When Jing Pei received her boyfriend’s call, she was in a senior activity center playing mahjong with a bunch of uncles and aunties. Her long black wavy hair was a mess, her face bare of makeup, faint dark circles hanging under her eyes—yet none of it could hide her breathtaking beauty. Like the sun itself, she shone dazzlingly even in a smoky, noisy, chaotic environment.

Last year, a photo of her went viral online and shot straight to the trending searches. In it, she had a cigarette dangling from her lips, was wearing pajamas, one foot hooked up in a flip-flop, her posture at the mahjong table uncannily resembling Stephen Chow’s iconic landlady, her head full of plastic hair curlers. At first, people were shocked simply because it was absurdly unfair that someone could look that beautiful even like this. Later, the frenzy escalated when people realized who she actually was.

As a top-tier, god-level author, she had told her readers a week earlier that she was just going downstairs to grab a meal and would be right back to write. Then she vanished without a trace. The new, naïve readers didn’t yet know her ways and worried something terrible had happened to their beloved author—only to turn around and see her on the trending list, completely absorbed in playing mahjong. They were hit by her beauty on one hand, and consumed by resentment on the other.

What was going on? Why? Were readers really less lovable than mahjong? If you’ve got the guts to play mahjong, why don’t you come “play” with your readers instead?!

Jing Pei had been a dominant figure at the top of the industry for the past decade, having written over a dozen novels of varying lengths, every single one a massive hit with a huge fanbase. Yet she had one notorious flaw that people could never stop criticizing: she was pathologically prone to abandoning her stories. Of those dozen-plus books, only half had proper endings—and even those were completed only because the copyrights had been sold, with editors and staff from all sides hounding her until she reluctantly dragged herself to the finish line. The other half, she had simply refused to finish, even turning down lucrative copyright deals.

Readers loved her and hated her in equal measure. They would swear they’d never read her work again, only to fall into the pit once more with the next book, endlessly bouncing between furious demands for updates and dramatic declarations of quitting the novel altogether. Jing Pei’s editor felt that the reason she hadn’t been beaten to death by readers all these years was partly because her talent was genuinely awe-inspiring—but mostly because of her face. So many readers, driven half-mad by being stuck in limbo, would have murderous thoughts—until they saw her face. Their anger would dissolve instantly, and they couldn’t help but forgive her.

With a face like that, she was a treasure of the human world. What a pity it would be to beat her to death. If she wouldn’t fill her plot holes, then fine—she could just post more selfies.

Aside from her habit of abandoning stories, there was another point that attracted constant criticism and gave her haters something to latch onto: she seemed extremely casual about relationships.

The mahjong tiles clacked and collided with sharp peng, peng, peng sounds. Jing Pei held the phone between her shoulder and ear, listening as her boyfriend on the other end asked, barely holding it together, “You got together with me… was it also just for writing a novel?”

“Huh?” Jing Pei made a sound of genuine surprise and confusion, her voice gentle and warm, while her hands arranged the tiles decisively. “I thought you already knew?”

Hadn’t it become a meme online by now? Jing Pei’s boyfriends were nothing more than material for her novels. Every relationship was like her stories—basically without an ending. What most people didn’t know, though, was that every time, the one being dumped was actually Jing Pei herself.

“I thought I was different.”

“I’m sorry. Do you want to break up with me?” she asked.

There was a long silence on the other end. Then, through clenched teeth, he said, “No.”

“Then I’ll come over tonight. I want to see you,” she said with a smile in her voice, soft and naturally tinged with an intimate tenderness. It gave the illusion of deep affection, even though she had just said something cold and ruthless moments earlier—making it impossible to tell what she was really thinking.

She was mysterious and irresistibly alluring, but also utterly lacking in any sense of security. Every one of her ex-boyfriends had eventually chosen to let go because they couldn’t endure that tormenting feeling any longer.

Jing Pei was, in fact, an almost perfect lover—beautiful, gentle, attentive to every detail, humorous and interesting. In every relationship, she gave it her all, doing everything she could to make the other person happy. And precisely because of that, she ended up hurting them even more deeply. Yet perhaps for that same reason, every one of her exes continued to protect her after the breakup. No one ever said a single bad word about her, and she became the white moonlight lingering in the hearts of other people’s detested boyfriends.

Sure enough, three months later, Jing Pei was dumped once again—only this time, the man doing the dumping looked even more heartbroken than she did.

Sighing, Jing Pei seized the moment and opened a brand-new novel.

Readers flooded in instantly, while simultaneously starting to place bets on how many words this one would last before getting abandoned. Those who thought they were already used to it, convinced they could read with a detached, spectator mindset, still completely lost it when Jing Pei once again dropped the line, “You wait here, I’m going to buy some oranges and then come back to write,” and disappeared.

Editor: “Why on earth won’t you finish your stories? Forget the readers’ feelings—that’s money we’re talking about!”

Jing Pei: “But by the time I write up to this point, the rest of the story has already played out to the ending in my head. I’ve already had my fun mentally, so there’s no freshness left. I just can’t be bothered to actually write it down.”

The editor spat blood.

Even with a stunning face that would be beautiful even if she were wrapped in a burlap sack, the accumulated resentment of so many readers over so many years was still overwhelming. Perhaps that was why, after her death, she transmigrated into the worlds of her own books. And because there were no endings—like spacetime walls that had never properly closed—multiple worlds fused together, turning into a chaotic hodgepodge.

Jing Pei sat in the black sedan, watching a public warning on a massive screen atop a building, advising citizens not to go out alone at night, to keep doors and windows tightly shut at home, and to beware of strangers knocking.

Then she looked up at the sky, at the enormous cage hanging there. A holy, hazy light emanated from within it.

Though she was too far away to see clearly, she knew that a six-winged angel was bound inside, restrained by thick, heavy chains. On the streets below, there were also people with horns growing from their heads or tails extending from their tailbones, mixed in among the crowds rushing to work and school.

Even as she was shocked, she still had the presence of mind to think that her death had been a bit undignified—after all, it had been caused by a relationship disaster.

This time’s boyfriend hadn’t been quite normal. He was so beautiful—and yet he had actually driven her off a cliff in a lovers’ suicide. How could he bear to die over something as trivial as love?

Well, whatever had already happened had happened. There was no point dwelling on it.

The humans of this world were divided into two categories: ancestral returnees and ordinary humans. The existence of ancestral returnees wasn’t caused by the fusion of unfinished worlds, though. It came from the setting of one of Jing Pei’s fantasy novels.

In that novel’s background, thousands of years ago, a great cosmic convergence had occurred, causing all sorts of creatures—some from legend, others never before imagined—to appear in the human world.

Dragons, phoenixes, angels, demons…

Although after barely a century those dimensions separated once more and the creatures vanished alongside them, some of those beings had no reproductive barriers with humans. Their bloodlines mixed into humanity, causing certain descendants generations later to awaken those ancient bloodlines and undergo ancestral reversion. Such people were called ancestral returnees.

Some ancestral returnees gained special powers. Others merely developed body parts different from ordinary humans.

The person Jing Pei had transmigrated into was a character from one of her novels named Long Jin, an ancestral dragon returnee. Her father was the eldest young master of the prestigious Long family, while her biological mother had been a rural village woman.

And behind that was a melodramatic past.

Back then, Long Ankang had been kidnapped by the Long family’s enemies and casually tossed into a river. Against all odds, he survived and was rescued by a rural couple who raised him. Thus, a noble young master became a countryside boy.

During high school, he pursued and won over the prettiest girl in school—Long Jin’s mother. They dated for seven years, and after marrying, she took care of his parents and worked to support him through graduate school.

But after he was admitted into a prestigious university, he met a wealthy young lady. That rich girl discovered he was actually the Long family’s missing eldest son, and deliberately concealed the truth while launching an aggressive pursuit of him.

Long Ankang surrendered almost immediately. He cheated on his wife with the rich girl, and once she became pregnant, the two registered their marriage.

That’s right—although he and his village wife had already held a wedding banquet, they had never officially registered their marriage. Back then, in many rural areas, people often held the ceremony first and registered later.

Long Ankang simply pretended he had never been married at all, even though Long Jin’s mother had already been seven months pregnant at the time.

Afterward, he brought the wealthy young lady back to the Long family. As for Long Jin and her mother, they were discarded without mercy.

What they never expected was that seventeen years later, the entire family would have to rely on that abandoned girl to restore the family’s former glory.

The Long family’s ancestor had once been an extraordinary woman. During the era of cosmic convergence, she had somehow managed to seduce a dragon. Because of that, the Long family inherited dragon blood, and every so often, a descendant would be born who awakened their ancestry. Whenever such a child appeared, the family’s fortunes would flourish once again.

But the Long family hadn’t produced an ancestral returnee in over two hundred years. Their businesses had been declining for decades, and they had long since been surpassed by rival families. Everyone was panicking.

Then, suddenly, they felt a mysterious resonance.

A precious treasure had awakened.

The Long family’s fortune was about to rise again.

Which beloved darling could it be?

Ah.

It was the baby girl they had abandoned without hesitation all those years ago—the daughter whose mother had suffered endless humiliation.

Jing Pei… was now Long Jin.

At this moment, she was sitting inside the car that was taking her back to the Long family estate.

After becoming Long Jin, Jing Pei thought about everything Long Jin would later endure and realized she had actually been rather cruel to her while writing.

The novel Long Jin belonged to was an ensemble story without a true protagonist. By the time the story began, Long Jin was already dead, appearing only in the memories of her half-sister, Long Ling.

Long Jin’s younger sister, Long Ling, had been a classic villainess character. Early on, readers thought she was a cold-faced but warm-hearted angel and screamed over how much they loved her. Then came the sudden reversal—her kindness had all been an illusion. She had done many dark and cruel things.

One of those things was joining forces with her family to exploit and drive the innocent Long Jin to death. Even the dragon pearl inside Long Jin’s body had been dug out and taken away by them.

According to the Long family rules, any child who underwent ancestral reversion was destined to become the head of the family. But Long Jin’s father didn’t love her, and her mother was already dead. Although she was an incredibly precious dragon returnee, the scheming adults of the family had no intention of supporting her as the family head and letting her stand above them.

What they really wanted was a puppet.

A docile mascot who would stay quietly within the Long family, bringing them fortune without causing trouble.

So overnight, they devised a complete strategy for controlling Long Jin.

The entire family would work together to psychologically manipulate her.

And the plan went incredibly smoothly.

This little country girl, despite being a noble dragon returnee, had little education and limited experience. She was intimidated by the Long family’s magnificent estate and by these prince-and-princess-like people. Nervous and overwhelmed, she didn’t know what to do.

They gave her cold shoulders most of the time, then occasionally tossed her a scrap of kindness. Like someone with Stockholm syndrome, she became overwhelmed with gratitude over those tiny moments of warmth, deeply moved and endlessly thankful.

Very few people knew that Long Ankang had once been married before. So the Long family fabricated a lie: Long Jin’s mother had supposedly been a shameless mistress who seduced Long Ankang and schemed to give birth to an illegitimate child.

This allowed the wealthy wife’s children to trample Long Jin beneath their feet while preventing her from developing any resentment she “shouldn’t” have.

In the end, Long Jin committed suicide due to severe depression.

By then, however, the Long family had already survived their crisis thanks to the fortune she brought them, and Long Ling had obtained the dragon pearl, transforming from an ordinary human into a half-dragon.

Ah, well. Authors had no hearts when they wrote.

Back then, when readers encountered that twist, they had been furious enough to practically bleed from all seven orifices, while she herself had found it fascinating. She had always loved teasing her readers.

Who could have guessed that one day she would transmigrate into the story herself?

In the driver’s seat, the chauffeur responsible for bringing Long Jin back to the Long family glanced at Jing Pei several times through the rearview mirror.

Ever since the girl woke up, something about her felt different.

Probably just his imagination.

It wasn’t as if she could turn into an entirely different person right under his nose.

After a two-and-a-half-hour drive from the airport, the journey was finally coming to an end.

The Long family estate was right ahead.

Yunjin Prefecture had only recently seen rain. The air was still damp and heavy with moisture, and the Long family estate stood amidst a faint veil of mist like a stern old man whose authority could not be challenged.

The stream in the front courtyard babbled noisily, and beneath the arched little bridge, a bamboo waterwheel slowly turned. The pine trees and peonies, washed clean by the rain, looked vividly green and brilliantly vibrant.

The Long family had already decided they would thoroughly intimidate Long Jin from the very beginning, so they had all dressed up specially for the occasion. The women wore complete sets of jewelry, the men were decked out in tailored suits and polished shoes, and even the children wore little bow ties and tiny crowns.

Gold and splendor. Pearls and jewels.

“She’s just some country girl who’s never seen the world. Is all this really necessary? We already dress pretty well normally,” one teenage girl complained impatiently, kicking at the pink strappy high heels on her feet.

“What would some ignorant village bumpkin know? Even if you wore twenty-thousand-yuan slippers, she’d probably think you bought them from a roadside stall. Of course we need to make it more obvious. And you—stop wearing slippers all the time from now on. Honestly, what kind of behavior is that?” her mother scolded.

Fine, whatever. She was only here because she was curious what a dragon baby looked like compared to ordinary people. Otherwise she couldn’t be bothered participating in all this nonsense with them. What a heartless bunch. Once she had a look, she’d head straight back to boarding school and spare herself the sight.

“They’ve arrived,” the butler came to inform them.

The family remained seated in the living room, making no move to greet her, waiting instead for her to come in herself.

Yet after waiting quite a while, no one appeared.

“What’s going on? Why hasn’t she come in yet?” Long Ankang asked impatiently.

No one answered, because even the butler hadn’t returned from outside.

“I’ll go take a look,” the Second Master of the Long family said gently.

The moment he moved, the others instinctively followed behind him.

Although Long Ankang was the eldest son of the Long family, the first thirty years of his life had destined him never to compare to his younger brother, who had been raised within the Long family under elite education from childhood.

So the entire group headed outside together.

The car was parked at the entrance. The rear door had already been opened, revealing the girl seated inside. Her skin had been tanned somewhat dark by the sun, and wearing a white dress only made her appear darker. Her hair was slightly yellowed and dry as well.

At that moment, she sat on the edge of the seat with her head lowered, staring at the wet ground as though lost in thought.

The butler and the driver stood nearby, seemingly trying to persuade her to get out of the car.

“What’s the matter?” the Second Master asked.

“Second Master, we don’t know why, but Miss refuses to get out,” the butler replied hurriedly.

Only then did Jing Pei lift her head.

Her eyes, clear and sharp like a cat’s, tilted slightly upward at the corners as they swept across the members of the Long family. Dark, bright, calm—completely lacking the timidity and awe they had expected.

“Xiao Jin, what’s wrong? Why won’t you get out?” the Second Master asked with a smile.

But hidden beneath that smile was pressure and authority enough to suffocate ordinary people. He intended to give this girl a warning from the very start, personally and before anyone else, to establish his dominance within the Long family.

Jing Pei merely looked at him for two seconds before her eyes curved slightly in a smile.

“Could you take off your coat?” she asked softly.

“What?” Everyone stared at her in confusion.

“Could you take off your coat?” Jing Pei repeated.

“…Of course.”

Though baffled, the Second Master removed his suit jacket and handed it to her outstretched hand.

It was an obviously expensive custom-tailored suit—exclusive design, hand-stitched by a master craftsman. The Second Master hadn’t dressed this way for Jing Pei’s sake, but because he was due to attend an important banquet afterward.

Curious about what she intended to do with it, they watched as the young girl casually tossed the jacket onto the rain-soaked ground. Then she stretched one foot out of the car, stepped directly onto the suit, and climbed the stairs ahead.

So the reason she hadn’t wanted to get out of the car earlier…

Was simply because the ground was too wet, and she didn’t want to step on it.