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Chapter 3

作者: Clear Spring
While they were turned around, I had dragged myself over to the windowsill and hoisted one leg over the edge. Only my swollen left leg remained inside the room.

James rushed over to grab me. Right as his fingertips were about to brush against the hem of my shirt, I threw myself down without a thought.

“Jean!” James roared, his eyes wide with fury, his heart nearly stopping.

A heavy, dull thud sounded from downstairs.

Immediately after came Lucas’s shocked, low growl. “Miss Jean! You–”

Lucas was down on one knee, straining under the impact, both of his arms trembling slightly. Meanwhile, I was being held securely in his arms, both of us having tumbled to the ground from the sheer force of the impact.

The System interface stalled.

[Death failed. External interference detected. System exit interrupted.]

I stared blankly at the dim, gray sky. For the very first time, I felt like this body was nothing more than a prison.

I was so close. Just a little more, and I could’ve returned to my original world to see my parents again.

Lucas looked down at me, cold sweat dripping from his forehead along his jawline. “Miss Jean, do you have any idea that if you were just a fraction off, my arms would have been shattered?”

I looked at his trembling arms and chuckled.

“What a pity.”

Lucas’s face turned deathly pale. He probably finally realized that I hadn’t done this on an impulse; I truly wanted to die.

James almost scrambled down the stairs on all fours. When he saw that Lucas had caught me, his heart—which was in his throat—finally settled back into place.

Chloe trailed behind and added breathlessly, “Jean, if you hate me that much, I’ll leave! Please don’t make a mockery out of your own life. Even though falling from the third floor isn’t high enough to kill you, you gave James a huge scare.”

The moment the words left her mouth, a flash of rage crossed James’s face.

“First a car crash, then a kidnapping, and now you’re staging a suicide! Jean, I am thoroughly disappointed in you!

“Lucas, head back to the Fox estate. Take her up to her room and lock the doors and windows tight. No one is allowed in or out without my permission.

“Have Dr. Miller go straight to her room to treat her.”

Back at the Fox estate, I was placed under strict surveillance.

James personally ordered his men to remove every sharp object from my room. Fruit knives, scissors, glass cups, and even the crystal lamp at my bedside were swapped out for a soft-shaded lamp.

When Dr. Miller was tending to my injuries, he paused upon seeing the deep bruises and scrapes on my body.

“Mr. Fox, Miss Jean’s injuries–”

James cut him off coldly. “Just treat what needs to be treated. Don’t ask unnecessary questions.”

The medication was forcibly injected into my body, my wounds were bandaged up, and my leg was put in a cast. I couldn’t even die if I wanted to, which put me in an exceptionally foul mood.

“The necklace has been found.”

James stood by my bedside and placed a jewelry box on the nightstand as he said, “You’ve lived a life of luxury since you were a child, but Chloe was adopted after struggling from meal to meal without a single decent piece of clothing to wear.

“Now that she finally has a family, as her older sister, can’t you show a little generosity? Is it really that hard for you to do that?”

Seeing that I remained silent, James assumed I was taking his words to heart, and his tone softened slightly.

“During the crash, Chloe suffered a large scrape on the back of her hand. Scars are never good for a young girl. We’ll consider you two even now.”

A major, life-threatening injury traded evenly for a skin scrape? I almost laughed out of sheer absurdity.

If James bothered to check the dashcam footage, he would see that Chloe intentionally showed off the necklace on her neck to provoke me and pulled on my arm while I was angry, causing me to lose control of the steering wheel.

Yet, just like countless times in the past, James didn’t bother looking into the truth at all. He trusted Chloe unconditionally.

In the past, I couldn’t understand it, so I would always cry and kick up a fuss at James. Now, I understood.

Under the protagonist’s influence, James was stripped of all basic reason. After all, he was merely a tool designed to serve the protagonist.

I didn’t even glance at James. My head was just filled with thoughts on how to die as quickly as possible.

Before coming to this world, my parents were braving a torrential rainstorm to buy me a viral chocolate cake from another city just to surprise me. On their way, they were struck by a truck and died instantly on the spot.

Overcome with grief, I jumped straight into a lake, wanting to unite with my parents. As the sensation of suffocation washed over me, the System found me.

[Complete the cannon fodder storyline and help the protagonist, Chloe Fox, turn from rags to riches, and you will earn a chance to reverse your parents’ deadly car accident.]

With my memories sealed, I had forgotten who I truly was. All I knew was that I was the wealthy heiress of the Fox family, spoiled by everyone since childhood.

Until the year I turned fifteen, when my parents brought Chloe home, saying they were looking for a playmate for me. However, a plane crash stripped me away from my parents overnight, and I became depressed.

Under the weight of immense grief and the pressures of running the conglomerate, James gradually shifted all his affection and patience from me to the far more ‘sensible’ Chloe.

Chloe always had an uncanny knack for making James misunderstand me, and I watched the special affection that once belonged to me slowly fade away.

I screamed, smashed things, and used every extreme method possible to make James believe me. The ultimate result, however, was James growing increasingly disgusted with me.

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  • The “Cannon Fodder-Real Heiress” Mission   Chapter 21

    I stood at the doorway of the living room, refraining from stepping inside.James was sitting on the sofa, his head lowered and his hands resting on his knees. When my mother handed him a cup of hot tea, he accepted it and murmured a quiet thank you. His voice was faint, sounding like someone who hadn’t spoken in a very long time.I didn’t know how much he still remembered. I had no idea how he ended up here, what role the System played in all of this, or what was currently left inside his mind. I just stood there, watching him.He looked far more haggard than I remembered. His suit was relatively neat, but there was a subtle wrinkle on his cuff, as if no one had cared for him in a while. Several small, scabbed-over wounds marked the back of his hand.In that moment, I suddenly recalled how, in that other world, James always maintained a flawless appearance. He had been the head of the Fox family, accustomed to standing at the front, giving orders, and being looked up to by everyon

  • The “Cannon Fodder-Real Heiress” Mission   Chapter 20

    When the System contacted me, I was chopping up some vegetables for my mother.An orange cat rubbed against my feet, the kitchen was filled with the smell of onion, and the TV in the background was playing some random variety show, punctuated by bursts of laughter.[System alert: Contractual mission rewards finalized. Transmitting final log.]My hands paused for a second, and I quietly walked back to my room, closing the door behind me.After returning to my original world, it had taken me a very long time to get used to this kind of peace and stability. Every evening when my father came home from work, he would bring me my favorite hot dog. My mother would nag about how lazy I was while always making sure I was fed.They were truly alive again. They would bicker, laugh, and argue in the kitchen over which herbs to add, and they would take turns knocking on my door whenever I stayed up late. Every detail was so real that it terrified me. Sometimes I would wake up in the middle o

  • The “Cannon Fodder-Real Heiress” Mission   Chapter 19

    After the coin vanished, James became a different person entirely.It wasn’t a mental breakdown, nor was he spiraling out of control. It was something far more agonizing—he had finally found clarity. He was as sharp as a knife that had been honed to a dangerous edge, cutting through anything while simultaneously cutting himself.He knew that I was dead. He knew that he had been manipulated for those three years, and that his actions during that time had not entirely been driven by his own free will.He knew that something beyond his understanding existed in this world, that Chloe had been fabricated into their lives, and that I might have never truly belonged there in the first place. All that clarity only led him to confirm the truth that I was never coming back.That night, he sat in his study until dawn. Outside the window, the sky shifted from a deep navy blue to a pale gray before finally turning light gold. However, he didn’t move an inch.Spread across his desk was a thick

  • The “Cannon Fodder-Real Heiress” Mission   Chapter 18

    James spent a long time looking into the origin of that coin, but he found no answers.No one in the Fox family knew where it had come from. The butler said he had never seen it, his assistant swore he had never touched it, and the security footage showed no one entering or leaving James’s room. It had simply appeared there one morning out of nowhere.James carried it with him everywhere, as if holding onto something he couldn’t quite put into words.During that period, his state of mind was hard to describe. On the surface, he handled company affairs as usual, attended necessary events, signed documents, held meetings, and made executive decisions. Yet, he began to question the nature of reality itself.If Chloe could be fabricated into existence out of thin air, if his willpower could be overwritten by an external force for three whole years, and if a shadow on a security feed could be in the wrong direction, was the ground beneath his feet even real? Was the torment he felt ever

  • The “Cannon Fodder-Real Heiress” Mission   Chapter 17

    James started doing things that made everyone around him think he’d gone mad. I only knew about it in intermittent bursts through the System’s residual signal, like a radio stuck between channels, picking up scattered fragments.He kept my bedroom exactly as it had been, untouched. Every day, he would personally replace the flowers with fresh roses—the blush-pink ones I loved most when I was alive. They bloomed in full, their scent filling the room. He would stand before my framed photo and speak to it, giving me a detailed rundown of everything that happened that day. For example, how many people visited the foundation, whether the weather was cloudy or clear, what he ate for lunch, and where things stood with Chloe’s court case.He would take all the items I had carelessly left lying around while I was alive and carefully put them back into their original places.On the third shelf of the bookcase sat an old fairy tale book with a worn cover and curled edges. That was the book h

  • The “Cannon Fodder-Real Heiress” Mission   Chapter 16

    James read through half of those documents before he stopped. It wasn’t absurd. In fact, it was frighteningly accurate.Folklore, metaphysical texts, fringe quantum theories, and even extreme psychiatric case studies repeatedly described a shared phenomenon: when an external force forcibly intervened in a person’s life trajectory, the individual would experience a “systematic divergence between behavior and emotion.” This would go unnoticed while they were conscious; only in hindsight would they realize that, during that period, they were living like a puppet controlled by someone else.James stared at those words ‘systematic divergence between behavior and emotion’ for a very long time. He remembered the countless times I had stood in front of him, my eyes red, pleading with him to believe me just once. Every single time, a sharp, fleeting pain had stabbed his heart. Yet every time, that pain was quickly overshadowed by another, even more intense feeling of irritation.It felt

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