How Does The Inadequate Heir End?

One year after I was confirmed to be a fake heir, all my friends said I was like a completely different person. I was no longer spoiled or entitled. I no longer desperately sought even a passing glance from my parents. And I no longer exhausted myself trying every possible way to win Jane Fraser's love. The harsh reality of financial hardship left me running ragged every day. It also made me understand, with painful clarity, that affection and romance were the most useless things in this world. As they wished, I stopped fighting. I stopped competing for anything at all. Later, when Jane brought the real heir back home, I simply went quietly to the guest room and waited in silence, ready to give up everything that once belonged to me. But those who had long wanted me to be obedient and well-behaved were suddenly driven mad. They asked me, over and over, why I had stopped fighting back.

I'm the true heir to an affluent family who got switched at birth. But when I'm reunited with my family, they suddenly announce their bankruptcy. The sprawling mansion is repossessed, leaving me, my wife, and my parents to sleep on the streets. My parents are so furious that they end up getting admitted to the hospital—one gets a stroke, and the other passes away. My wife gets her legs broken by one of the creditors, and my son is so frightened that he becomes mentally impaired. To bear the astronomical medical bill, I work countless part-time jobs and put myself through the wringer. Everything changes when, one day, I accept a job as a temporary driver. I go to a lavish hotel's banquet hall. A celebration for a gold wedding is being held there, and I see my late mother and paralyzed father sharing a kiss onstage. My crippled wife is dancing offstage as she enjoys the festivities. Meanwhile, my son speaks fluently in a foreign language as he speaks with a foreign child.

The day my brother, Chester Rodney, came to the orphanage to take me home, my boyfriend Dominic Huxley looked at me coldly and said, "If you choose to acknowledge your birth family, we're over." I knew he had his pride—he could never accept the difference in our social standing. So, for him, I turned my back on the family I had yearned for my whole life. In the decades that followed, I toiled without complaint, saving every cent to help him rise to success. By the time I was not yet fifty, overwork had worn me down. Lying on my deathbed, my breathing shallow and weak, I watched Dominic on television. He was now an acclaimed scientist, just awarded the nation's highest research honor. Tears welled in his eyes as he thanked another woman. "All these years," he said, "I never felt worthy of Alicia. But now, maybe I can use this award as the prologue to a love I've owed her for decades." The "Alicia" he spoke of was the woman mistakenly switched with me at birth—the false heiress the Rodney family raised as their own. The camera zoomed out. Alicia Rodney stood radiant, graceful, and perfectly preserved by years of luxury, blushing as she accepted the trophy. "I waited for you for decades," she said sweetly, "but marriage is still something I'll need to ask my brother about." Chester, who had long taken over the family, looked at her with an indulgent tenderness tinged with something unspoken. "I was adopted by our uncle back then for one reason—to protect Alicia. Making the only princess of the Rodney family happy has always been my life's mission." Only then did I realize—everything I thought I had chosen freely, every sacrifice I made without regret, was nothing but a trap, carefully woven by two men, all for Alicia. The betrayal pierced my heart. I died without peace. But when I opened my eyes again, I was back on the very day Chester came to take me home from the orphanage. I glanced past the two men eyeing me with subtle disdain. Without hesitation, I stepped into the car. "Take me home," I said. This time, I'd send whoever stole my life back to the gutter they slithered from.

It all started when my sister made an offhand remark while sponsoring a poor student. She told him it was a coincidence that we were born on the same day, at the exact hour too. That comment made him convince himself that he was the real heir, that we were switched at birth. Soon after, he showed up with two thugs, kidnapped me, and planned to kill me to reclaim his life. I called my fiancée for help in desperation. Instead of saving me, she told me impatiently that I deserved to die for stealing his life. Her friend showed up to save me, but neither of us made it out alive after I was pushed into the river. I was back on the day when I was kidnapped when I opened my eyes again. When the poor student laughed and told me to pick someone to leave my last words to, I did not hesitate to call my sister. Their fates were sealed, with another chance at life, I would make sure to make them pay, and show them who the real heir was.

On the day my marriage ended, the entire Vale family was celebrating my husband’s mistress for carrying the “heir” I had failed to give them. For five years, they called me barren. For five years, I protected Damian Vale’s pride while his mother humiliated me piece by piece. For five years, I played the perfect Luna while they prepared to replace me. So I smiled, opened the family group chat, and sent the one document that shattered everything. Damian Vale. Male. Congenital azoospermia. Permanent infertility. The room went silent. Then I looked at the people who had fed on my humiliation and said, “I was never the one who failed this family.”

At my 20th birthday banquet, I am to sign and receive the ten-billion-dollar inheritance left to me by my mother. My half-sister, Samantha Hatfield, and Howard Daley, her husband, who is also a secretary, eagerly urge me to sign the document. In my previous life, they trick me into signing the very same agreement, and the inheritance somehow becomes theirs. When I try to fight back, no one listens to me. Together, they have me confined to a sanatorium, where I spend the rest of my life drugged, imprisoned, and forgotten. But this time, their scheme is going to fail—I have returned with memories of what happens from the past life. Under their confident, expectant gazes, I pick up the pen. However, I do not pick it up to sign. I raise my hand and slash the pen's tip across Howard's face. As he lets out a terrified scream, I tear the agreement into pieces in front of all the guests and hurl the paper scraps at them. I say coldly, "My mother left all this to me. What makes you two heartless parasites think you're worthy of laying even one finger on it?"