Chapter 3

“Turn it off. Turn it off right now!”

My mother rushed toward the screen in the morgue and clawed at the wall, trying to find the switch.

“Who the hell is behind this sick joke?”

Her voice shook with rage.

“Let me tell you something. I’m not someone you can mess with. I’ll collect evidence and sue every last one of you.”

In the livestream box, her face twisted into something ugly and frantic.

She grabbed the power cord and yanked it out.

But the memory did not stop.

The livestream did not stop either.

The screen kept playing as if it had never needed electricity at all.

In the recording, ten-year-old me stood there in clothes that hung awkwardly off my body. My eyes were red and swollen as I looked up at my mother and asked helplessly,

“Mom, why do you hate me?

“Why do you keep calling me cursed?”

The truth was, when my mother gave birth to me, she had almost died from complications.

We had been twins.

The older baby died.

The younger baby survived.

My mother and I had both made it through the same disaster. Once, she had held me in her arms and said she was grateful I had come into the world.

She said she would love me properly.

She said she would give me my sister’s share of love too.

But at some point, I did not know when, the way she looked at me changed.

The love disappeared from her eyes.

Then came disgust.

She stopped calling me her precious daughter.

She started calling me cursed.

She said I was born vicious.

She said I did not deserve to be her child.

In the livestream box at the lower left corner, comments began flooding in one after another.

[Wait, isn’t that Diane? The parenting influencer? I thought she was supposed to be a great mom. She treated her own daughter like this?]

[God, you really never know what people are like behind closed doors. I’ve followed her for ten years. I never imagined she could be this cruel.]

[Is this staged? Even if it is, who acts like that toward a child? That’s sick.]

My mother panicked.

“No. Please, don’t misunderstand. These videos are all AI-generated.

“I had my reasons.”

Her voice rose higher and higher.

“It was her fault. It was that cursed girl’s fault. She killed her own twin sister and traded her sister’s life for a System. She’s a murderer. She’s bad luck. I did nothing wrong.”

She kept explaining to the livestream.

But watching her, I finally understood something.

She cared far more about her image being destroyed than she cared about what she had done to me.

Maybe the System had been right all along.

My mother had never kept me in her heart.

She had never truly seen me as her daughter.

My father stared at the screen, his brows drawn tight.

“Who the hell is trying to ruin us?”

He grabbed a stool from the morgue and swung it at the screen with all his strength.

The glass shattered.

Only then did the livestream image cut out.

But in the very next second, my father’s phone began ringing nonstop.

Call after call flooded in.

He answered one of them, his face dark.

“What's going on? Every ad screen, TV, and phone in the city is showing your family’s private business right now. It’s everywhere. The buzz isn’t dying down.

“And no one can turn it off.”

His friends kept sending him video after video.

Every electronic device seemed possessed.

Even the radio at a roadside barbecue stand, one without any screen at all, kept repeating the same sentence on a loop.

“You don’t deserve to be my daughter. You are nothing but a cursed girl.”

A vicious glint flashed through my father’s eyes.

“Someone is targeting us.”

My mother stood there in a daze.

“Could it be her?”

Her voice dropped into a frightened whisper.

“Could that cursed girl have come back for revenge after she died? I knew she was bad luck. Even dead, she won’t let us have peace.”

My father shook his head.

“Natalie never dared to do anything to us when she was alive. What could she possibly do after death?”

He pulled out his phone and called his assistant.

“Find out who’s behind this.”

His voice turned cold.

“And check whether Sterling Group has made any moves.”

During all this, my mother glanced down at her own phone.

She had always been an influencer, so her inbox was full every day.

But today, her phone had been completely drowned in messages.

Not one of them praised her.

Every single one was tearing her apart.