her lips. She extended one hand, fingers tipped with nail polish the vivid red of fresh arterial blood. But instead of reaching for the offered drink, her hand traveled directly toward Marcus's lower leg. Her fingertips glided down the fabric of his expensive trousers with deliberate, teasing slowness. "Young Master Chen," she purred, her voice dripping with honeyed seduction, "I lost this round, so the penalty drink is mine~"
However, just as her fingertips were about to reach his ankle, Marcus's entire body went rigid!
It was an almost instinctive defensive response—the hair-trigger sensitivity to physical contact that belonged to someone who had survived a brush with violent death!
"Get the hell away from me!" The words erupted from him in a low, threatening growl as he shoved her with considerable force, the movement nearly reflexive!
"Ah!" The woman in red let out a startled cry as she tumbled backward, caught completely off-guard. She landed hard on her knees on the carpeted floor.
Marcus moved with a speed and coordination that no genuine drunk could possibly manage. He surged to his feet in one fluid motion, throwing off the two women who'd been draped over him like accessories. In two quick steps, his left hand shot out and clamped around the red-dressed woman's wrist with crushing force. His right hand seized the back of her neck, and without a shred of gentleness or hesitation, he slammed her face down onto the cold, unforgiving surface of the glass coffee table!
"Who are you?!" His voice had gone ice-cold, sharp enough to cut. His eyes blazed with the piercing intensity of a raptor spotting prey. There wasn't a trace of drunken fog left in his demeanor.
The surrounding crowd fell silent for exactly one heartbeat before erupting into even louder catcalls and enthusiastic whistles.
"Damn! Young Master Chen is getting rough tonight!"
"New kink unlocked! This is wild!"
They all assumed this was some kind of kinky game Marcus had initiated on a drunken whim—just another form of entertainment for the jaded wealthy.
Only the woman pinned beneath his hand understood the truth. She was genuinely terrified, pain bringing tears that streaked through her carefully applied makeup. "Marcus! Have you lost your mind?! Let go! You're hurting me! It's me—it's Scarlett!"
[Ding! Detecting intense host vital signs and acute stress response. Soul binding protocol forcibly activated!]
An utterly emotionless synthetic voice detonated inside his skull without warning.
[Loading world parameters... Binding character designation: Marcus Chen (Supporting Male Character/Cannon Fodder Tier-N in The Nightshade Tragedy).]
A translucent screen materialized before Marcus's eyes, hovering in his field of vision like some high-definition holographic interface ripped straight from science fiction.
"What the—?! Who's there?!" The question formed in his mind, sharp with alarm.
[Greetings, Host. I am your Mission Support System, designation Unit-0602.]
Text flickered across the floating screen in precise digital font. Beside the text, a shadowy silhouette gradually resolved itself—unmistakably the outline of a young woman seated in a wheelchair.
Adjacent to that shadow, lines of crimson text began populating in rapid succession, arranged like entries in some clinical database:
[Current Mission Target: Elena Nightshade]
[Age: 20 years]
[Height: 175cm]
[Physical Status: Bilateral leg paralysis, chronically frail health]
[Relationship to Host: Legally married spouse as of today]
The System continued its mechanical recitation of baseline information, but Marcus cut it off mid-sentence, his internal voice shaking with disbelief. "Hold on—wait just a damn minute! You're talking about that Elena Nightshade? From The Nightshade Tragedy?!"
[Affirmative, Host. Your current solitary objective is as follows: Successfully romance the target character Elena Nightshade and prevent the inevitable fatal outcome.]
Marcus roughly shoved Scarlett aside—she was still whimpering and crying—and ignored the raucous jeering of the crowd around him. He stumbled toward the restroom, his movements urgent and uncoordinated.
He crashed through the door, lunged into the nearest stall, and slammed it shut behind him with a bang that echoed off the tile. He collapsed onto the closed toilet seat, buried both hands in his hair, and tried desperately to impose some kind of rational order on this utterly insane situation.
He knew that novel. He'd read the damned thing! The Nightshade Tragedy was an infamously dark, psychologically brutal work that had been abandoned incomplete by its author—probably because even they couldn't stomach where the story was heading.
The female protagonist, Elena Nightshade, had lost both parents in her youth and suffered catastrophic injuries that left her legs permanently paralyzed. She survived by clinging to her older sister, who suffered from severe, debilitating mental illness.
Together, they possessed a fortune worth tens of billions—making them precisely like helpless children clutching gold bricks while walking through a den of hungry wolves. Predators circled them constantly, waiting for any sign of weakness.
To survive in that merciless environment, to protect her vulnerable sister from those who would exploit or destroy them, Elena underwent a horrifying transformation. Step by calculated step, she evolved from a fragile, pitiable young girl into something the readers had dubbed a "villainess"—a woman whose meticulous scheming and ruthless methods were genuinely appalling to witness.
The novel's descriptions had been deliberately, viscerally horrifying:
She could smile warmly while personally administering poison to the elderly butler who'd raised her with genuine paternal affection, who'd treated her as tenderly as his own daughter.
She could orchestrate the complete destruction of her supposed best friend—a woman who'd shared every secret with her—manipulating events until the poor girl's reputation lay in ruins and she saw no escape except to throw herself from a building.
She'd even turned her calculated cruelty on her own cousin—literally the only person who'd ever shown her unconditional kindness—and had him committed to a psychiatric institution through manufactured evidence. Her reasoning? He might someday pose even the slightest potential threat to her sister's wellbeing.
Elena was portrayed as something fundamentally inhuman—a creature born without the capacity for empathy or genuine human connection. Every trace of goodness had been cauterized from her soul, leaving behind only raw possessiveness, pathological need for control, and an almost artistic capacity for destruction.
To call her a "natural-born monster" would be generous understatement.
And Marcus Chen—the body he now apparently inhabited—was destined to be her very first victim on that blood-soaked path to damnation.