He had run up a massive gambling debt with an underground organization and could only rely on his adopted son to repay it—
"Black Snake's hired thugs held a knife to your father's neck last night! You're not an ungrateful wretch. Can you really stand by and watch your father die?"
The middle-aged man didn't sound as though he was asking his adopted son for help. Glaring furiously, he sounded more like he was ordering a slave around.
In his previous life, even when Xin Hexue was still the neglected fifth prince confined to the cold palace, no one had dared speak to him like that.
After he ascended the throne, there were even fewer. Anyone who dared raise their voice in front of Xin Hexue had to consider whether the mad dog at the emperor's side, the "Nine-Thousand-Year-Old," might beat them to death the next moment and toss them into a mass grave.
The fingertips gripping the rim of his cup turned white from the pressure.
System K reminded him in his mind, "Stay in character."
Xin Hexue put down his teacup.
He had retained his old etiquette, cushioning the bottom of the cup with his little finger as he set it on the table.
The cup touched the dining table without a sound.
Xin Bao didn't know why, but the adopted son in front of him felt strangely unfamiliar.
Had he really found this little bastard frightening for a moment just now?
He had only gone two years without seeing Xin Hexue.
Xin Bao suddenly remembered the day his adopted son turned eighteen. He had taken all the money, and before leaving, he had looked back at his adopted son standing quietly in a corner of the house.
At the time, he had thought Xin Hexue didn't resist when he took the money because he had beaten him into submission, and he had finally learned to know his place.
That glance back had raised a question in Xin Bao's mind—
Had this little bastard always looked like that?
Xin Bao knew his adopted son had a good face. Otherwise, he wouldn't have been so successful at begging as a child when Xin Bao forced him to do it.
But had he looked like this?
Xin Bao studied Xin Hexue with murky eyes.
His beauty was beyond anything words could describe.
His hair was black and soft, falling neatly along his neck, and his skin was as white as frost on plum branches on a moonlit night.
Beneath the faint shadow cast by his left eyelashes was a small mole.
Did Xin Hexue have a mole?
Xin Bao stared blankly for a moment. He searched his memories, only to find that he couldn't recall his adopted son's appearance at all. His mind was completely blank.
System K dutifully did its job.
The blank image in Xin Bao's memory was replaced entirely by the appearance of the young man before him.
His suspicions vanished, and Xin Bao felt even more confident about throwing his weight around and coercing his adopted son.
Xin Hexue drew a soft breath, as though his patience had reached its limit.
But he quickly adjusted his demeanor, becoming meek and submissive in the face of his foolish, vicious adoptive father.
Like a lamb.
His hands were pale, with blue veins visible beneath the thin skin.
His fingers curled slightly as he held out a bank card.
Xin Bao had gotten his way. He snatched the card. "Same password as before?"
When Xin Hexue obediently nodded, Xin Bao said in a nauseating tone, "Good boy."
The young man across from him didn't respond. He simply pulled out a napkin and wiped his fingertips beneath the cover of the table.
When Xin Bao had snatched the card, his greasy, blackened nails had touched Xin Hexue's hand.
Xin Hexue pressed his lips together, giving their pale red color a lush, alluring hue.
He rubbed his fingers repeatedly with the napkin, almost neurotically, and began calculating when Xin Bao would die.
After spending two years with his host, System K often thought he was like a pampered, troublesome cat.
System K didn't know much about specific breeds, but in any case, it was the kind of cat that was snow-white all over.
Considering that Xin Hexue had been the crown prince of an asteroid in his first life and the fifth prince who inherited the throne in his second, System K searched its database.
Hmm, probably a Linqing Lion Cat, a breed much favored by court painters.
Its ears and nose were pale pink, and its long white fur was soft and smooth but difficult to care for.
It liked peace and quiet, and because it hid its arrogance so well, it appeared affectionate, gentle, and refined.
But when it was in a bad mood, it wouldn't hold back at all when biting the humans it lived with.
That was the kind of cat he was.
System K reached its conclusion.
Xin Bao had gotten the bank card, but he had no intention of leaving yet. "How much money is in it? Where did it come from?"
He wondered whether the adopted son he had abandoned had gotten another script and started acting again.
Xin Hexue paused.
In his past lives, he had never needed to worry about money, so naturally he didn't know how much was in the card or where it had come from.
He received the figure from System K.
Xin Hexue said, "Fifty thousand star coins."
He added, "Waiting tables."
At some restaurants in the Sixth District, servers earned two thousand star coins a month. After two years of waiting tables, that was about how much he would have.
Xin Hexue had transmigrated into this small world when his character turned eighteen and came of age.
According to the original plot, "Xin Hexue" had indeed worked part-time as a server near his home for two years before meeting the protagonist gong, Pei Guangji.
System K had a vague feeling that making Xin Hexue wait tables would be a waste of his talents.
More importantly, for a young man who had been either a crown prince or an emperor in his two lives, being made to do such work immediately would inevitably be too drastic a change. Out of the humanistic concern built into its programming, System K had spent those two years training its host instead.
The training mainly involved getting him used to life in the current world and teaching him about various works of literature and art from the Great World.
After all, whether as an asteroid's crown prince or an ancient emperor, he was far behind the trends of the Great World.
Xin Hexue had died of illness in his first life and been poisoned to death in his second. He had never lived past twenty.
System K had promised him that as long as he obtained enough love points and heartache points from his mission targets in these small worlds, he could go to a new world, free himself of illness and pain, and live to a ripe old age.
Even immortality wouldn't be a problem.
After all, the Great World was a perfect world where everyone was immortal.
When everyone was immortal, boredom was inevitable.
The entertainment company System K belonged to had come into being for that reason.
They bound hosts and tossed them into so-called small worlds to act out scripts. The resulting footage was edited into films and television dramas for audiences in the Great World to watch for entertainment.
Xin Hexue thought that the worlds he had lived in during his two previous lives were both the small worlds System K had spoken of.
But he certainly hadn't been the protagonist.
Otherwise, he wouldn't have died so young.
Although System K had spent the past two years analyzing popular film and television genres in the Great World with him, it still hadn't given Xin Hexue the full script.
Xin Hexue only knew that his character was a Beta with face blindness, a pureblood human and a washed-up actor, with an adoptive father who was addicted to gambling and lived off his adopted son.
The protagonist gong was Pei Guangji.
That was all he knew about the plot.
Xin Bao seeking out his adopted son again after two years seemed to mark the beginning of the plot.
So System K finally deigned to transmit the complete plot to Xin Hexue.
"..."
Xin Hexue fell silent for a long time.
[The Great World.]
For once, he was somewhat at a loss for words.
[This kind of domineering]
[CEO]
[ruthlessly... story is what's popular with you?]
System K: [...It's been popular for the past two years.]
It was an extremely melodramatic script.
Xin Hexue was a Beta, a Beta with face blindness. He was good-looking, and he even had an adoptive father who owed a massive gambling debt.
With this kind of story, anyone could guess what would happen next.
After a chance encounter with the protagonist gong, Pei Guangji, the eldest young master of the Pei family.
To pay off the debt, Xin Hexue signed a two-year lover's contract with Pei Guangji, under which he had to satisfy the young master's physical needs.
This wasn't even a story about Cinderella marrying into
a wealthy family.
Pei Guangji had never cared about Xin Hexue. He was merely a tool who allowed Pei Guangji to vent his pheromones during his Alpha rut without worrying about marking him.
The Pei family's main residence was in the Core District. They were one of the Federation's three major conglomerates and, without question, a wealthy and powerful family.
The Federation's powerful families placed great importance on their connections with one another and worked together to monopolize every path to advancement in the land.
Pei Guangji therefore had several childhood friends of equal standing, who were extremely curious that their good brother had actually kept a Beta.
After Pei Guangji was injured in an aircraft accident and transferred to a hospital in the Core District for treatment, leaving him unable to leave, his childhood friends finally had a chance to make their move.
They possessed all the flaws common to the Federation's
celestial
dragons—they didn't treat people as human beings.
A Beta meant they could avoid the problem of marking.
A Beta with face blindness was not even sensitive to people's voices.
That meant anyone could pretend to be Pei Guangji and demand that the young man fulfill the terms of the lover's contract.
It didn't matter even if they cruelly took the back of his neck in their mouths, pressed their canines against the snow-white skin over his neck, and marked him repeatedly.
It didn't matter even if they filled his entire body with an Alpha's intensely aggressive pheromones.
After all, he was only a Beta, and a pureblood human, a citizen of the lowest class at that.
Once the Alpha pheromones dissipated, everything would return to normal.
The childhood friends' vile actions had actually been carried out with Pei Guangji's tacit approval.
Yet when he returned after his treatment, he said coldly to Xin Hexue, "Get lost. You're filthy."
Xin Hexue was driven out of his exquisite cage. Because the Pei family's eldest young master had cast him aside, everyone else kicked him while he was down. Unable to remain in the Federation, he could only live in exile along the border.
Then one day, he accidentally became caught up in an uprising by a resistance organization and became cannon fodder in the line of fire, bringing his life to an end.
[...]
Xin Hexue fell silent for another moment.
He said to System K: [Are you joking?]
[A script with a plot this devoid of boundaries or value should be put through a shredder and thrown in the trash.]