Melodramatic Imagination Short Stories & Bias Transmigration Novels

The day I proposed to Hannah Amell, we discovered that we were characters in a romance novel about a woman destined to save a broken man. She was the heroine, fated to devote her life to redeeming the male lead. I was nothing more than a nobody in the background. Hannah’s eyes had blazed with fury. Defying the fate written for her, she dragged me to the courthouse to make our marriage official, then held a lavish wedding with me. As I held her in my arms, she made me a promise. “Leon, I don’t believe in some stupid book or its ridiculous redemption plot. The only thing I believe in is that I love you.” In the years that followed, everyone saw us as the perfect, devoted couple. I really thought we could spend the rest of our lives happily, growing old side by side. Then, in the third year of our marriage, the novel’s hero got drunk, rode his motorcycle the wrong way down the road, and came hurtling straight toward me. In a split second, I wrenched the wheel aside and slammed hard into the roadside barrier. I was covered in blood. A shard of glass had pierced my heart. Every beat sent another burst of fatal pain through my chest. Hannah, sitting in the passenger seat, was shaken but completely unharmed. She struggled to force open the car door. The moment she saw the unconscious man lying on the ground, all the color drained from her face. “Cedric!” In that instant, the blood in my veins ran cold. Cedric. That was the name of the novel’s hero.

On my hundredth hospital admission, I saw the comments floating across the screen. They revealed that I was the frail supporting character, destined to die young, while my fiancé, Julian Frost, was the male lead. While I was unconscious in the hospital, Julian was busy playing hero to the insecure woman he supporting financially. Even as I was rushed to the ICU and resuscitated, he still had condoms in his pocket for the two of them to use. Everyone in the comments was hoping I would die and set Julian free. Later, just as they wished, I left Julian’s world one spring. But Julian went mad and never escaped that spring for the rest of his life.

My wife, Janice Frost, was an interworld traveler. People like her weren't supposed to form attachments with anyone in another world. But she fell for me the moment she saw me. Every time her feelings stirred, it tore through her, like her soul was being ripped apart. She had endured that pain 99 times. Later, I was abducted and taken to North Kaman. They beat me every day, over and over. Right when I was about to break, I remembered the method Janice once taught me, a way to reach her across worlds. Somehow, I managed to use it. But instead of her voice alone, I heard her speaking with her mentor from the other side. "Janice, how could you contact a resistance group yourself and have them take Samuel? I thought you loved him." Janice's voice was cold and hard. "This ordeal was meant for Tim. I had to do this to save him. Samuel is the main protagonist of this world. He's protected by fate. Nothing will happen to him. Once this mission is done, I can stay in this timeline for good. When that happens, I'll make it up to him." My chest tightened until it felt like it might split open. When those people closed in on me again, I stopped resisting completely.

After waking up in the pages of a novel, I married the loyal second lead—the man who could never win the heroine's love. Blessed with exceptional fertility, I gave him two children in three years, and what began as a marriage of convenience slowly ripened into something like love. However, during the New Year's Eve ball at the palace, strange lines of floating text suddenly appeared before my eyes. [The queen heroine is faking her pregnancy. She's just waiting for the fertile side character to give birth so she can steal the child!] [The second lead is truly devoted. To secure the queen's position, he'd even offer up his own wife to the king's bed.] [Once the side character "dies in childbirth," the baby becomes the heroine's by right. What a perfect scheme.] The silver spoon slipped from my fingers and rang against the floor. So, the deeply devoted second lead was always meant to protect only his unattainable first love. In that case… Why shouldn't I take the crown for myself?

I had always been a little dizzy by nature. My head was often muddled. Three years ago, in that same haze, I picked up a drunk woman and brought her home. She woke up and stared at me for a while before suddenly saying, “Let’s get married.” I did not think much about it. I just nodded and thus became the rich husband of a powerful family. They gave me a credit card that I could use however I liked, and I could live in a luxury house without any limits. We had a son, but alas, he was kidnapped. It took me two years, but I managed to find him again. I was about to tell my wife when she handed me a divorce agreement. “I’m bankrupt. This is my last sum of money. Take it and leave.” At that moment, a few chat messages suddenly appeared in front of me. [Wow! The female lead’s crush, the male lead, has returned to the country!] [She is probably pretending to be bankrupt. She wants to get rid of the male supporting character to go back to the male lead!] [She got drunk back then because the male lead left. The male supporting character was just a stand-in!] What? So I was a replacement? I nodded slowly. “Oh. Then let’s get a divorce.” The light in her eyes went out at once. I looked at her and felt that I had forgotten to say something. Whatever. I would say it when I remembered.

In the seventh year of marrying into the Dawson family, Amanda Dawson's childhood friend, Leroy Blanchard, has returned from overseas. Leroy is very outgoing and handsome, not to mention he's extremely capable, too. Soon, he becomes the apple of everyone's eye. Even my father-in-law, who has never liked me, to begin with, has nothing but praises for Leroy. On Leroy's birthday, Amanda spends a huge amount of money in organizing his birthday party before declaring her love for him in a high-profile manner. The entire city is waiting to watch me, the legally-wedded husband, embarrass myself just so I can kick up a huge fuss over the whole thing. But I merely smile faintly before packing my things and getting ready to leave. I've been in this world for seven years. Finally, I'm about to finish acting out all of my scenes as the lovesick male supporting lead.