Tous les chapitres de : Chapitre 1 - Chapitre 10

The last thing I remember with any sort of pathetic clarity is the taste of cheap ramen and the blinding glare of a truck's high beams. Classic, right? A real gourmet-meets-grim-reaper special. In my defense, I was multitasking. As a struggling actor whose biggest role to date was "Background Customer #3" in a toothpaste commercial, my life wasn't exactly a whirlwind of excitement. My one true pleasure was hate-reading the most gloriously trashy web novel ever written: The Alpha's Obsession.And let me tell you, it was a masterpiece of garbage. The plot was thinner than the plot on a porn star, the female lead had the personality of a damp sock, and the male lead, Huo Yan, was such a ridiculously overpowered Alpha film god that you could practically smell the author's daddy issues through the screen.But the crown jewel of its awfulness was a minor character. A cannon fodder Omega who, by some cruel cosmic joke, shared my name: Zhan. This Zhan was a walking, talking cliché—a jealous,

He didn't drag me. That was the terrifying part. His grip on my wrist was firm, but he walked with a calm, unhurried pace, as if we were simply taking a stroll. It was the confidence of a man who knew his prey wasn't going to run. Mostly because I couldn't. My legs were moving, but my brain was still back in the hall, screaming a high-pitched "abort mission" that nobody was listening to.He led me down a corridor that was quieter, the the fancy gold and marble giving way to dark wood and dimmer lighting. The air here was still, heavy with his scent. He pushed open a heavy oak door and ushered me inside.It was an office. A ridiculously masculine, stupidly expensive office. One wall was floor-to-ceiling windows, overlooking the glittering city lights below. The other walls were lined with books, their leather spines looking ancient and important. In the center of it all was a massive mahogany desk, and behind it, a leather chair that looked more like a throne.He finally let go of my w

I didn't sleep. The three words on that card—"Break a leg"—were a brand seared onto the inside of my eyelids. It wasn't a good-luck wish. It was a promise. A threat. It was Huo Yan telling me he knew I was performing, and he was eager to see how I'd handle the pressure when the stakes were real. By the time the soft chime of the intercom announced orientation, I felt like a frayed wire buzzing with static. I'd changed clothes three times, finally settling on a simple, dark grey sweater and black trousers. I wanted to look like a shadow, like someone who didn't want to be noticed. It was a pathetic attempt at camouflage, but it was all I had. The main screening room was exactly what you'd expect from a man like Huo Yan: a small, private theater with twenty plush, velvet seats arranged in a precise, intimidating formation. The air was cool and smelled of leather and something else, something clean and sharp that I was beginning to associate with him. He was already there, sitting in

The rehearsal room was on the estate's lower floor — black walls, moveable panels, lighting rigs that made everything look slightly too real. Not accidental. Everything about this production was intentional in ways that only became visible after you'd spent enough time inside it. The space was designed to strip comfort, to remove the padding between a performance and the thing underneath it. Huo Yan was already there when I arrived. Of course he was. I was beginning to think the man simply materialized in rooms, that he didn't travel between them so much as decide where to be and then be there. He was at the far end reviewing something on a tablet. He didn't look up when I came in. He had the ability to make not-looking feel like looking, which was a quality I was cataloguing with increasing attention. My first scene was the confrontation between the traitor and the villain. My character had been caught — not fully exposed, just suspected. The net beginning to tighten in the method

He appeared in my doorway at eleven-seventeen PM with a bottle of wine he didn't open and an expression he didn't explain. I'd been awake — of course I'd been awake, sleep had become a theoretical concept since the transmigration, something I understood in principle but could no longer reliably execute. I was lying in the dark running the next day's scene notes in my head when I heard two raps at the door. Even. Unhurried. Not urgent. The knock of someone who has decided to knock and is doing it without performance. I opened the door and there was Huo Yan. Black shirt, sleeves pushed to the elbows with the casual precision of someone who had done it without thinking about it, which somehow made it more intimate than any deliberate gesture could have been. The wine bottle held loosely in one hand, by the neck, the way you hold something that was never really the point. Looking at me with that quality of attention — not hard, not soft, but calibrated to see exactly what it was aimed