Bias Imagination Short Stories & Novels

When the news of my husband's death reached me, I was seven months pregnant. My vision went black, and I fainted on the spot. When I opened my eyes again, a childish voice shouted in my head, "Mommy, wake up! Scumbag Daddy tricked you! He's not dead! He's with his mistress who's about to steal your identity!" I was stunned. The voice angrily spoke again, "The head of the Shaw family from the capital is your biological brother. Today, Scumbag Daddy is going to let his mistress take your place as his long-lost sister! Then, he and his mistress will conspire to kill you, and my brother and I will be sold off. To protect me, my brother will get his legs broken by human traffickers in the future and starve to death!" The child's heartbreaking cry jolted me awake from my grief like a bucket of ice water. I thought it was a hallucination, but then I heard the voice of an unfamiliar man in the living room. "Mr. Shaw, this is Miss Alice Woods. She's the long-lost sister that you've been looking for for twenty years!"

It is the night before the family holds the lottery to decide our arranged marriages, and I happen to overhear my family talking to Julia Quinton, the woman I love. "I never thought Xander would burn us all to death in our past life. Thankfully, we've all been reborn. We have to make sure Xander doesn't get drawn in the lottery tomorrow." Julia feels nothing but utter disgust for me. "There's no way I'll ever marry him again now that I've been reborn!" If that is how they feel, I decide to give everyone what they want. I tamper with my lot and marry someone else instead, only for all of them to end up regretting it.

I was a guide dog. On the day my owner got engaged, his fiancée gave him an AI pet translator collar. Once I put it on, I barked toward the kitchen, and the collar immediately translated: "The short-rib soup is too hot. I want to wait until it cools down before eating." My blind owner touched the scalding dog bowl and was deeply moved by his fiancée’s thoughtfulness. From then on, the collar became the bridge between my owner and me. Until one day, my owner was home alone. Thick smoke drifted from outside the mansion, and I barked desperately. However, the collar translated my barking as: "This blind man is so annoying. How could he ever be worthy of marrying mummy? I want to tear his throat out." My owner panicked, stumbled backward, and fell down the stairs, dying on the spot. His fiancée returned and beat me to death, claiming that I was a vicious dog that had attacked its owner. She not only inherited my owner’s enormous fortune but also married his best friend soon afterward. When I opened my eyes again, I had returned to the day my owner’s fiancée tried to put the collar around my neck. This time, I sank my teeth straight into her thigh.

I was the prime suspect in the notorious murder of my parents-in-law in Cardinal City. The one who arrested me was my wife—Linda Reese, the police chief. While the verdict was still pending, the killer struck again. The new victim was murdered with the same savage cruelty. Linda knelt before me, begging me to tell her the truth. I told her I didn’t know. The victims’ families screamed, demanding that I be carved into pieces. Three months later, Linda found me beside a garbage bin, bringing with her a memory-decoding device. Her hands trembled as she pressed two thin needles into my temples. “I’m sorry, Finn. I know you’re not the killer. I just want this slaughter to end. I don’t want anyone else to die. Let everyone see your memories—let them see what really happened back then.” But when she finished watching my memories, she collapsed to the ground, utterly broken, and fell to her knees.

Within the high society circle, I'm a notorious high-maintenance trophy wife. I won't eat apples unless they are peeled and sliced into small pieces. I won't drink water unless it's exactly 113.2°F. By my second year married into an elite family, my in-laws can no longer stand me. They sign me up for an online makeover reality show, hoping to fix my attitude. The Internet goes crazy. Everyone tunes in, eager to watch me, a spoiled brat, lose my mind in the countryside. Instead, the moment the live stream starts, they see me carrying ten bundles of wheat across my shoulders. They see me wearing a pair of canvas shoes, running more steadily than the local farm women. When the village chief gives me a hundred dollars, my eyes light up with joy. "Wait, I get paid a hundred bucks a day, and meals are included?" People explode with rage. "Who does this fake think she's fooling? She spends a million dollars a day back in the city, and now she's pretending to be frugal on the show?" "If she were really like this, why would the Greenwood family send her here in the first place?" I have nothing to say. These people have no idea. Life in a wealthy family may look glamorous from the outside. But they only give me a hundred dollars a month. The only reason I haven't starved to death is because I've been secretly taking construction jobs in a mask, hauling bricks and mixing cement just to earn enough for a couple of meals. That night, a clip of me wearing a straw hat and grinning foolishly over my hundred dollars goes viral. Jeffrey Greenwood, who is attending a business conference overseas, calls me. "That's enough. Ten minutes ago, I paid off your seven-million-dollar Hermès bill. The Greenwood family gives you ten million dollars a month, and anything beyond that gets fully reimbursed. Why are you making our family look bad?" I freeze in the middle of chewing a mouthful of wild greens. Ten million dollars a month? Seven-million-dollar Hermès bill? What the hell? Who's living my life as the spoiled, billionaire's wife?

After high school, my brother, John Garrett, and my childhood friend, Ivan Jeffson, take me on a trip. But we end up stranded on a deserted island after a plane crash. In our third year on the island, I accidentally discover surveillance cameras hidden in the trees. Startled, I lose my footing and tumble down the cliff, falling into a large pool at a luxury villa. Inside the villa, a special effects artist is applying fake bruises to John's face. Helen Burch, another girl who had been on the same flight and stranded on the island with us, is lying in my parents' arms. They sit on the couch, watching the video playing on the giant screen. In the video, I am starving, but I still give Helen the only fish I catch that month. After three years of relying on each other for survival, I have long considered her my own sister. My parents gently tap Helen's nose and say, "You don't have to worry about being bullied by your sister anymore, right? You two have become closer than ever." John carefully asks, "Can we move on to the next step and bring Helen home then?" Helen bites her lip and nods. Ivan, whose leg is supposedly broken, strides down the stairs and says delightedly, "It's a good thing I held back and didn't tell Nina the truth." It turns out Helen is my biological sister, who had been taken away by our nanny right after birth. The whole ordeal on the island is nothing more than an elaborate ruse to bring her home. Thinking about everything I have endured over the past three years, I nearly break down. Just as I am about to rush inside, a line of text suddenly appears before my eyes. [Congratulations, Host. You have unlocked the final stage of the Favoritism Mission! Would you like to accumulate enough favoritism points to return to the real world?]

Yelena Moon, the new intern, claimed to be someone who could bring wealth to everyone. Apparently, the lottery numbers she had her eye on would definitely win a prize. Everyone lined up to get her to buy lottery tickets for them. Surprisingly enough, they became millionaires overnight. But I soon realized that whenever Yelena won a lottery prize, I'd lose money to all sorts of incidents and accidents. I might suffer from a bone fracture one day, only to get into an accident that required a surgery the next day. Even my own luck started to run out when it came to my own wealth. I kept failing my investments while racking debts nonstop. In the end, the loan sharks came knocking on my door. My senses were all frayed at that point. In a fit of despair, I demanded answers from Yelena, only to get scolded by everyone else. "What do you mean Yelena swapped out your luck for hers? I think you're just jealous of the fact that everyone's getting rich now!" "You can't even retain your own wealth, and yet you have the guts to frame a young woman for such nonsense! People like you are absolutely toxic to this world!" I tried my best to defend myself, but not even my own dad believed me. To rub salt into my wounds, he even treated Yelena as his own biological daughter and kicked me out of my home. Later on, someone tossed a sack over me and kidnapped me. After torturing me to no end, they threw me off a high building, I was crushed beyond recognition. When I wake up again, I've returned to the day Yelena is flaunting her financial luck. Upon noticing how smug she looks, I start buying lottery tickets like mad. "What a coincidence! I'm also super lucky when it comes to wealth!"

"Anna, you don't look so good. Want some candy?" The class belle smiled sweetly as she held out a bag of fruit candies. In my previous life, I ate one. That very night, every penny in my bank account vanished—including the money I'd saved to pay for Grandpa's lifesaving surgery. Desperate to afford his treatment, I gave up my acceptance to Oxvale University and worked myself to the bone day and night, but before I could save enough, he died. And eventually, so did I, alone and exhausted in my tiny rented room. Only after I died did I learn the truth. The class belle had bonded with a transfer system. As long as I ate something she gave me, whatever money was in my bank account would automatically be transferred to hers. Now that I had been given a second chance, I stared at the candy she held out and reached for it. If she wanted other people's money badly, then I'd find out just how much her system could swallow—30 classmates' bank accounts. All at once.

My husband and I scratched off a five-million-dollar lottery ticket at a lottery shop. Before we even had time to celebrate, the rosary I had worn since childhood suddenly snapped, a single bead cracking clean off the chain. Without another word, I grabbed him and tried to buy tickets that very night to flee back to the southwestern mountains. The lottery shop owner stared at me in shock. My husband clung to the metal shutter and roared, "Have you lost your mind?" But I gripped that broken wooden bead tightly. "We leave now." My husband flung my hand away, his eyes bloodshot. "I'm claiming this prize today. If you dare run, we're getting divorced!" I nodded without hesitation. "Fine. The five million, plus the used car at home, all go to you. I'll leave with nothing... "But tonight, I have to leave this city."

To stay by the side of award-winning actress Victoria Quinn, I gave up the system's one-billion-dollar cash reward. I also drained every last one of my luck points to make her paralyzed legs heal. The price was that my life became bound to her loyalty. If she ever betrayed me, emotionally or physically, my soul would be ripped from my body and erased completely. At the moment of binding, I hesitated. But when I looked into her eyes and saw the depth of her love, I believed her. I believed her when she said, "Out of all the people in the world, I only want you." So I chose to become the man who stood silently behind her, giving everything without complaint, and I pressed confirm. For seven years, we loved each other as deeply as we had in the beginning. Hand in hand, we weathered every storm together. Until our wedding anniversary. I was in the kitchen making her favorite soup when I suddenly coughed violently and spat out a large pool of black blood. Then I looked down and saw my fingers slowly turning transparent, so faint that I could no longer even touch the glass in front of me. At the same time, a piercing alarm rang through my mind. "Warning. Bound target's love value has fallen below the critical threshold. Erasure protocol activated..."

The day I found out I was pregnant, I accidentally called myself three years in the future. Clutching my pregnancy test report, I asked excitedly, "Was Adrian happy when he found out he was going to be a dad? Is my baby a boy or a girl?" The woman on the other end of the phone answered in a hoarse voice, "The baby was never born. After Jane found out you were pregnant, she gave you abortion pills. Adam even signed the papers to have your uterus removed. And Adrian ignored you completely just to comfort that illegitimate daughter." My mind went blank, and my whole body started shaking. "That's impossible..." I couldn't believe that my beloved older brother, my best friend of 20 years, and the man I had loved for seven years had all betrayed me. A muffled sob came from the other end of the phone. "Adrian had already secretly married Sophia. Everyone knew about it, but they all kept it from you!" I collapsed into my chair. Then my phone received a string of numbers. "If you don't believe me, go see for yourself."

In the city of Ottenworth, I'm the heir who nobody wants to mess with. Grandpa is a member of the school's board. The student council president is my fiancée, Cassidy Spencer. The captain of the fencing team, Millie Tiller, and the top student of our year, Sierra Porter, are my childhood friends. That's why everyone says that I can have anything or anyone at the school as long as I say the word. However, everything changes when I return to school after taking a year off due to my illness. Rows of comments suddenly appear in my vision. [The rich heir has returned! He doesn't know that Cassidy, Millie and Sierra have already fallen for the transfer student.] [Although Micah is poor, he's courageous and kind. He refuses to be sponsored and insists on working to support himself. Who wouldn't feel sympathy for him?] [Jasper will use his family background to bully Micah. In the end, he will be hated and shunned by Cassidy, Millie and Sierra. Even his fiancée will call off their engagement in front of everyone.] [I love watching a haughty heir fall from his pedestal!] Cassidy, Millie, and Sierra used to revolve around me. During orientation, they hurl insults at me to protect the poor student, Micah Lyon. I just smile and decide to stay away from them from now on. After all, a true successor doesn't have to prove himself by losing his mind over women.

As the heir to a bloodline of diagnostic empaths, I was born with an extraordinary gift. The instant my fingers made contact with a patient’s skin, I could hear every organ speak its mind. When I examined a drunkard, his liver had screamed from inside him, “Half a bottle of whiskey and two beers every day! Look at me! I’m so dark and shriveled, I practically look like beef jerky soaked in bourbon!” When I examined a woman who had been struggling to conceive, her uterus had lamented, “Her husband’s swimmers can barely move, yet he has the nerve to blame me for not doing my job?” One night, after returning from a business trip, I accidentally touched Andy Croft’s wrist while pulling the blanket over him. A weak voice immediately came from his kidneys. “I’m running on fumes here. Three times a day, every day, for two straight weeks. Even a machine would have broken down by now!” His heart chimed in right after. “Every time he receives a check-in call, I start pounding so hard from panic that I feel like I could break through his ribs!” His skin was even more indignant. “That awful woman really went wild with her nails! His back looks like he lost a fight with a wildcat. She even bit him on the shoulder. Does she have a thing for biting?” My hands shook as I pulled back Andy’s collar. A fresh bite mark stood out clearly on his shoulder. That same night, I called a number I had not dialed in years. “You once made me an offer long ago. I accept.”

I was snow, lent to the human world by the Snow Realm. As a child, I led three lost boys out of the snowy mountains. One became my boyfriend. The other two became my closest childhood friends. The Snow Realm allowed me to stay human on one condition: Every year, before spring arrived, someone had to walk the last stretch of snow-covered trail at the summit with me. If no one came, I could no longer remain human. That first year, all three came, each trying to be the one to clear a path through the snow for me. And every year after that, they came again. Until this year, when my boyfriend Ethan’s cousin, Lily, moved to the city for school. She said she’d never seen the sea and wanted them to take her there. Before they left, I asked, “Who’s walking the snow trail with me this year?” Ethan answered first. “I am.” Noah and Lucas smiled. “Have we ever let you go alone?” But on the day we were supposed to leave, I waited at the station until dark. Then Lily sent me a photo from the beach. The three of them crowded around her, her smile as bright as a summer day. I asked, “Weren’t you supposed to come up the mountain with me?” “It’s Lily’s first time seeing the sea,” Ethan said. “I can’t just leave her here.” “You go every year,” Noah told me. “What’s the harm in skipping it once?” “We’ll go with you next year,” Lucas said. I looked toward the distant mountain. “But the snow will be gone tomorrow.” “Then we’ll go earlier next year,” Ethan replied. That night, they sent another message to the group chat. “We’re coming back to the beach next week. Want to join us?” I lowered my head. The snow on the back of my hand was slowly melting.

After catching Dustin Sherwood cheating on me, I decisively break up with him and join a tour group to the Northern Pole to clear my head. However, I encounter a rare blizzard and get trapped on a glacier at -22 degrees. As my life hangs by a thread, Dustin trudges up to me, searching for me on foot. He peels off all his clothes, layer by layer, and wraps them tightly around my freezing body. "Don't go to sleep, Claudia. I'm sorry. Please forgive me. I only want you to live well for the rest of your life… If there ever is a next life, I promise that I will never betray you or let you down again." When the rescue team finally finds us, Dustin is still clinging to me, but his body is completely frozen stiff. They have to cut his arms off just to separate me from him. After Dustin's death, I live with guilt toward him until I die at 80 years old. When I open my eyes again, I realize that I am reborn a year before he cheats on me. In this life, he decisively severs all ties with Miranda Barlow and even makes a show of kicking her out of the company with me watching. He also swaps out all of his personal assistants and secretaries for married men and never brings any female companions to events or drinking parties anymore. Everyone marvels at how deeply Dustin is in love with me. However, on the eve of our wedding, I suddenly hear his heartfelt inner thoughts. [I'm about to have her, even in my second life. This time, I must make sure to hide Mimi well so she never finds out about her.]

After I turn five years of age and have my very own phone, I start receiving strange messages every single day. For some reason, the sender keeps referring to me as their mom. At 3:00 am, they send me another message. "Mom, I saw you in my dreams again. The rain is seeping into the attic. My stepmom told me to use a rag to soak up all the water, but the rag is too small. Even though I tried to wipe it up all night, it still wouldn't dry. Mom, I'm so cold and hungry. I miss you so much…" I tilt my head, looking at the rain pouring outside the window. I then earnestly reply, "Don't be scared, sweetheart. Where are you right now? I will bring you something yummy!"

I was the greediest stand-in in high society, and my motto was simple. As long as cash kept coming, my dignity could take a back seat. For Frederick Jameson, I played the role of his obedient pet, so when his true love accused me of stealing her necklace, I just bowed and apologized. With Samuel York, I served as his lab rat, testing drugs meant for his sweetheart's condition until they left me with a bleeding ulcer. And for Theodore Xander, I acted as a scapegoat, getting pushed out to take the blame of extortion for his crush. They all assumed I was hopelessly in love with them, even forcing me to sign a confession at their joint engagement party. That was when the system's voice chimed in, "Host, the portal home is now open." I wiped the blood from my lips, splashed my wine into their faces, and grinned brightly. "Game over, losers!" Right in front of everyone, I leaped straight into the sea. Later, word spread that the three big shots scoured the entire ocean just to find my body.

On the seventh day after I was pronounced dead, my husband, William Garcia, turned me into an obedient AI wife. During a global live press conference, he hugged my holographic projection and said in a hoarse voice as though truly heartbroken that he had lost me, “Tiffany, don’t be scared. From now on, you’re accompanying me in another way.” The internet praised him for being the most devoted husband in the tech world. But no one knew that I actually wasn’t dead. My body was hidden in the third basement floor of Garcia Tech’s office building. I was hanging by a thread, kept alive only by an oxygen tube. My conscience had been connected to a Late Wife Companion System, and I was set to say “good morning,” “good night,” and “I love you” to him at fixed times every day. Backstage at the press conference, top celebrity Wanda Scott leaned into William’s embrace, with a sapphire ring that my mom had left me on her finger. She asked with a smile, “William, is Tiffany a lot more obedient now than she was before?” William bowed his head and kissed her. “Tiffany used to be too smart, too ambitious, and too unwilling to submit. “It’s just nice now.” Wanda asked again, “What will happen to her after I become Mrs. Garcia?” William chuckled. “I’ll switch her to housekeeper mode. “She’ll greet you by the title Madam every day, pick out your wedding gown for you, and read our children bedtime stories.” Suddenly, a technician rushed in, his face pale. “Mr. Garcia, AI Mrs. Garcia keeps repeating a phrase backstage.” William furrowed his brows. “What?” The technician’s voice trembled. “She keeps saying, ‘William, I’m still alive.’” William fell silent for two seconds, the look on his face growing cold. “Delete it. “Clear out her SOS module, anger module, and resistance module.” The camera was still live, and the entire internet heard him. At the next second, my holographic projection on the big screen suddenly lifted its head. I said to the thousands of viewers in the gentle voice he trained me to have, “William Garcia, what right do you have to expect a woman you murdered to still love you?”

On the day I was in heat, my childhood sweetheart stood me up. He only sent me a voice message, which said, “Willow, what do you mean you’re in heat? You’re just desperate for a man. Have some self-respect. Stop calling me!” Just as my fever spiked, pushing me to the edge of delirium, spectators watching my story flooded my vision with comments. [Sweetie, there are plenty of fish in the sea! Don’t be sad!] [Honey, look who’s walking in front of you. It’s Douglas Simus, the university heartthrob. He has the whole V-line and abs package, and he’s still a pure virgin boy!] Who? A V-line and abs? He should probably be able to satisfy me then. I struggled to open my eyes and saw a handsome man appear. Not bad. He smelled clean. I stopped him. “Do you want to hook up with me?”

To complete my mission of winning over the tragic second male lead, Charles Sawyer, I exchange all my system points to help him rise and become the richest man in Broxia. All that is left is for him to propose to me, and the mission will be complete. When the innocent-looking female lead, Natalia Leigh, causes the company to lose tens of millions of dollars due to a mistake, I simply fire her according to company rules. Unexpectedly, this causes Charles to lose his temper at me in public. Right in front of the entire company, he rebukes me, "Melissa McBride! Stop using work as an excuse to vent at Natalia just because you're jealous! I've seen through your little scheme to win me over!" To punish me for supposedly bullying Natalia, he bids aggressively and wins a priceless piece of jewelry at an astronomical price a few days later at a charity auction. Not only does he personally present it to Natalia, but he even drops to one knee and proposes to her in front of all the guests. When he looks at me, he says mockingly, "Melissa, as long as I refuse, your mission is destined to fail." He is convinced that he has absolute control over me. But he does not know that once the mission fails, my system activates a return function. When that happens, every advantage I once gave him will be returned to me with a single command.