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[GL Lily] The Melancholy Miss's Overbearing Butler Author: Shi Mian [Completed]

Synopsis:

In the fifth year of the apocalypse, Xiang Changge died in a natural disaster.

When she woke up, she found herself transmigrated into an old-fashioned novel she had just finished reading, with something calling itself a system screeching in her head.

Looking at the bright, sunny weather and smelling the fragrant scent of food in the air, Xiang Changge punched the air, devoured five airplane meals, and agreed to the system's mission to save the supporting female character.

In this old-fashioned novel, the male lead has a fiancée destined to die young. The fiancée is incredibly wealthy; money is the most useless thing to her, yet she has never known what happiness is. Melancholy is her natural gift.

Upon learning that the male lead's kindness toward her was merely out of guilt and the obligations of a marriage contract set by their elders, she chose to step aside, fulfilling the beautiful romance between the overbearing CEO male lead and the fiery, innocent girl.

Because there was nothing left in this world for her to cling to, she chose to leave this world alone on her twenty-fourth birthday.

Xiang Changge's mission is to help the supporting female character regain her confidence in life and live happily.

Having just been threatened by the system that she would be "cremated" if she failed the mission, Xiang Changge smacked her lips, which still held the lingering taste of dried earthworms, and said, "That's it?"

System: "..."

A confident host? Interesting.

Mission One: Guide the supporting female character to enjoy three meals a day on time.

At 7:30 AM, the butler Xiang Changge walked in like she owned the place, carried Yu Qing—who had stayed up all night sitting on the bay window staring at the sunrise at a forty-five-degree angle—to a dining table set with forty-nine different dishes, handed her a bowl of white porridge, and then proceeded to sweep the entire table of delicacies clean herself.

Holding the bowl and watching the person in front of her eat with such gusto, Yu Qing took a spoonful of porridge as if possessed, then suddenly realized something: "Didn't I lock the door? How did you get in?"

Xiang Changge: "Oh, the butler academy taught us how to pick locks."

Yu Qing: "..."

Mission Two: Guide the supporting female character to feel the joy of life.

Xiang Changge thought for a moment, and the next day, she handed a contract to Yu Qing.

Yu Qing, thinking it was a resignation letter, took it and read the title: [Wilderness Survival Program Season 2 Participation Details], Participants: Yu Qing, Xiang Changge.

Yu Qing: "?!!!"

After inexplicably gaining a butler, Yu Qing's life became like this—

Sitting alone in the studio, looking at a painting she had just finished that was full of melancholy, she mocked herself: "As expected, melancholy is my talent..."

Suddenly, someone outside the door roared: "Miss Melancholy, time to eat."

Startled, Yu Qing's hand shook, adding a glaring streak of gold to the painting.

In the music room, playing the piano until the sky turned dark, Yu Qing watched the last ray of sunset disappear on the horizon and whispered: "I am in the darkness, unable to see a single glimmer of light..."

Click. The European-style chandelier above, consisting of ninety-nine small flower lamps, turned on. The blinding light made Yu Qing reflexively close her eyes, and the familiar voice came from the doorway: "Miss Darkness, time to eat!"

"..."

*Miss Eat-Everything x Miss Melancholy (crossed out)

*A transmigrator with maxed-out combat stats who finds happiness in eating grass roots x A sickly, melancholy, doomed supporting female character who has lots of money but wants lots of love (checked)

Content Tags: Urban, Fated Encounter, Transmigration, Lighthearted, Wilderness Survival, Redemption

Protagonist: Xiang Changge, Yu Qing | Supporting Character: Please leave a five-star review

Others: Livestreaming, Entertainment Industry

One-sentence summary: Oi, Miss Melancholy, time to eat.

Theme: Hope is best tied to oneself; be your own light.

Chapter 1: Wealthy and Melancholy

[What is the use of having so much money? In this bustling, noisy world, money brings her nothing but loneliness. The longer that string of numbers grows, the deeper the void in her heart becomes.]

[What she needs is a lot of love.]

[The empty villa lacks even a trace of human warmth. Yu Qing thinks that perhaps she should have gone with her parents long ago. What is the difference between this life of lingering on and a rat crawling in the dark of a sewer?]

[Thinking of this, she no longer hesitates.]

[She is tired enough of this painful life that repeats day after day. After saying "Happy Birthday" to herself in her heart, Yu Qing exerted force, giving her life a release.]

"Hmm..."

Xiang Changge chewed on a dried earthworm that had been roasted over a fire after merely wiping off the mud, feeling that familiar earthy bitterness spread in her mouth.

She freed a hand to flip back a few pages of the novel, which was already so tattered it looked like it had been used in a restroom and then stepped on eighty times, with some parts of the text barely legible due to excessive wear.

Finding the section describing gourmet food, she read it with relish for the three-hundred-and-sixty-fifth time.

While imagining the taste of those exquisite foods in her mind, she continued the chewing motion in her mouth.

It is now the fifth year of the apocalypse. Everything edible has been eaten, yet society has not restored order. The world seems to have regressed tens of thousands of years, returning to an ice age.

No, it is more terrifying and complex than the ice age.

Five years ago, after a sudden acid rain, countless people turned into mindless zombies that only knew how to feast on flesh and blood. In an instant, the human population dropped by a full seventy percent.

In the five years that followed, zombies, acid rain, tsunamis, earthquakes, blizzards, extreme heat... one natural disaster after another followed in a chaotic, relentless succession, each one consuming every living thing on Earth.

Those who have managed to survive until now, aside from possessing formidable personal abilities, owe a massive part of their success to sheer luck.

Xiang Changge shares this sentiment.

Having brushed shoulders with death countless times and still remaining alive and well, how could she possibly claim her luck is bad?

Although she currently struggles to find food, drink, and clothing, she did manage to scavenge an old, vintage novel of unknown origin.

The book contains descriptions of the extravagant lifestyle of a supporting female character, involving quite a bit of gourmet food. In the past, Cao Mengde quenched his thirst by thinking of plums; today, she, Xiang Changge, uses reading to help her swallow her meager meals. One could say they arrived at the same destination through different paths.

[Kung Pao Chicken, Hibiscus Chicken, Yan Du Xian, Eight-Treasure Duck, Crab Roe Noodles... The kitchen prepared a Chinese feast tonight, with an incredibly rich variety of dishes spread across a two-meter-long marble table.]

[Yu Qing, accustomed to such luxury yet lacking any appetite, picked up a chopstick of Yan Du Xian. However, before it even reached her mouth, she seemed to sniff the air, and she stopped.]

[She stood up, said only "Clear it away," and walked upstairs, leaving behind the two nannies who had raised her since childhood, watching her retreating back with worried, unspoken words.]

Seeing this, Xiang Changge, sitting in a low shack that was little more than a skeletal frame with three sides exposed to the wind—a place one couldn't decide was a ruin or a condemned building—clenched her eyes shut. She held a half-eaten dried earthworm in one hand and flipped through the novel resting on her knees with the other.

This is the true embodiment of "the parched die of thirst, while the flooded drown in excess."

Although Xiang Changge has read this scavenged novel from cover to cover dozens of times, every time she reaches this part, she—who could kick a hole through solid granite—still feels a profound sense of powerlessness.

The main plot of this vintage novel goes like this—

The male lead, Shangguan Min, has a fiancée he was betrothed to since childhood named Yu Qing.

The Yu family was wealthier than an entire nation. After the Yu parents died in a plane crash, their eighteen-year-old only daughter, Yu Qing, inherited all their assets and became the youngest richest person in City A.

However, Yu Qing was a premature baby and had been sickly since childhood. If not for the Yu family's immense wealth, she surely would have perished long ago, unable to afford the exorbitant medical expenses required for someone born into an ordinary family.

Precisely because of her frailty, Yu Qing spent almost all her time cooped up at home, meticulously cared for by several family doctors. Even the amount of water she drank each day was precisely calculated.

Forget about humans; even an animal, living a life without freedom and treated like a lab specimen, would not develop a healthy psyche.

The book's assessment of her is: "Melancholy is her talent. Words like 'Lin Daiyu' and 'sickly beauty' seem naturally suited for her."

Yu Qing possesses an otherworldly detachment, as if she has seen through the vanity of the world. She is interested in nothing. After her parents died, the only person who could make her look up was the male lead, Shangguan Min, who grew up with her and often came to keep her company while she was confined to her home like a bird in a cage.

To her, Shangguan Min is like an older brother.

In a world where she is left all alone, Shangguan Min is the only family she has in her heart.

As for Shangguan Min, he originally thought his life had a set trajectory: study, learn, inherit the family business, marry Yu Qing, and shoulder the heavy burden of both their enterprises...

But unexpectedly, one day, a girl who was poor but forever positive, stubborn and resilient like an unkillable cockroach, burst into his life like a dazzling ray of sunshine, filling his world with her radiance.

Before he knew it, his gaze lingered on her more and more, and then even more—

In short, this is a story about a vintage-style domineering CEO who falls in love with a plucky, "fallen-from-the-sky" heroine. Yet, because he is betrothed and his fiancée is so frail that she looks like she could die at any moment, he dares not tell her he wants to break the engagement to bravely pursue his true love.

He can only be torn between his growing feelings for the heroine and his sense of responsibility toward his fiancée, trapped in a cycle of back-and-forth agony that makes both him and the heroine suffer heart-wrenching pain.

If one had to summarize the theme of the entire book in a single paragraph, it would probably be—

"I love you, but I'm sorry, I still have my responsibilities; yet if I try not to love you, I cannot control myself. The longing and the love I have for you will be the death of me; I know I love you, but I am so sorry, I cannot love you."