She was a complete failure, a paper kite with its string snapped.

After a day grinding on site, Jiaqi limped back to her cheap rental. She sprawled on the couch, fried chicken in one hand, an otome game glowing like a neon talisman.

She was a civil engineering grunt, seven or eight years sunk into school and grad school. She’d chased client‑friendly courses, yet five years post‑grad she still got squeezed by a contractor. Every night she came home like melted slime, a puddle without bones.

Emptiness hit first, like a cold pond, whenever she opened the door to that black room. She wished the light would spring on and a cute little sister would hook her arm, call her “big sister” with honey on the tongue.

Reality didn’t care. She dragged that dead‑heavy bag and flicked the switch herself. She flung off clothes caked in site dust and dove into the couch, a corpse sinking into peat.

Yes. A failure, a guttering candle.

The only bright shard left in her life was Miss Mira.

On the laptop, a blond, blue‑eyed sprite threw out razor‑cool lines. Light kindled in Jiaqi’s eyes, like embers fed fresh wind.

For a closeted nerd like her, the only pillar left was a flawless, never‑scandalized 2D crush, a paper moon that never fell.

Lately she’d been all‑in on an otome game called Holywell Academy, chasing one character—Mira Isabella Belial.

Lady Mira was near‑perfect in looks, a noble’s jewel, and the game’s top talent in magic—bright as a comet above snow.

She shared the protagonist’s class, brilliance beyond doubt. Yet she was also the fiancée of the First Crown Prince, Samir—one of the romance targets, a sun already claimed.

Otome players know the script: a setup like that rarely births a heroine; it’s a shadow behind the spotlight.

And so it was. Mira envied and crushed, her aura sharp as winter wind. In every route, she stood as the tallest wall between heroine and prince.

In short, she was the villainess noble lady, a blade wrapped in silk.

And Jiaqi was a villainess devotee, a moth for the dark flame.

To her, those clingy cardboard princes were dust. She loved only the villainess ladies in otome worlds.

Cold and merciless, or proud and blazing. Heartless or two‑faced. Golden curls or pink straight. Clumsy hands or bullying connoisseur—if she was a villainess, Jiaqi welcomed her like rain in drought.

Of them all, her favorite—always—was Mira.

Betrayed and turned dark, yet bold in love and hate, a heart set on high horizons—Mira was perfection. In every path she met a bad end, yet she lifted her chin. She died with elegance and pride, a swan under storm.

Watching the heroine get tormented by Miss Mira was her only entertainment. Meanwhile her brain churned ten‑thousand‑word ship fics, a secret lantern in mud.

Now, the CG showed a fully demonized Mira dueling the protagonist, sparks like meteors. Jiaqi knew the True End route had crested the wave.

Her pulse sped up, drums under a tent roof. She was about to learn Mira’s long‑held ambition. Then fate pinched the candle. The hero drove the blade into Mira’s only weakness—the purple birthmark on her abdomen. Jiaqi’s breath snagged and stopped.

It felt like a fist to the chest. Her heart flared with a savage pain, a thorn twisting.

Her vision smeared. The laptop doubled like bottles in a bar, the world buckling.

As a sleep‑starved corporate drone, she’d feared an end like this. But—

—No way. Not now, of all times?!

—Please, at least let me learn why Miss Mira chases the Sacred Heart...

She couldn’t finish the thought. Everything slid into darkness, a curtain dropping.

**

Adelaide seemed to dream a long, long dream, long enough to wear another’s life like a cloak.

She opened her eyes to rubble that had once been beautiful wall tiles, to embers dropping like fire seeds. For a breath, she didn’t know who she was.

Feeling seeped back. A dull throb sat at the back of her head; copper sweetness pooled at her throat. Awareness rose like dawn.

She remembered why she stood inside a burning palace, its flames licking like hungry foxes.

She touched the sore spot. Her palm came away sticky, a red bloom spreading across her fingers.

Just like the blood trail ahead, stretching like a crimson ribbon and vanishing around the bend.

But she knew the blood on the floor wasn’t hers, a river that belonged to someone else.

As her thoughts settled like silt, Adelaide couldn’t help smiling, a petal‑thin curve.

So she’d escaped. Clever girl. My sweet sister lived up to her name.

A pity. If she weren’t this shrewd, she wouldn’t threaten my place as future queen consort.

Then I wouldn’t have to kill her here, with my own hands, like pruning a rose.

Adelaide rose slowly, eyes sweeping like a cold wind. No black‑haired figure in sight, and yet her heart stayed calm.

Her sister’s dying struggle had shoved her off balance; she’d cracked her skull on a table edge and blacked out. Even so, the girl couldn’t get far.

After all, Adelaide had already broken her sister’s leg, snapping the bone like a pale twig.

Remembering the white shin bone jutting out, Adelaide hummed with a lighthearted tune, spring in her step.

Just as she sauntered forward to pursue, a spike of pain lanced her mind. She stumbled, the world tilting.

She blamed the earlier blow, but the flash that followed said otherwise, a lantern showing a different path.

The dream—was it this?

Pain surged, a storm cresting. Adelaide clutched her brow, braced against the wall, and refused to fall.

Memories poured in like a spring tide, dragging alien sensations. The bliss of fried chicken, the bone‑deep fatigue after work, the escape of touching a “computer” and fleeing into pixels.

For a heartbeat, the self called “Adelaide” almost vanished, a candle under gusts.

Gasping and clinging to her core, a proverb from another world surfaced like a moon through clouds.

Zhuang Zhou’s butterfly dream.

In the dream, the “her” named Jiaqi was an ordinary person, somewhere unknown, some time unstated, a reed in a different river.

She spoke an alien tongue, followed laws unlike ours, lived a life that felt like another world’s market street.

Her values, her thoughts, her era’s tools—things Adelaide had never heard of, couldn’t imagine, constellations beyond her sky.

Yet the dream‑girl never questioned any of it. That wild world was simple daily bread to her.

On the contrary, Adelaide’s world was the fantasy, a painted scroll to her.

At the dream’s end, the otome game she played—Holywell Academy—unfolded on a continent called the Sumerland Continent.

Not just the names of nations and the top academy; every setting in that game seemed to rhyme with Adelaide’s world, like twin mirrors.

And Adelaide’s sister—the Douglas Family’s adopted second daughter, Mira Isabella Douglas—appeared in the game as a villainess, silk hiding steel.

Adelaide’s name surfaced once as well, a pebble tossed in a lake.

In one bad end where Mira triumphed over the protagonist, she revealed the reason out of pity. On her fourteenth birthday, someone jealous set a trap.

That person used Mira’s trust, lured her where no help could reach, and tried to cut her down, like a lamb led from the flock.

They didn’t expect Mira, driven by raw survival, to awaken an innate magic domain. She turned it and killed in return.

The betrayal almost shattered her mind. Worse followed like winter after autumn.

The royal family coveted that rare, powerful domain. They seized Mira from the Douglas Family and forced her under a royal branch.

Overnight, Mira lost her family and everything. She turned dark, trusted no one, and became the main story’s arrogant, ruthless antagonist, a thunderhead over a city.

The betrayer behind it all, in her eyes, was the gentlest, most caring, most beloved sister—Adelaide von Douglas.

...

As the memory tide ebbed, the dizziness faded. Adelaide finally sorted her thoughts, stones stacked into a wall.

“Chuanyue...”

She didn’t know why that word rose first. When she spoke, it wasn’t Salmanese for “crossing worlds,” but a phrase shaped by strange syllables.

She was sure it wasn’t any major tongue on the Sumerland Continent. Yet its meaning was clear, like ink on snow.

A “modern” soul crosses to an “other world,” replaces the body’s owner, then uses past knowledge to make waves there...

“That kind of thing—how could it be?”

No. Such things don’t happen. Not in any world with a sky.

A dream is just a dream. The coincidences were head‑blow confusion, facts and fantasies stirred like tea leaves.

This dream won’t change anything, a cloud that drifts and disperses.

Yes. She was still herself—Adelaide von Douglas—not the loser called Jiaqi in those borrowed skies.

She cast off the flimsy fantasy, tossed even the ghost‑taste of fried chicken, and set her feet moving again, firm as stakes.

A plan brewed for years would bear fruit today. Spoiling it over a trifle would be such a waste, like spilling wine at the altar.

She recalled her dear sister’s terrified face. The despair etched in Mira’s eyes lifted the corner of her mouth, frost turning to bloom.

In that good mood, she hummed the lullaby she’d sing by her sister’s bed. She followed the blood trail, a red line guiding her steps.

Soon she heard Mira’s delicate sobs, a silver thread. She turned the corner and saw Mira slumped against a bookshelf.

Leather‑bound books were pocked by falling embers. Mira’s right calf was twisted at a cruel angle, the mangled wound and half‑coagulated blood uglier than before.

Even without the leg wound, her back pressed against a dead end, a wall without doors.

Drained of blood, Mira went paler at Adelaide’s sight, like paper left in moonlight.

“D‑don’t come any closer...!!” Her voice rang like a cracked bell.

In that instant, Adelaide thought of Father’s satisfied gaze on Mira, and Mother’s endless pampering, warmth like a hearth around the girl.

Since the Douglas Family adopted her, Mira had been their darling, radiant everywhere. Now she gripped a broken pair of scissors, one tip jagged, trembling toward Adelaide like a thorn from a rose.

“What’s wrong, Mira? I’m your sister. Don’t you recognize me?”

Mira shook hard. The bent bell on her hairclip gave a dull, off‑key jingle.

She was wretched. One of Mother’s gifted little leather shoes was missing. The birthday dress she’d put on was shredded by floor shards. Bare skin was smeared with dust and blood, a flower dragged through ash.

Her stance with the scissors was weak and desperate. It wasn’t a threat; it was a plea, a paper shield in a storm.

Right now, she looked like an angel with snapped wings, dropped to earth, her light snuffed like a candle in rain.

Ah... seeing her like this made Adelaide—

—in a very good mood.

“My lovely sister, my lovely little sister…”

Adelaide smiled and took a step. Mira shrank on reflex, a frightened white rabbit curling into itself under a hawk’s shadow.

“W-why, Sister… why are you… doing this…?” Mira’s voice shook, baby-soft sobs braided with fear and confusion, like a child lost in fog.

It wasn’t really her fault. It was her fourteenth birthday, the one day she waited for all year, bright as first snow.

Tonight should’ve been a happy dinner, candles and silver, and then—like the last five birthdays—at the stroke of midnight, a kiss on her forehead from the sister she adored, four years older.

She loved her sister so much that even when the palace fell into a firestorm and the crowd became a tide of screams, she didn’t panic.

Because her sister held her hand like a warm lantern and promised to take her somewhere safe.

Ah, what a moving sisterly bond—Adelaide sighed inside, like tasting honey laced with ash.

If not for that trust, pure and unalloyed, her face wouldn’t have looked so delicious when Adelaide snapped her lower leg with magic, bone like dry twig.

So, as a thank-you gift for this excellent mood, and for the sake of sisterhood, she’d be merciful. Before she slit Mira’s throat, she’d let her know why she had to die.

“My dear Mira, of course it’s because I’m jealous—”

Pain lanced the back of her head like an ice needle, and the words lodged in her throat. Air caught; she nearly coughed.

In a heartbeat, cold climbed her spine like frost on a windowpane. She remembered.

In that dream’s Bad End cutscene, Mira was leaning against a scorched bookcase, clutching the same scissors with a broken tip. Her sister… was grinning like a mad dog, saying, “I’m jealous of your hateful talent!” while lunging.

Then the still frame ended, and all that remained was Mira telling the heroine she awakened her innate magic domain, then turned the tables and killed her sister.

Adelaide stared at a scene that matched that still, down to the drifting cinders, and once again lost the line between dream and daylight.

While she went silent, Mira lifted her head, dazed. “Jealous…?”

She looked at Adelaide, and the scissors dipped a little, revealing what her hands had covered at her waist.

Her clothes there were cut open; white skin was speckled with rusty blood. Between half-dried red and dust, a pale violet patch of skin glared like a bruise of twilight.

Adelaide shouldn’t have known that existed. The thought was an icicle pressed to her heart; breath forgot its path.

After a beat, she couldn’t help but laugh.

It started as a small chuckle, then rolled into a wild, lung-emptying cackle, like storm wind through a broken hall.

It was the same crazed laughter as the Adelaide in the game, right before her death marched in.

What is this, some rotten joke?

It has to be a joke, right?

I endured for years, climbed inch by inch, and now—right before the summit—you tell me this…?

Don’t make me laugh!

As if I’d give up over something this stupid—!

“I’m jealous… so jealous—”

Adelaide’s voice went hoarse; her heart pounded hot and thick, making the world tilt like a deck in rough seas. She still walked toward Mira, just like the Adelaide in that cutscene.

Then she gathered her breath and shouted with everything she had.

“Because I’m jealous—of Prince Samir!”

“Sis…ter?” Mira, already confused, froze like a deer in lanternlight.

“You’ve got me. Why do you still slip off to be alone with him? I saw you. You went out together. You even let him play with the bell I gave you, didn’t you?” Adelaide pointed at the bell hairpin in Mira’s hair, and with the motion hid her left hand behind her back. “You said you’d treat it as your most precious treasure. How could you let a man’s filthy hands touch it?”

“Huh… huh?”

“The day I gave it to you, you promised you’d wear it at your wedding too, let the whole country know I made it for you with my own hands… and you let his dirty hands touch it? Why? A man like that is absolutely not okay—!”

“C-calm down, Sister.”

Mira waved both hands, desperate, and the scissors slipped from her grip. They hit the rubble and stuck there, tip-up among shattered brick like a fang.

Adelaide watched her go from terror to fluster, even trying to soothe her, and a cold laugh rang in her chest like steel on stone.

Calm down? This might be the calmest she had ever been.

Her blood boiled like a kettle, but adrenaline honed her thoughts to a clean edge.

If a direct threat would trigger Mira’s innate domain, then lull her first. Soften her guard, then strike from still water before ripples form.

Behind Adelaide, the blood that had glued to her wounded scalp gathered where Mira couldn’t see. It streamed down her neck, pooled along her left arm, and at her fingertips hardened into a sharp crimson blade, a cold crescent of life.

At the same time, she kept talking—“I’ll never let a rat like that steal you, Mira”—throwing chaff into Mira’s eyes while she drifted closer like a shadow at dusk.

This silly sister act? She’d played it with Mira for five years. The performance no longer needed thought; it flowed like breath.

Listening, Mira’s face showed not a fleck of doubt. She swallowed the story whole like warm milk.

Everything was smooth as silk. While Mira kept trying to explain she and Prince Samir had done nothing, Adelaide stepped into the distance where a throat could be drawn open like a red seam.

In that moment, Adelaide’s eyes held only Mira’s slim neck, pale as porcelain.

One flick of her hand, and that delicate skin would part. How gorgeous would the blood bloom then, a crimson flower on fresh snow?

The thought thrilled her, a spark against fate’s cold iron. Blood surged again—then, just as she moved, her foot hit something.

A shard she’d ignored, too focused on Mira, snagged her sole. It shouldn’t have mattered. But the sudden head rush made her balance vanish like sand.

Everything lined up too “perfect,” like chess pieces nudged by unseen fingers. She couldn’t catch herself. The next heartbeat, she pitched into Mira’s arms, and pain stabbed her chest, exactly like the dream’s last frame.

Before she named it heart-piercing, she heard Mira’s scream, raw as a torn string.

“Sister!!”

Adelaide tried to speak, but copper rose in her throat and choked every word.

Her limbs went slack. Through blurring sight, she saw what had skewered her chest—the scissors Mira had dropped, wedged upright in the ruins like a spike.

In that instant, she heard it: a god’s nasty little laugh, echoing like wind under a door.

…Heh. Heh-heh.

So in the end… it’s still following that dream’s script, isn’t it?

Her thoughts began to unravel like wet silk. Images flashed—her stubborn grudges, the nights she didn’t sleep, chasing her little sister’s shadow.

But in the last heartbeat, she didn’t pray. She didn’t repent. She raised a big middle finger at God in her mind, a gesture this world didn’t even recognize.

—F******** you********************

Adelaide spat a stream of curses she hadn’t even known until now. She hated that He toyed with her fate. She hated more that He revealed the ending at the last minute, then mocked her for trying to change it.

A god with cruel humor, showing up just to wreck a cruel girl.

…Well. Fine. Maybe that’s only fitting.

Before everything went dark, a familiar fragrance wrapped around her like a warm shawl.

Hot droplets struck her face like summer rain. Someone called her name, begging her not to die.

Following that voice, Adelaide fell into the dark.