Overactive Imagination

I had been asleep from 1975 to 2025. I am the only successful subject to have ever survived a cryonics experiment. Wearing the face of a 20-year-old, I set off to seek out my wealthy younger brother and reclaim my place in the family. But a barrage of comments suddenly appears. "This female lead is stupid. Her brother took her small shop and turned it into a business empire. People change. He doesn't even remember her anymore. Why would he want to reconnect with her?" "Exactly! The Slater family is tearing itself apart over the inheritance. If she shows up, they'll kill her!" "Michael Shaw truly loves her. If she marries him, she'll be happy for life." Just then, Michael drops to one knee before me. "Zoe, the Slaters are too dangerous. Don't go back, okay? Marry me instead. I'll take care of you and protect you for the rest of my life." His words touch me. Before I can reply, I hear his thoughts in my ear. "System, did you post the fake comments?"

Midnight. I heard a faint meowing through the window. I was about to have a look when floating words appeared in front of me. [Don't open the window! There isn't a cat outside! It's a serial killer!] [I'm done. How could the side character be so dumb? I can already imagine how tragic her death will be.] [Go and find the villain! He loves you so much! He will surely protect you!] I quickly retracted my hand on the window latch…

My husband is from a wolf pack with a throne to inherit, but despite all my efforts, I can never give him a son. He finds it shameful that I only give birth to daughters, forgetting how I risked my life to save him. So, he begins an affair with my sister. Later, for the sake of the male offspring in my sister's belly, he brutally throws my daughter to her death and made me cough up blood until I die. Now that I am reborn, I no longer want any connection with him and avoid the path where I save him. But I never expected that my reborn sister would rescue him instead. They smugly mock me for being unable to bear male heirs. But she doesn't know that the ten-thousand-year-old Creator Goddess bloodline flowing through my veins has already been quietly awakened. My daughter will inherit the power of the goddess and become the ruler of the new world.

The day I was supposed to win the biggest award of my career, I walked in on my boyfriend, Ethan, in bed with another woman. He sneered, calling me a face-blind, scent-deaf bore in bed. I planned to expose his ass at the award ceremony. Instead, he and his lover mowed me down with their car. Next thing I knew, I woke up with them in an S-class horror survival game. Mortality rate: over 95%. We had to survive ten days in a haunted manor to be revived. Hit 100 on your Anxiety Level, and your soul is obliterated. Chloe, Ethan's lover, sneered. "Sensory defects? You can't recognize ghosts or smell danger. In a horror game, that’s a death sentence. You might as well just die." The others heard her and scrambled to team up. Me? I walked straight into the lair of the manor's final boss. The most powerful demon in the game wanted to devour my soul. I couldn't really see him. I just thought he was a cosplayer. I lunged forward, poked his abs, and pointed at the glowing crack in his chest. "Wow, you're really committed to the role. This getup must've cost a fortune."

My husband Norman had always hated how his childhood friend Julia clung to him no matter the occasion. He even cut her off for my sake. One morning, I woke up and realized that I had mysteriously swapped bodies with Julia. I wanted to find my husband and figure out what to do, fearing he'd turn me away because of Julia's appearance. I cooked up a hundred explanations in my head until I finally arrived at our home. When Norman opened the door and saw me, he frowned and quickly shut the door, pushing me away. Just as I was about to explain that I wasn't Julia, he suddenly pulled me into his arms. "What are you doing here? Can't stand being apart from me for even two days, huh?"

I ordered an incubus online, but when the package arrived, there were two of them. One was gentle and obedient, the other was hot-tempered and unpredictable. I immediately messaged customer service to ask if they'd sent the wrong one—I had only ordered the gentle kind. The reply came cheerfully. "Congratulations, you've unlocked the hidden variant! This model is a bit special—buy one, get one free!" Wait… what? I remembered hearing people say that raising an incubus is like raising a puppy, only better—they keep you warm at night and don't shed. Well, if that's true, whether I had one or two made no difference. So I ended up paying the price of one and getting two—what a steal! Or so I thought… until I went to feed them. That's when I realized I was the cookie in the middle of a sandwich. Apparently, "keeping me warm at night" was a strenuous activity.

The first thing I do after being reborn is dump my devoted boyfriend and immediately say yes to the obsessive man's pursuit. In my past life, my so-called best friend, Sarah Cole, bound herself to an app that could transfer all of my boyfriend's love for me to her. My boyfriend was Luke Spencer. The golden roses he prepared for me ended up with her. The hotel he bought for me suddenly had her name on the deed. The way he looked at me shifted from fierce desire to cold disdain, but when he turned to her, his eyes overflowed with the tenderness I once knew so well. When I cried and demanded to know why Luke had changed, he just looked at me with disgust as he spat, "We broke up a long time ago. Leave my girlfriend alone!" On my birthday, Sarah went live online, flaunting how Luke had rented out the entire amusement park for her. Fireworks lit up the sky behind her in a blaze of color. And me? They worked together to have me thrown into a mental hospital. They called me a crazy woman obsessed with someone who never loved me back, and in endless rounds of electroshock therapy and forced medication, I died in despair. When I open my eyes again, I'm reborn. This time, I no longer feel anything real for my ex-boyfriend. Instead, I play along with Ethan Grant. I find it funny when Sarah opens the app again, siphoning away every drop of Ethan's overwhelming love. I really want to know if she can handle it.

Our entire class gets dragged into The Tyrant's Atonement game. The only way to escape alive is to reach a 100% atonement score. The system lets us choose our roles. The class belle, Isolde Adler, picks the tyrant's first love. Her atonement score shoots straight to 99% on the first day. The class president, Asher Brooks, chooses to be a loyal chancellor. His atonement score jumps to 80%. Spectators watching the game flood the screen with comments. "This new batch is smart and way better at picking roles than the last. They might just clear the game in three days." "Even if just one person hits 100%, the whole class goes free. I'm looking forward to seeing who finishes first." "My money's on the first love. She's already at 99%." Just as everyone starts celebrating, the next morning hits us with bad news. All 20 classmates who picked their roles are dead, and Isolde suffers the cruelest fate of all.

Dario Morello came from old money in Santria City—but his family was cursed. Every guy in that bloodline dropped dead before twenty-five, like something sucked the life out of them. The only way out? Marry someone with a rare fertility gene. In my last life, my adopted sister Serena jacked my wedding dress and took my place at the altar. I exposed her right there in front of everyone. She became Santria's biggest joke. Then she killed herself. My parents said I was heartless. Cut me off without blinking. Dario? He hated me too. On the anniversary of Serena's death, he locked me in a basement, strapped me with explosives, and snapped, "That fertility gene lie? You made it up for clout and cash. Serena was pregnant with my kid. You killed them both. So now—you're going with her." Next thing I knew, I was waking up on the morning of the wedding. This time? I helped Serena with the veil and wished them a perfect life.

I wasn’t even pregnant, yet I ended up popping abortion pills like they were candy. It was all because in my past life, the moment my widowed sister-in-law got pregnant, every single side effect of her pregnancy became mine. She strutted around happily with her big belly, consuming spicy tamales, while I was rushed to the hospital for violent nausea and stomach pain; she showed off her flawless skin in crop tops every day, while my stomach broke out in hideous stretch marks. When I told my husband what was happening, he just shoved me away impatiently. “Enough with the jealousy! My brother’s dead, and she’s carrying his only child. Of course, I should look out for her. Do you really have to put on such an act?” After that, my sister-in-law went even further. She kept testing her limits during pregnancy and even ate a mango she was allergic to. And me? I went into anaphylactic shock, landed in the hospital, and nearly died. Doctors couldn’t explain it. They just brushed it off, saying I was overly jealous and it was all psychological. Later, my sister-in-law tried to brand herself as a “hot single mom”. She went live, belly and all, to show off her weight-loss workouts. She jumped around for three straight hours. And me? My uterus literally gave out, and I hemorrhaged to death. When I opened my eyes again, it was the exact day she first announced her pregnancy.