เรื่องสั้นแนว Feel-Good Story และนิยาย Hypocrisy Revenge

I used to be the cockiest rich kid in high society, but somehow I became the biggest simp in the whole circle. It was all because I was bound to a heroine conquest system. If I failed, I would be finished. To stay alive, I had no choice but to do everything Samantha said and constantly try to please her. Knowing I could give her anything she wanted, she took the sports car I gave her and went for a drive with her childhood friend, Charles Lindsey. Then she left me alone on the highway in the middle of a violent storm. "Samantha, my asthma is acting up. My medicine is in the car. Can you come back and get me?" She gave a cold, mocking laugh. I could also hear Charles laughing on the phone. "Walk home yourself. There’s no room in the car for you." With only ten seconds left to live, I finally snapped. "You stupid system! How can a woman this cruel be the heroine? I want to switch targets!" The system froze for a long moment before a notification appeared. "Target has seriously deviated from the assigned character profile. Select a new target within five seconds!" In a panic, I pointed at the thin, miserable-looking figure in the distance. "New target selected: Destined Villain. Confirm?" I shouted with all the strength I had left. "Her! I choose her!"

There is a dead mouse stuck in the air conditioning unit during summer, filling the classroom with a foul odor. Henry Hudson, my homeroom teacher, instantly blames it on me, saying I don't shower. He mocks me for reeking of pigs and polluting the air in the classroom since Mom and Dad raise pigs for a living. He even insists that Mom and Dad sell our pigs to buy new air conditioners for the classroom. I flush with shame as I repeatedly insist that I shower every single day, but my classmates still mock me and call me "Stinker Tucker". I am forced to transfer to another school after enduring the endless insults and hostile glares from countless people. Years later, I head a major biopharmaceutical company that houses numerous talented innovation teams. It is through a rigorous screening process that a team led by a young PhD graduate, fresh out of his studies abroad, emerges on top. I plan to allocate 20 million dollars in funding to him because of his stellar resume and expertise, which is exactly what we need for our project. I, however, instantly call my assistant over after seeing the name listed among his family details. "Disqualify him from the selection, have him get his final pay from finance, and show him the door. I don't need the son of a crook working in my company."

A former classmate of mine, Zack Lindell, is unlawfully fired by his company and denied a severance package. With nowhere else to turn, he becomes so desperate that he threatens to take his own life. I represent him entirely free of charge and run myself ragged until I secure a 500,000-dollar settlement for him. Yet on the day he receives the money, he comes to me with a 50-dollar parking receipt. "William, I drove my car that day, so I'll let the gas money slide, but the parking was because you had business at the courthouse, so that should be your expense, right?" Beside him, his wife, Helena Lindell, adds sarcastically, "I hear you big-shot corporate lawyers make insane money. Tens of thousands, and even hundreds of thousands of dollars at a time. You're not seriously going to stick us with a 50-dollar parking bill, are you?" As I watch the couple count their money, I lose whatever goodwill I still have toward them. I turn down an acquisition worth millions of dollars to handle his case, only to end up owing Zack 50 dollars for parking. I toss a hundred-dollar bill onto the table and block them. A year later, Zack sinks his life savings into a residential development that is never completed. When he can't find anyone willing to help him recover his money, he corners me with tears in his eyes. "William! Please, you have to help me! That money was everything we had." I have my assistant hand him a retainer agreement. "I can help you, but my consultation fees run at 5,000 dollars per hour, and my contingency fee is 30% of the total asset value. Those are my terms. Not a penny less."

To honor the last wish of my late husband, Daniel Bennett, I spent twenty thousand dollars on the most lavish Christmas funeral Evergreen Memorial Funeral Home offered. As I watched Daniel's urn being lowered into the ground, I thought he had finally found peace. Then, the following March, local police called to tell me Daniel's body had not been cremated until January. I marched into Evergreen Memorial's reception office with the police record and slapped it on the table. Evergreen Memorial's manager, Martin Hayes, glanced at the record, shut the door at once, pulled a stack of cash from a drawer, and pushed it toward me. "Ma'am, the cremation schedule was fully booked over Christmas. We held the funeral first and used temporary fill for the burial. It's an industry workaround for scheduling delays. Take the money, we'll finish the paperwork, and we can all pretend this never happened." "If you insist on making a scene, we'll sue you for defamation, and you won't even get this compensation." I studied the smug look on his face, so certain he had me cornered, then pulled out my phone and tapped the button to save the recording.

On our seventh wedding anniversary, my husband—Don Enzo Cavina—suddenly put a motion before the family council: The Donna would be barred from taking part in family affairs. “One vote in favor.” “Two.” “Three.” The motion passed unanimously. Being forced off the council just as I completed seven years meant the family no longer had to honor its promise to grant me the twenty-percent stake that was about to vest. I had been reduced to nothing more than an appendage to the Don. My fingertips turned cold, but my gaze remained steady as it swept over every face around the long table. “Why?” Jack was the first to stand. “You’re nothing but an outsider who married into this family, yet you’ve controlled the port, the banks, and the union for seven years. Who knows how much you’ve skimmed for yourself?” James sneered. “If we let you take twenty percent, sooner or later, the Cavina family will become the Medici family.” I turned to my husband, Don Enzo, seated at the head of the table. “Is that really what you think?” Enzo came to me and pulled me into his arms. “You’ve given seven years of your life to this family. I just can’t bear to watch the council drain you any longer.” “You won’t have to sit through these pointless meetings anymore. But you will always be my wife.” Without a seat on the council, I had no say in any decision. But the Cavinas couldn’t manage their dealings with the Five Families without me. So that was it. They still expected me to bear every risk—they just didn’t want to give me the share I had earned. I smiled, slipped off my wedding ring and family badge, and slapped them both onto the long table. Three days later, Enzo came to me with every elder who had voted for the motion. Together, they knelt before me, begging the “outsider who did nothing but steal everyone else’s credit” to come back and save them.

The executive I meet on a dating app, Eric Cole, convinces me to invest in a supposedly foolproof investment scheme. After weeks of him wearing me down, I invest my entire savings of one million dollars. The next morning, I open the app and find a message saying the server is unavailable. Confused, I assume it's just a system update and immediately text my perfect boyfriend. But the message won't go through. Realizing the investment platform has vanished, I rush to the cybercrime unit to report it. After tracing the IP, the police tell me I've fallen for a classic scam. I'm stunned. Eric and I have even picked out names for our future children! No matter how many chat logs I provide, Eric is nowhere to be found. When my coworkers find out, they spread rumors that I lost my mind from being so desperate to marry a rich man. My boss uses the scandal as an excuse to fire me. Eventually, overwhelmed by severe depression, I swallow an entire bottle of sleeping pills. Even as I die, I can't understand why giving someone my everything leaves me with nothing. When I open my eyes again, I'm back at the moment Eric first messages me. This time, I become the ultimate player and turn the tables, bleeding the scam operation dry.

To get me out of the way for Simon Luther, the man who steals my position as heir of the Luther family, the three young women my dad took in as children and raised alongside me work together to send me to prison. "Once you get out of jail, one of us will marry you—but on one condition. You'd better take this secret to the grave." To stop me from revealing the truth, the three women even fed me a drug that rendered me mute. As the years go by, the endless and inhumane torment I endure in prison slowly destroys what feelings and affection I have for the three women I once considered my sisters. When we meet again, I watch impassively as the three of them fight to win the auction that gives them the chance to marry Simon. Chuckling, I arrange for the key evidence of Simon's crimes to be put up for auction. The three of them seem to have a thing for making bids. Let's see them scramble to win this one.

The day a rat sold out our East Coast safe houses, the FBI got its hands on the addresses of every old base belonging to the Five Families. The Commission gave the order: every associate had to report to the neutral church and register within seventy-two hours. Only those who completed registration would make the evacuation list and be picked up by the convoys. Once the list was sealed, no one could be added. But Viola Romano claimed she was the daughter of the Commission's Chairman. She said her father had already saved a spot for everyone. They didn't need to register, and they could still leave on the priority convoy. My friends believed her and canceled their registrations, one after another. I begged them not to gamble with their lives and told them to register just in case. Viola immediately accused me of being jealous and trying to ruin things for everyone. My boyfriend, Matteo Russo, said I didn't understand power and that I belonged in line with the ordinary members. In my last life, I reported the whole thing to the Commission. Viola was exposed. Everyone managed to register before the deadline and secure a spot on the evacuation list. She was cast out of the Family for impersonating the Chairman's daughter and obstructing an emergency evacuation. In the end, she died in an FBI raid. Everyone said she got what she deserved. They thanked me for saving them. But after we moved into the new safe house, Matteo shot me from behind. The bullet went straight through my heart. The people I'd saved just stood there, watching coldly. "The worst that could've happened to us was getting arrested by the FBI. Viola lost her life!" When I opened my eyes again, I was back on the day Viola promised to get everyone onto the evacuation list.

The year I turned fourteen, Grandma and I were crammed into a beat-up trailer on the edge of a desert town. She couldn't afford paint, so she mixed colors from the cheapest red clay pigment at the general store. When a frame broke, she hammered it back together herself. When canvas tore, she patched the back with old cloth and sealed it with a paste she boiled from leftover church wax and cheap resin. Grandma never went to school. She painted out of pure love, and she kept at it for thirty years. Then one summer, a gallery owner named Evelyn Hart crawled into Grandma's leaky shed and examined every painting, flipping each one over to study both sides. The next day, every last painting was gone. Finished oils, sketches, pigment records, old photographs, frames. Everything cleared out overnight. Three months later, Grandma walked into Evelyn's gallery and saw her own painting, Madonna of the Red Rock, hanging in the brightest spot. But the brass nameplate beside it bore Evelyn's name. She lunged for the painting. The security guards pried her fingers loose and dragged her out the door. That night, a blizzard sealed off the roads. She pounded on the glass, but no one came. The next morning, when I found her outside the gallery, her body was already frozen solid. After the funeral, I went to clean out what was left of the burned shed. Inside the lining of an old brush pouch, I found a small scrap of painted canvas. It was a piece Grandma had trimmed off while repairing Madonna of the Red Rock. The thief had missed it. I tucked it away and kept it. For twenty years. Twenty years later, I was the compliance director at an international art marketplace. A young woman submitted an auction application for a series of paintings. The Desert Madonna Series was about to be sold to collectors and private museums around the world. The collection was valued at more than $150 million. I opened the file. In the artist field, I stared at the name for a long time. "Application denied."

On the third day after receiving our college acceptance letters, the most popular student in school, Natalie Simmons, proposes something in our class group chat. "We're all adults now, and we've already been accepted into college. We should do something exciting before the semester begins. Let's put on a show and stage a fake bank heist. It'll be fun." In my last life, I make 23 phone calls in a row and confiscate every prop they plan to use. No one gets hurt. But Natalie becomes the target of criticism from parents and teachers. She sinks into depression and eventually jumps into a lake. The entire class blames me and hates me. At our graduation dinner, they force a whole bottle of liquor down my throat. Then, they say they're taking me to the riverside to sober up. When I wake up, I'm in the river. Water fills my lungs, freezing cold. The news report summed up my life in five words. "Drunk Man Falls Into River." When I open my eyes again, my phone is vibrating. The very first message in the group chat is Natalie's proposal. This time, I don't say anything. I take screenshots and save copies.

At the company's annual awards ceremony, my boss personally presented me with the "Employee of the Year" award. The bonus was ten million dollars, and he promised it would go through immediately, right there on the spot. Hundreds of my coworkers rose to their feet and applauded. Champagne and confetti rained down around me. But the next morning, the police showed up and took me from my own home. The company had reported me, claiming I suffered from a severe delusional disorder, that I'd not only imagined receiving a ten-million-dollar bonus but had also attacked the finance system in an attempt to siphon off company funds. I pulled up the transfer record and the gala footage on my phone, only to find they'd both turned into garbled nonsense. I went to every coworker I could find. All of them looked at me with the same pitying eyes and said the same thing. "Man, wake up. You got drunk and made a scene onstage at the gala last night. There was never any ten-million-dollar bonus." In the end, I was locked away for attempted fraud and mental illness, and I died there, tortured to death in a psychiatric hospital. When I opened my eyes again, I was back on the day of the gala, and my boss was walking toward me with a wine glass in hand, smiling.

When the company began choosing a vendor for staff lunches, I immediately ruled out my family's restaurant. A coworker stared at me. "Nora, that is a $150,000 contract. Your family runs a restaurant, and you're turning down money being handed to you? Are you out of your mind?" I smiled and didn't answer. In my last life, I took that contract. Then the new intern, Fiona Bell, accused me of secretly pocketing a commission. She even produced a quote from a three-star hotel for comparison. "Look, theirs is three dollars a portion. How do you justify charging eight?" Even my boyfriend of six years, Gavin Shaw, whom I had been seeing in secret, joined her in confronting me with the invoices. In the end the whole company froze me out. After I was diagnosed with severe depression, I died in a car accident one groggy-eyed morning. Three months after my death, several people were poisoned or killed after that hotel cleaned its dishes with pesticide. This time, I slid the order back to Fiona. My voice was calm. "You're the intern in facilities. You know the approval process better than I do. I'll stay out of it."

I let my housekeeper’s son, Blake Livingston, stay at my house. Instead, he went to school and stole my identity, pretending to be me. One afternoon, our housekeeper, Fanny Livingston, brought food to school. When I reached for one of the containers, Blake said sarcastically, "Finn, this is the food my family’s housekeeper made for me. I may treat you like a brother, but that doesn’t mean you can just help yourself." Listening to our classmates whisper about me, I knew that in my previous life, I would have simply walked away. I wouldn’t even have bothered explaining myself. Unfortunately for him, I’d been reborn. Right in front of everyone, I dumped his lunch over his head. "You stay in my house for a few days, and suddenly you think you’re some rich kid? And your family has a housekeeper? Your mom barely makes enough working as one herself. You think she can afford to hire a housekeeper?"

The boss' daughter, Pamela Thompson, returns from overseas to take over the family business. The moment she sees me growing vegetables in an empty lot on the factory grounds, she covers her nose in disgust and sneers. "Our factory is a flagship company in this industrial hub!" she barks. "What kind of riffraff grows vegetables here? Do you think this is your personal farmer's market? Fire him, scrape that patch clean, and pave it over with concrete!" "And you!" she snaps, pointing to another worker. "Aren't you getting a little too old? You don't exactly fit our corporate image. You're fired too!" I take off my work uniform, load up my bicycle with my homegrown harvest, and pedal away. Behind me, the workers are all dumbfounded. One after another, they strip off their uniforms as well and fall in line behind me. "Where Drew goes, we go!" This time, it's the spoiled heiress who's left staring in utter disbelief.

Ten minutes before the wedding ceremony is about to begin, I receive a disturbing photo on my phone. In it, a man with deeply sunken eyes is crawling on the ground like a dog. He is so skinny that he's nothing more than skin and bones. Meanwhile, my bride, Waverly Suther, is looming over the man on the floor as she gazes down at him with a disdainful sneer. Just as I'm about to block the number of the person who sent me this disturbing prank photo, that person sends me another two messages. "Run away from the wedding! Right now! Don't marry Waverly Suther, no matter what!" "That man on the floor is you ten years from now!"

The annual performance review came around. I was the company's top revenue generator. They gave me a D. I looked at the evaluation form in my hand and laughed, because the alternative was worse. "A D? No raise? You people call this a comprehensive assessment?" Even a dog that drags a forty-five-million-dollar deal home gets a couple of bones for it. Sonia Blake, our HR director, was busy touching up her lipstick. She didn't bother to look up. "Ethan, don't get arrogant. This company values character. It values teamwork. You lean too hard on individual heroics. The D was a unanimous decision by the board." "So that's the justification for wiping out my entire year-end bonus and cutting my pay twenty percent?" I didn't understand. That was when my direct supervisor, and the man I hated most in the building, Grant Palmer, walked in. "If you don't want the job, you can leave." He was flushed with satisfaction, waving around the letter of intent I had just closed. One and a half billion dollars. "Sonia, why are you still arguing with him? Ethan, here's the termination agreement. Sign it. And while you're at it, hand over the core code for the new platform." Use a man up, then throw him away. Fine. Wonderful. I picked up the pen and signed my name across the agreement with a flourish. "I hope you don't come begging me to come back."

I am an orphan who was adopted, yet I live like a king in my house. While my older brother, Eric Jones, sleeps in the attic, which is freezing in the winter and sweltering in the summer, I get the nicest bedroom, the south-facing one with the best sunlight. Eric wears worn-out clothes from the flea market, the kind sold by the pound. As for me, I get new clothes from the mall every year. Some still have the tags on. Eric starts working at a construction site right after high school. As he works three shifts a day, his hands are covered in calluses. I, on the other hand, attend the best private high school in the city, where one year's tuition costs as much as two years of his wages. My adoptive mother, Dolores Bender, looks over my straight-A report card, wipes away her tears, and says, "Even if I have to sell everything we own, I'm putting you through college." Whenever relatives come over, they tell me how lucky I am to have been taken in by the kindest family on earth. That's what I've always believed, too, right up until Thanksgiving, when Eric had too much to drink.

At the final meeting before the company's IPO, my wife, who was supposed to give the presentation, was absent. I called her multiple times, but she never answered. Because of her absence, the company lost the bid and became the laughingstock of the industry. Right at that moment, her male best friend uploaded a new post. "It's just a cold. Look at how worried she is." I clicked on it. There was my wife, whom I hadn't seen in days, crouched beside him, fawning over him as she gave him his medicine. I was utterly disappointed. In that moment, the five years we had spent together vanished completely.

One week before Mom and Dad's 20th wedding anniversary, Mom gives Dad a Patek Philippe watch as a gift. However, I take the watch from him and give it to my 300-pound classmate, Amber Love. This is because in my past life, Dad's personality changed completely after three days of wearing the watch. He would look at me with coldness in his eyes, constantly smash things, curse at me, and call me a good-for-nothing bitch. I once casually complained about him to one of his good friends, Bryan Glover, but Dad found out and slapped me hard. It wasn't until one night later, while walking past Mom and Dad's bedroom, that I overheard them say the watch was a cursed object that would let the wearer swap souls with Bryan. I called the police at once, but Mom and "Dad" accused me of being mentally ill and then forcefully locked me up at a psychiatric hospital. I ended up getting beaten and tortured there so badly that I died a horrible, painful death. When I wake up again, I realize that it's the day when Mom presents the watch to Dad before their 20th anniversary.

My sister disappeared because of my aunt, Renee Dover. She smiled and said, "Our little Candy is so pretty. It'd be a shame not to get her into kids' modeling." Then she took three-year-old Candy away. She claimed the shoot had been too crowded and that Candy had wandered off on her own. My parents searched for over ten years. When they finally found her, Candy was chained up in a house deep in the mountains. She had given birth to seven children, and her mind had broken long ago. She died on the way home. The grief destroyed my parents too. They lost their minds and were killed when a car struck them. Aunt Renee seized their inheritance and gloated, "Your mother should've lent me the money when I asked. I sold the kid and got paid anyway, didn't I?" She built her happiness on Candy's suffering, married well, and lived happily ever after. In a haze, I was swept into traffic too. When I opened my eyes, I was four years old again.