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Yu Qing, the supporting female fiancée, served a purpose that included, but was not limited to, standing by while the domineering CEO pinned the red-eyed heroine against the wall and said, "I'd give you my life," while the heroine tearfully said, "You have a fiancée, don't do this," and the male lead watched her in heart-wrenching agony, pounding the wall.

After the male and female leads had suffered through three hundred chapters of tortured love, and everyone around them knew about their relationship, Yu Qing—the only supporting female character left in the dark—finally learned that the male lead had long since given his heart to someone else.

So, to Shangguan Min, she had only ever been a responsibility born of an agreement between their families and the fact that the Yu Family had once helped his family. Without realizing it, she had even caused Shangguan Min and the heroine, Chu Keke, to agonize over her for a long time.

Without a word, Yu Qing calmly gave the male lead his freedom and called off the engagement.

They had thought the male and female leads could finally live happily together from then on, but Yu Qing, having no attachment left to this world, chose suicide.

Afterward, the male lead believed that Yu Qing's death had been caused by his breaking off the engagement with her. Thus, burdened by guilt, the male and female leads fell into an even deeper cycle of painful entanglement.

"..."

Since Xiang Changge's life consisted of either scavenging junk or desperately figuring out how to live a little longer—boring yet thrilling—she had forced herself to read through all of it again and again.

Every time she read it, she had only one thought: the author had taken quite a while to produce such a massive pile of crap.

Besides wanting to slap the heroine once, the male lead twice, and the author three times, Xiang Changge also wanted to hit the ever-melancholy Yu Qing with the Eighteen Dragon-Subduing Palms. Yu Qing would leave table after table of extravagant feasts untouched just to stare at the stars and moon while freezing in the cold wind.

Xiang Changge could understand that she was frail and unable to do intense exercise, but if she was weak, why did she stay cooped up at home every day? Wouldn't that just make her weaker? At the very least, she could walk around beneath the trees in her eighteen-acre garden and get some sun.

And what was this nonsense about being immensely wealthy yet never knowing happiness, only feeling the slightest bit of warmth from the male lead?

Couldn't money buy happiness? Couldn't it buy people who cared for her? The male lead only showed up once every ten days or half a month. What warmth could he possibly give her?

If that did not work, she could hire a few gentle, pretty older or younger sisters to live with her, chat, play mahjong, curl up under the blankets together, and turn on the heat. Xiang Changge refused to believe Yu Qing would not be able to feel some "warmth"!

Suppressing the speechless frustration in her heart, Xiang Changge closed her eyes and forcefully swallowed the dried earthworms in her mouth. Without even looking up, she picked up a stone not far from her feet and casually tossed it diagonally to the side.

A zombie that had wandered over after catching the scent of a human poked its snarling head through a gap in the crumbling wall beside her, letting out a low hiss. In the blink of an eye, the stone struck it with perfect accuracy.

Its head flew three meters away with a smack, rolling twice across the ground before stopping.

Ignoring the headless zombie body that swayed twice before collapsing to the ground with a thud, Xiang Changge carefully pinched off another strip of dried earthworm, stuffed it into her mouth, and chewed with loud crunches.

"Immense wealth and still depressed? She's probably just got too much time on her hands."

Xiang Changge had barely delivered her hoarse verdict, her voice rough from prolonged dehydration, when she suddenly sensed something. She abruptly raised her head and looked up at the sky.

Beyond the half-collapsed roof, she could clearly see a massive fireball hurtling toward her through a huge rift in the gray sky, moving so fast she had no time to think.

Reflected clearly in Xiang Changge's gray-brown eyes, behind that growing fireball came more fireballs, denser and more numerous.

Like rain, blazing meteors were pouring down from the sky.

In an instant, violent booms erupted one after another. The precarious building and the few scattered zombies wandering nearby all turned to ash amid billowing dust and smoke.

"Ding-dong—"

"Ladies and gentlemen, welcome aboard Air China flight SM2352 from Bribatol to City A. This flight is expected to take eleven and a half hours, with an estimated arrival time of 14:30. Our aircraft is about to take off. Please take your seats and fasten your seatbelts..."

When a string of inexplicable sounds rang by her ear, Xiang Changge, who had just regained consciousness, warily made no sound.

She even restrained her body's instinctive reactions and did not immediately open her eyes, lest anyone notice that she was awake.

She merely forced down the dizzy, splitting discomfort in her head and listened closely to the faint sounds around her.

Against a backdrop that sounded like the roar of some large weapon, countless people were talking. Some spoke Chinese, some English, and some spoke bird language that Xiang Changge could not understand.

They seemed to be in a very relaxed state, with no urgency or oppression in their voices.

The temperature around her also seemed comfortable. It was neither the blazing heat of forty or fifty degrees nor the bone-chilling cold of more than thirty degrees below zero during the deep freeze.

She could not smell the stench of rotting corpses, nor the sour odor of people who had gone too long without washing. There were only... many faint scents of perfume.

Perfume?

How long had it been since she had smelled something like that?

Unable to resist, Xiang Changge greedily took a deep breath.

Ah, what a fresh scent. What wonderful air.

Wait, oh no—

After taking that deep breath, Xiang Changge suddenly stiffened, her entire body entering a state of hair-trigger alertness.

If someone had been monitoring her nearby, they would definitely have noticed the instant her breathing rhythm changed.

In that case, with the situation still unclear, she could no longer wait for the enemy to move before she moved and observe things first.

But—

Hadn't she just been hit by a fireball in that ruined house? She had even felt herself being instantly melted by the extreme heat. She had barely felt any pain before losing consciousness.

By all rights, she should have been dead beyond dead. So how was she now...

Eh, was she on her way to heaven?

Otherwise, why were there so many people around her, and why was the environment so comfortable that it made her want to fall asleep?

Right, right. Times had changed. These days, when people died, they did not go to the underworld—they went to heaven.

Thinking that, Xiang Changge eagerly opened her eyes, preparing to see what the legendary heaven actually looked like.

The second she lifted her eyelids to greet the light, she clearly heard a delighted electronic voice in her mind.

"Konnichiwa, Susu-jiang. Watashi Plot Rewrite System-jiang. You can call me Tongtong-jiang. Welcome to <99 Torturous Romances, the Domineering CEO's Hidden Exclusive Love 2.0, Parentheses, Rewrite Version, Parentheses Return>."

"...?"

In that instant, Xiang Changge was so deeply shocked by both the scene before her and the voice in her mind that she froze blankly.

Author's Note:

1. Flight S(leepy)M(ian)8802352 (this novel's ID) is about to depart. Dear readers, remember to bookmark and shower it with love to fuel this flight [dog holding a rose in its mouth]

2. My next novel will be the urban late-night-desire-swamp story <After Deleting the Late-Night Snack Stall Owner, She Added Me Back Again>. If you like it, remember to bookmark it in advance so you'll know when it launches.

3. My latest completed novels include Post-Marriage Passionate Love, where an instant-married man has no choice but to learn new positions with his newlywed wife every night; Miss Dragon and the Mute Little Cook, where food conquers a black-backed, white-bellied dragon in a Western fantasy world; as well as many other completed stories you can binge without waiting for updates, such as Romance Allergy and Becoming a False-Promise Master in a Tragic Novel. They are all in my column—welcome to come have a taste [dog holding a rose in its mouth]

Drifting Half a Lifetime, Finally Meeting a Worthy Master

So this was what heaven looked like?

Though she was only twenty-seven this year, Xiang Changge felt as though she had already lived two lives.

In her first life, she had lived in a peaceful, beautiful modern society filled with traces of civilization everywhere.

Though she had been an abandoned infant thrown into a trash can at birth, she later met her grandfather, Xiang Xingchang.

Under his care and with the companionship of the senior brothers and sisters at the martial arts school, she had studied and grown up step by step.

But just as she graduated from university, prepared to inherit her grandfather's martial arts school, and wanted to carry it forward, her first life came to an abrupt end.

The apocalypse descended, and society entered a period of chaos.

As one familiar person after another left her, every day feeling like a year was no longer just a simple phrase—it became Xiang Changge's life.

In the apocalypse, dying was as easy as breathing.

And surviving became a difficult, painful, unattainable wish.

After drifting through the apocalypse for five years, Xiang Changge had killed more people and zombies than a fishmonger had killed fish.

Everyone who still retained their sanity and died before her had the same plea for her, whether they said it aloud or conveyed it with their eyes.

—I just want to live properly.

So even when she was the only one left, even when the future was shrouded in fog, even knowing full well that only a broken bridge to the execution block awaited her ahead, Xiang Changge still struggled to live on.

She thought, I want to see what will happen to me tomorrow.

And only the day after tomorrow could reveal the answer.

And so, she numbly lived through one day after another. Until today, as if she had experienced a final burst of life before death, she saw this scene that was both familiar and unfamiliar.

People—so many living, breathing people.

There were men and women, young and old.

They sat orderly in their seats. Some lowered their heads to fiddle with their phones, some wore headphones and watched shows on tablets, some read magazines, and some looked around curiously...

The plane announcement began repeating for the second time. The gentle, pleasant female voice sounded like ethereal Buddhist chanting from the heavens. To Xiang Changge, it felt utterly unreal.

But perhaps that sense of unreality belonged only to her.