Tragic Love Imagination 短篇故事與 Mistress 小說

My husband, Jonah Perry, and my son, Liam Perry, have given me a gift on my birthday. As soon as I open it, I see a silver snake hissing at me before biting me on the hand. Terrified by the ordeal, I end up getting sent to the hospital. Liam walks into my hospital room with his head bowed. I'm about to tell him that I'm fine when he tells me in disappointment, "Suz loves snakes the most. Dad and I plan on keeping a few snakes at home, too. "How's Suz going to visit us in the future if you keep this act up, Mom?" As he speaks, he lifts a snake to my face. "Will your fear disappear if you interact with snakes a lot more from now on?" Jonah chides Liam for his actions softly. But soon, he picks up a call from Suzanne Wright and walks out of the room with a wide smile on his face. I feel my heart sink to the pits of my stomach. My lips soon curl into a mocking smile. Instead of questioning the father-son duo hysterically like I always do, I summon the system, which has been asleep for a very long time. "Remember when you told me that I get to go home as long as I change my mind within two years after my mission's completion? Are you still holding up your end of that bargain?" One month later, I die right in front of Jonah and Liam. But they end up going insane.

For weeks, my husband had been disappearing for two hours every night. One night, I tailed him to a strange pawnshop. Inside, he was holding my nightgown. “I want to trade six months of her life. Wendy’s healthy. She’ll be fine.” Then he pulled out my lipstick and handed it to the shopkeeper. “It's only three days of her youth. She won't notice.” The shopkeeper placed my belongings on an antique bronze scale, selling off pieces of my life as if they were worth nothing. I stormed inside to stop them, but my husband grabbed me around the waist and pinned me against the cold counter. He pressed a kiss to my cheek. “You know Aria’s been coughing up blood. How can you just let her suffer? She’s only in this condition because of me.” Then, without a trace of hesitation, he crushed three of my fingers. I screamed, the pain so intense I nearly blacked out. “All you have to do is put up with a little pain, and Aria gets an entire day of relief. Seems like a fair trade to me.” The bronze scale flashed red, drowning out my screams. Then one day, my husband brought our wedding ring to the pawnshop. “She's worn this ring for ten years. I want to trade it for another ten years of life for Aria.” But this time, the shopkeeper smiled. “A transaction this large requires an exchange from both parties.” He turned to me. “Now, what would you like to take from him?”

Renee Fuller, my wife, suddenly stops talking about divorce after her 18th failed attempt. She has failed every attempt before this, after all. I catch them at a hotel and cover the company lobby with photos of her in bed with Edward Chester, her male assistant. I beat Edward up so badly at the press conference that he suffers a concussion and develops PTSD. Renee has every reason to hate me, but even so, she drops the subject of divorce completely. She is home every day right on schedule and hands over her phone. She updates me on her whereabouts every hour and even keeps a 24-hour video call running when she travels for work. I still can't put my mind at ease, though. I keep pestering her day after day, demanding to know why she no longer wants to divorce me. Renee asks me, "Haven't I done enough?" It is enough—almost too good to be true. Renee finally tells me the truth after catching me following her again, her eyes filled with exhaustion. "I received a call from myself ten years in the future, and she says I'd regret getting a divorce." I am stunned. "You actually believed that?" Renee says, "She said you burned Edward alive."

In my seven years of being married to my husband, Mark Chapman, he always gives me whatever I ask for and prioritizes me in everything. This goes on until he keeps sending food coupons to a female college student named Hayley Larkson. Not only that, he stands up for her and beats up some thugs on her behalf. One time, he even takes her to the hospital to get treatment. Holding a toy, my daughter asks Mark innocently, "Dad, Ms. Larkson is so gentle and pretty. She's not as strict and mean as Mom, who always makes me do homework. Can you ask her to move in and be my teacher?" Mark smiles and replies, "Sure." I stand frozen in a corner, my lips trembling. Just then, the system's cold voice speaks in my mind. It asks if I want to go home. I close my eyes and reply, "Take me home."

For the 999th time, the system in my head issues a warning: [Warning! Your infatuation level has exceeded the safe limit! If you do not leave Eleanor Hayes within one hour, you will be erased!] I look up to find my CEO wife, Eleanor, standing protectively in front of her secretary, Charles Beaumont, in the hospital. He has falsely accused me of stealing his paintings, and she believes him without question. Right in front of me, she slashes the paintings I have spent three years creating and then orders me to apologize to Charles. "You stole Charles' paintings in the first place," she says coldly. "Everything I've done is to make it up to him. All you have to do is apologize. What's so hard about that?" I stare at her in silence as she shields Charles from me. I take a last glance at the paintings I have spent three years creating, then calmly speak to the system in my head. "If this obsession with her is what's causing the problem, then I want the highest level of authorization. Remove all the love I have for her. Immediately." The system replies, "Authorization request received." One hour later, I am cleared to leave the hospital. Eleanor is waiting outside. The moment she sees me, she blocks the door and grabs me, her eyes burning with anger. "Daniel, what kind of game are you playing now?" I look at her calmly. There is none of the anger, hurt, or love I once would have felt. Then I say evenly, "Ma'am, you've unlawfully assaulted me. Would you like me to call the police?"

On my wedding day, I find out my wife has a system that lets her swap two people's lives. Once my love for her reaches its peak, she can make me switch lives with the man she's always loved. She makes me fall for her on purpose, all so she and that man can take everything I own. But after the swap, she comes to me with red-rimmed eyes and begs me to switch back. I smile and shove her away. "It's just cancer. Why should that stop you two from being together?"

It is the third year of the apocalypse. All water sources have been thoroughly polluted, making even a single bottle of clean water extremely rare. Every base has to send out search teams to find new water sources for all. My husband, Jasper Curran, is a geologist, and so, he is able to locate water sources that are still pure and unpolluted. However, when someone holds a knife to my throat for the last bottle of water—thinking that he will do anything to stop them—he hands the only bottle of clean water to Avery Grayson, the person who claimed she was my parents' real daughter instead of me. "Ave is thirsty. She's been suffering since she was little and she even had her parents taken by you, Arianne Grayson," Jasper says. "Just let her have the water." Jasper's expression is too calm and collected, as if my life is not on the line because of him. "They're just trying to scare you. You've enjoyed so many years of being spoiled with a luxurious lifestyle anyway. So what if you get bullied a little?" The people then kick me to the ground in a fit of rage as I watch Jasper huddle Avery into his arms and disappear into the desert. I get beaten up so hard that my chapped lips crack and start bleeding once again. I look at the menacing faces around me and quickly exclaim, "Wait, wait! I can help you find clean water too!"

On my thirty-eighth birthday, my husband, Hugh Shaw, nearly forty, found the love of his life. He asked me for a divorce. "Mina’s only twenty. She’s sweet and kind, while you’re old and boring." I nodded at my own reflection, looking worn and lifeless. That explained Hugh’s strange behavior lately. He’d started caring about his appearance. He never left the house without putting on cologne, and he bought a bouquet of flowers every day. No matter how busy he was, the first thing he did when he got home was work out at the gym. Before the divorce, Hugh asked me, "Maya, you’ve been a housewife for seven years. Can you really bring yourself to divorce me? Don’t come crying to me later!" I smiled. "I won’t." Because that girl he fell in love with was me at twenty.

The day before my wedding, my friend sent me a link to a viral web app called 'A Conversation with Your Future Self.' Looking at my fiancee, Wilma Lambert, still asleep beside me, I decided to give it a try and sent a message. [Future me, I'm marrying the woman I've loved for seven years tomorrow. I'll definitely be happy after we get married, right?] The screen flickered, and a reply came almost instantly. [No. That's because your wife has already cheated on you. On your wedding night, she'll spend it with your best friend, Hank Gilbert.] The smile on my face vanished instantly. I frowned and instinctively argued back. [How is that possible? Apart from my parents, Wilma and Hank are the two people I trust most. She even donated one of her kidneys to me.] The reply came just as quickly. [The truth is, they've been secretly sleeping together for a long time despite pretending to be at odds with each other for the past seven years.] [She donated her kidney to you only to secure a future with Hank and get your family to invest millions in them.] Wilma's phone alarm suddenly went off beside me. My gaze turned dark, and I gripped my phone so hard that my knuckles turned pale. Then came the final blow. [If you don't believe me, when you try on your wedding outfit later, just pull open the curtain of the fitting room next door. You'll see the truth then.]

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.

Everyone in Harbor City knew that my father maintained two households, one in the north and one in the south. My mother and I lived in Northport, while he kept his lifesaver and her daughter in Southport Years ago, Evelyn Hart took a knife meant for him during an explosion at the docks. He promised her his devotion for life. My mother fought with him over it for more than a decade. The women in their social circle mocked her for clinging to her position as Mrs. Lawson when she could not even drive his so-called lifesaver away. That changed when my mother became pregnant with my little brother. Evelyn flew into a hysterical rage over the phone and pressured my father to give her an answer. That very night, my father took my mother to the hospital and forced her to terminate the pregnancy. "Ava, we can have more children in the future, but I can’t abandon her and her daughter." The night my little brother was gone, my mother suddenly stopped crying. She simply held me and whispered. "Minnie, I’m going home." I knew that my mother was a system agent. She would survive as long as she gave my father a son and a daughter. But now, the mission had failed. The countdown above my mother’s head kept ticking down day by day. I called my father again and again, crying and begging him to come home and see my mother. However, he only snapped coldly. "Hasn’t your mother caused enough trouble after all these years? Tell her to stop using you and her life to compete for my affection." But this time, my mother truly had not been bluffing. The day the countdown reached zero, she slowly stopped breathing in my arms. I wiped away my tears and called the hospital. From that day on, I had neither a father nor a mother.

In the tenth year of my marriage to a genius pianist, I came down with a strange illness. A month ago, my husband missed my birthday party to care for his ailing sister-in-law. Night after night, I had waited for him to return home. But that night I forgot to wait at all and went to bed early. Half a month ago, he attended an important performance with his sister-in-law. I had always been petty and prone to jealousy, yet this time I didn't get angry. I simply went home in silence. Three days ago, I fell seriously ill with a burning fever. My husband rushed back from out of town in a panic—but only to tend to his sister-in-law, whose hand had been scalded. When we ran into each other at the hospital, I was strangely calm. I, who used to be fiercely jealous, felt nothing at all. I forgot the promise we had made to grow old together. I even forgot how he once fretted over me for days when I'd scraped a bit of skin. It wasn't until he said he wanted to bring his sister-in-law home and take care of her for the rest of his life that I—my memories riddled with holes—summoned the system at last. "I want to go home."

After the mission failed, I traded my emotions away with the system so that I could return to my own world. But two years later, the system urgently summoned me back. The system said my target had tried to destroy the entire world, and all she wanted was to see me. I rejected it on the spot. Even though I had already lost my emotions, I still did not want to stay next to someone who had hurt me out of rationality. The system grew frantic and threw out one reward after another. In the end, we agreed that I would only go back for three months. Once I returned, not only would my emotions be restored, but I would also receive a huge sum of money. Legal and after tax. But when I returned to Jessica Sand's side with no emotions at all, her madness seemed to have become even more erratic…

I was a mermaid from the deep sea. Out of curiosity and playfulness, I was caught by a fisherman and endured unbearable torment. Just when I was on the brink of death, Trevon Chapman happened to pass by and saved me. So, I gave up my identity as a mermaid princess, left the ocean behind, and followed him into the human world. For five years after our marriage, Trevon granted my every wish and showered me with affection. I truly believed I had found a safe harbor I could depend on for the rest of my life—until fate struck with its cruelest blow. Trevon's childhood sweetheart had fallen gravely ill, and only a mermaid’s tail could save her. I begged him desperately, but he responded with chilling indifference. "You're only losing your legs. Corinne is losing her life. Are you really that heartless? You're just going to watch her die?" "Besides, you can’t return to the sea anymore. That tail means nothing to you now. From now on, I’ll be your legs." After the surgery, I sat in a wheelchair, running my hand over the empty fabric where my legs should have been, and calmly demanded a divorce. Trevon pulled Corinne into his arms, sneering. "You're neither human nor fish now—a monster. Without me, the only road left for you is death." Yet in the end, when I transformed back into a mermaid and leapt into the sea, his cries and desperate sobs echoed across the waves.

Ruby Monroe's memory resets every three months, back to the day she hates me the most. She breaks my hand again and again to get revenge for her adopted son, Ricky Smith. She also loses her memories again and again after proposing to me beneath a sky full of fireflies. I live through our story over and over, waiting for the day she finally remembers everything. Until one day, I accidentally overhear her talking to her friends. "Ruby, how long are you going to keep this act up? Only a fool like Ricky would believe you really lost your memory. Every time, he gets down on his knees and begs us to play along with him, dreaming that he'll marry you. "In three days, you're going to fake losing your memory again, right? How many times has it been now?" "Nine times." Ruby's cold voice comes through the door. "His food gave Ricky food poisoning and ruined his coming-of-age ceremony. He should be punished!" She pats Ricky's head. "Nobody bullies Ricky!" My heart breaks when I hear her gentle yet cruel words. I never expect that all my years of waiting are just part of her revenge. I wipe away my tears and summon the system. "Cancel our previous deal. In three days, declare this mission a failure and erase all my memories of Ruby."

I did not really go crazy when I found out my fiance was cheating on me. There was one simple reason. Solomon Zimmer had a strange condition—every time he lied, his body would break out in a rash. He had never been able to lie to me. So, when I confronted him, Solomon remained perfectly calm. "You're the one I love the most, Yvonne. I'd never cheat on you." There was no breakout. Unfortunately, I did not buy his story at all. Whenever he said he was doing overtime, I would wait outside his office. Whenever he went on a business trip, I would book a flight and follow him wherever he went. In the end, I installed surveillance cams in his car and GPS on his phone. When he found out what I had done, disappointment filled his eyes. "It's been six months. You went from unhinged to crazy. So, tell me, did you find out who the woman was?" He pulled my fingers away and tore his ring off. "If you have so little trust in me, perhaps we should delay the wedding indefinitely." That shattered me into a million pieces, and my depression attacked me at the same time. I was going to slit myself, but then a screen of comments popped up before my eyes. "Finally, the side character's getting the boot! MMC forced himself to take allergy meds for six months so he wouldn't have a breakout when this girl demanded answers from him." "Well, this character is the FMC's best friend. The FMC's been staying overseas all these years so she wouldn't break this side character's heart. Poor MMC. He had to travel back and forth for seven years." My hand froze in midair, and along it was the blade that would cut through my flesh. Then, my best friend, Louise Stone, messaged me. "I'm coming home, Yvonne."

On our anniversary, Nina Reid took our daughter—and her assistant, Ray Chapman—out for another "family day." Without me. That was it. I filed for divorce. Right after signing the papers and boxing up my stuff, I heard a buzz from the corner. Old phone. Twelve years old. Buried in a drawer. The screen lit up with a number I almost recognized. Hand shaking, I picked up. A voice I hadn't heard in years. Young. Way too familiar. "Hey, Liam. I need to talk to you."

After his son, George Black, dies, Jonas Black returns to his own world, thinking of that marriage as nothing more than a nightmare. That is, until the system appears again. "Host, after you drowned, Serena wanted to trade her own life to save yours. If you go back and stay at her side for a whole year, George will come back to life in this world, and you'll be rewarded ten billion dollars." Just like that, Jonas is summoned back to that world for a second time. This time, he's a different person. He suggests to Serena Quinn that they should sleep in separate rooms and stay out of each other's lives. When his daughter, Erica Black, makes a fuss about wanting to see Serena's savior, Henry Lane, Jonas simply has her things packed and sends her over with her suitcase. Even when Serena favors and sides with Henry, Jonas doesn't act up or get angry. He just doesn't care. All he does throughout the year is buy luxury cars or spend his time at clubs and bars, showering the hostesses with money. Everyone in the circle calls him "The Walking ATM". One day, Jonas casually gives his wedding ring, worth tens of millions, to a club hostess. Serena, who has heard the news, barges into the private room soon after. "Jonas Black!" She grabs his wrist. "That's our wedding ring. I designed it myself, and it took three years to perfect it! How could you just give it away? What are you trying to prove?!" Annoyed by her shaking him, Jonas pulls his hand free and leans against the couch lazily. "It's just a ring. Why make a big deal out of it? You can give your ring to someone else, too. It's not like you haven't done it before."

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."