Story Imagination

My older sister, Scarlet Dawson, is an absolute saint with a savior complex. When the apocalyptic heatwave hits us, she gives out water to our neighbors, food to strangers, and even invites her boyfriend's entire family to live with us. When our supplies are finally depleted, Scarlet actually considers selling me off to a perverted old man in exchange for supplies to look after her boyfriend, Marcus Crosby. I promptly pull out my stun gun and knock her unconscious. Then, I hand her straight to the perverted old man instead. I go back to my villa, where the temperature is constantly kept at 60°F, and enjoy a tub of Ben & Jerry's ice cream under the air conditioning. Not only that, but my villa is stocked with enough supplies to last me for the next few decades!

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?"

A group of unwelcome visitors suddenly show up at a relative's funeral. The man in the lead claims to be my wife's boyfriend and wants to punish me. Apparently, I'm her fresh-faced lover. I don't want this to turn into a big deal because we're at a funeral, so I tell him we'll settle this after everything's over. Unexpectedly, my wife's boyfriend causes a huge fuss and instructs his men to pin me to the ground, wanting me to get on my knees and grovel at his feet. The rest of my relatives are unmoved by this. They watch as my legs get broken. I sneer and say, "Your girlfriend bought this urn for my mom. She spent a fortune on this, you know!" Sure enough, the man is furious. He clamors and wreaks havoc, ultimately smashing the urn to pieces. "How dare you parasites latch onto my girlfriend and try to exploit her! Don't think you're getting a cent out of her!" What he doesn't know is that the "mom" whose funeral is being held is my wife's mother and my mother-in-law. The funeral that is crashing is hers, and her urn is the one he's just smashed.

It happened overnight. A job label suddenly appeared on everyone's forehead. My wife was [Cleaner], while her first love, the man she had always pined for, was [Unemployed]. She hugged my leg and begged me pitifully, "Honey, your label is [Emperor]! That's a useless label in this modern era. Please give it to him so that he can revive his career by using the fate of the chosen one." Before I could answer her, her first love and her knocked me unconscious and pointed an ancient bronze mirror at my forehead while chanting a spell. The golden label of [Emperor] left my forehead. It was an excruciating pain that felt like my soul was being torn apart, and I almost passed out. The label ended up being branded on the forehead of her first love. They celebrated wildly when it appeared on his head. As I opened my eyes slowly, I was filled with pity for them. They had no idea that the full label was [The Last Emperor].

On Christmas Eve, my uncle, Adam Stewart, took a sip of the expensive wine I bought and pointed at me, laughing. "A child’s nature really shows early. When she was little, she wet the bed. Now that she's all grown up, she's working as a content creator in her parents' store. "She can't compare to my daughter, Erin Stewart, who has a secure job with guaranteed income. Because you're running a small business, your family will starve if you were to come across the smallest hurdle!" All the relatives at the dining table laughed. Erin pretended to play with her phone, but she was grinning. My parents just smiled politely, at a loss for what to do. I looked icily at Uncle Adam. There were still six hours before the ice apocalypse arrived and the global zombie crisis broke out. In my previous life, Uncle Adam, who always looked down on us, pushed my entire family into the zombie horde to seize my parents' supermarket. This time, I would not let him get away with it. I had just grabbed the plate, ready to smash it over Uncle Adam's head, when a crisp notification rang in my mind. "Ding! Rage Points System has been bound. The host can obtain resources by retaliating. The more shameless you are, the stronger you become!" Looking at Uncle Adam's smug face, I laughed. "Yeah, I don't know anything, but I just recalled something. Uncle Adam, you were arrested by the anti-prostitution squad when you went to Los Anglos on a business trip eight years ago, weren't you? Does Aunt Leanne know about this?"

My friend and I transmigrated into a melodramatic novel about a wealthy family. When the mission ended, I chose to leave. He fell for the obsessive female lead and chose to stay with her. Eight years later, the system told me that she had locked him in a mental hospital, and he had only three days left to live. When I rushed to him, he was tied to the bed. His eyes were dull, and he kept repeating my name. His crush, Sterling Group's CEO, was planning a grand wedding with the man she truly loved. I looked at my friend’s hands. They had once played the piano with grace. This time, they were covered in countless needle marks. “You came, I knew you would...” He mustered the last of his strength to look at me. “I was a fool. I thought staying by her side was the truest form of my love for her. “I never realized I was only a stepping stone in her path. “Take me home. I don’t want to die here...”

A heatwave swept across the surface of the Earth right after the end of boot camp. Temperatures rose to 200 degrees Fahrenheit, and all electronic items stopped functioning. Even our water source had all dried up. I was lucky that I never liked the taste of water in college, and I always had five boxes of bottled water standing by in my hostel room. If I rationed my water, I could sustain myself until help arrived, but our instructor suddenly requested everyone to hand in their water to be managed by one person. "We're a group, and it's only by working together that we will be able to sustain ourselves until help arrives! Whoever doesn't hand in their bottled water will be considered the common enemy!" I had no choice but to hand in all the water I had. However, the instructor was not fair with his water rationing. He would give the women one bottle a day, while I only had one bottle cap's worth of water. "You're a man, aren't you? It doesn't matter if you have less water. Do you really want to fight the fairer sex for a little water? The ladies should be pampered like princesses. Can't a man like you bear some responsibility to take care of them?" I wanted to argue with him, but my girlfriend, who was also my childhood sweetheart, helped the instructor tie me up and flung me under the sun to be burned to death. When I opened my eyes next, I had returned to the day before the heatwave. This time, I moved all of my water into a cave and watched gleefully as that lecherous instructor got thrown under the sun by his pampered female trainees to be burned.

My husband Seth and I switched bodies on the night of our wedding anniversary. When I went to the office posing as him, his colleague Jenny whispered sultrily into my ear, "Why haven't you divorced your wife yet?" I looked at the counter on my wrist. It displayed ninety-nine points—that meant we only needed to gain one more point to switch back to our own bodies. I smiled. “Points have been reset to zero! Reset! Reset! Reset!”

When I was at my absolute poorest, I got sucked into some kind of survival game. The challenge was to survive 7 days on just 50 dollars, and the winner would walk away with a million dollars. As someone who might as well be certified as a professional at being broke, I knew exactly how to survive on next to nothing. That prize money had my name written all over it.

Stanley Meyer and I were the main leads of a sappy school romance novel. We were childhood sweethearts with a bond stronger than iron and steel. Everyone thought that I'd be Mrs. Meyer in the future despite the fact that I was the daughter of the Meyers' housekeeper. That was, until I personally witnessed Stanley making out with Tina West, Gerard West's illegitimate daughter who has just returned from abroad. He even put the emerald pendant, which was supposed to be a keepsake from my grandma, on her neck carefully. I was overwhelmed trying to figure out this unexpected variable outside the plot. But Stanley decided to imprison me in a mental asylum instead. "It's better for you to wake up from that daydream of yours. I'm sick of hearing you prattle about the male and female leads for so many years. Only when Tina is by my side do I feel a sense of freedom." The torture I was forced to undergo in the mental asylum was too much for me to handle. My only salvation was the spare time I got to scribble down the original plotline of this novel. When Stanley found out, however, he torched my drafts instantly. He even went as far as to poison the glass I drink from. Before I died, I heard his icy voice. "Tina will continue to live her life in fear as long as someone in this world remembers the original plot. That's why you must die for her sake." When I woke up again, I'd returned to the day I witnessed Stanley and Tina making out with each other. Everyone around me wore various expressions, though they collectively decided to stay quiet. I was the one who shattered the silence by raising my glass with a smile. "I wish you a lifetime of happiness."