Chapter 1: The Idiot Villain Has No Lines
[Host consciousness loading...]
[0%... 47%... 99%... 100%. Host consciousness loading complete.]
[Host Name: Xie Yu.]
[Book loading...]
[Book Title: "Imprisoned Relationship"]
[Book Genre: Modern, Pure Love, Protagonist-Abuse, Forced, **, **, beep— beep— beep—]
[System detected violation words. Automatically replaced with mosaics for your wellbeing and the wellbeing of those around you.]
[Estimated time until protagonist arrival: 58 minutes. Please prepare accordingly.]
Xie Yu sat in the bathtub, staring at the floating blue panel in the steam-thickened air, and thought: I have made a terrible mistake.
Not in the dying sense. That part was already done, firmly and irreversibly, courtesy of a heart that had decided, at twenty-six years old, that it had done enough work. No, the mistake he was currently cataloguing was the part where he had agreed, without reading the fine print, to transmigrate into a protagonist-abuse novel whose content was apparently so egregious that the system censored roughly eighty percent of it.
He had clicked agree.
He, a grown man with a postgraduate degree, had clicked agree on a supernatural contract without reading a single clause.
"Show me the script again," he said.
The system obliged. The rectangular screen reappeared, hovering over the bathwater like a very expensive and useless menu.
[Xie Yu **, Shen Cixi.]
[Shen Cixi ****, and also ****.]
[Xie Yu then proceeded to ******, after which Shen Cixi ******.]
Xie Yu stared at the screen for a long moment.
"There is not a single usable sentence here."
"The host is correct," 006 said, in the same cheerful tone one might use to announce good weather. "Approximately eighty-three point seven percent of the Original Host's dialogue and actions have been flagged as violations of public order and good customs and cannot be displayed."
"Eighty-three point seven."
"Yes."
"What about the remaining sixteen point three?"
A beat of silence.
"Mostly stage directions," 006 admitted. "Such as 'Xie Yu walked in.' And 'Xie Yu sat down.' And once, memorably, 'Xie Yu looked out the window.'"
Xie Yu pressed his fingers to his temple. "So what you're telling me is that I need to play a complex villain character in a full-length novel, and the sum total of my available script is: enter room. Sit. Occasionally look at window."
"The host has excellent summarization skills."
"I'm going to malfunction your water resistance feature."
"I don't have one," 006 said, sounding briefly alarmed. "Please don't test that."
Xie Yu stood up, wrapped himself in the bathrobe, and walked out of the bathroom into the penthouse suite. The room was absurdly beautiful in the way that things were when money had been applied to them without restraint. Floor-to-ceiling windows framed the Jiang City skyline like a painting, neon bleeding into indigo at the edges, the city's lights strung across the dark in gold and amber.
He stood in front of the glass and looked out.
Well. He was already hitting one of his stage directions.
"Give me what you can," he said. "Character summary. Personality traits. Anything that isn't a mosaic."
"Of course." 006 rustled, in the way that systems rustled when they were trying to sound more helpful than they were. "Xie Yu, the Original Host, is best described as follows: arrogant. Frivolous. Condescending. He has never studied seriously in his life. He owns no fewer than four sports cars. He once threw a birthday cake at a hotel waiter because it was the wrong flavor."
"What flavor was it?"
"The file does not specify."
"Tragic." Xie Yu turned away from the window and looked at himself in the decorative mirror near the entryway. The Original Host was, objectively, unreasonably good-looking. Sharp jaw, dark eyes that had the kind of depth that made people uncomfortable, the sort of bone structure that belonged in galleries. Utterly wasted on someone whose primary occupation was apparently throwing desserts.
"And the protagonist?" he asked. "Shen Cixi."
"Female. Top student. University A. Works three part-time jobs simultaneously. Currently in possession of a signed contract."
Xie Yu looked at the floating screen where 006 had helpfully pulled up what little unredacted information existed about Shen Cixi. There was a brief physical description — that the system had apparently deemed safe to display, which meant it was probably the least useful part — and a character summary that read like a tragedy compressed into a paragraph.
Poor family. Sick grandmother. Brilliant grades. No options.
He'd read it once already in the bathtub, and reading it again didn't make it any more comfortable to sit with.
This woman had signed a Sugar Baby Agreement because she had been cornered from every direction and left with no exit. And his job, as the villain NPC, was to walk up to her and be imperious about it.
"Right," he said quietly. He rolled his shoulders. He straightened his spine. He looked in the mirror and practiced what he imagined was an expression of contempt, which came out slightly more like indigestion.
"Too much," 006 observed.
"I'm practicing."
"The host looks like he ate something bad."
"I am playing a man who has never been told no in his life. Give me a moment."
He tried again. Chin up. Eyes half-lidded. The specific kind of boredom that came from having everything and caring about none of it. He thought about every terrible rich person he had ever encountered in his previous life and compiled them into a single expression.
Better. Marginally.
"Estimated time until protagonist arrival," he said.
"Fourteen minutes."
He walked to the sofa, sat down in what he hoped was a sprawling, careless kind of way, and picked up a glass of water from the side table, because it was something to do with his hands. The room was very quiet. Outside, the city hummed.
Fourteen minutes.
He could do this. He had no script, no precedent, and no acting training beyond a primary school performance of a historical skit in which he had played a tree. But he had a character outline. Arrogant. Frivolous. Condescending. A man who had thrown a birthday cake at a waiter for reasons that remained historically undocumented.
He could be that man for however long this took.
The knock came at eleven minutes, not fourteen.
Xie Yu startled, nearly dropping the glass, then caught himself. He set it down. Slowly. Deliberately. He leaned back against the sofa cushions and arranged his expression.
"It's open," he said, and was relieved to find that his voice, at least, came out correctly — flat, and a little bored, like someone who answered doors the same way they breathed.
The door opened.
Shen Cixi walked in.
Xie Yu had read the character description. He had processed it clinically, the way one processed information on a screen — at a remove, abstracted into text. He had registered words like top student and three part-time jobs and nodded at them the way one nods at a weather report.
He had not, in any meaningful sense, prepared himself for the actual person.
She was not what he had assembled in his head. There was nothing showy about her. She was wearing a plain white shirt that had been washed so many times it had lost most of its original brightness, dark trousers, shoes that had clearly covered a great deal of pavement. Her hair was pulled back neatly. Her face was composed in a way that took effort — he could see the effort if he looked, the particular stillness of someone who had decided, in advance, exactly how much of themselves they would allow to be visible.
She was holding the contract.
Her hands, Xie Yu noticed, were not shaking. He had expected them to shake. The plot had described shaking hands at this moment. But Shen Cixi's hands were perfectly, precisely still, and there was something in that stillness that was somehow worse than shaking would have been.
She looked at him.
He looked at her.
A beat passed.
And then 006 said, directly into his ear canal in a helpful whisper that only he could hear: "This is the moment where the Original Host says something arrogant and condescending to establish the power dynamic. You should probably say something."
Xie Yu said, "You're early."
It was not the most devastating opening line in the history of villain dialogue. He was aware of this. But it was what came out, and it was, at the very least, accurate.
Shen Cixi's expression did not change. "The bus was faster than expected."
She had taken the bus. She had taken the bus to a penthouse suite in a five-star hotel where the floor was imported rock slab and the bathwater smelled of Damascus roses, and she had said it the way one states a simple fact, without apology or embarrassment or any acknowledgment that it was in any way notable.
Something shifted, very slightly, in the back of Xie Yu's chest. He did not examine it.
"Sit," he said, and gestured at the chair across from him. This was one of his approved stage directions. He had used it correctly and at appropriate timing. He gave himself a small internal point.
Shen Cixi sat. She placed the contract on the table between them, precisely aligned with the edge, and folded her hands in her lap. Then she looked at him again, and he became abruptly aware that her eyes were doing something he had not anticipated.
They were not afraid.
He had expected, on some level, fear. Not because he wanted it — the prospect was actively uncomfortable, actually — but because the novel had described it. The protagonist arriving at the villain's lair, trembling, dread and desperation in equal measure. He had been bracing himself to be the recipient of that fear and trying to figure out how to make it feel less awful.
Shen Cixi was not afraid. Or if she was, she had buried it so deep that what sat on the surface was something else entirely — a kind of fierce, contained assessment, like a person calculating odds and finding them manageable.
She was looking at him the way people looked at problems they intended to solve.
"You signed it," Xie Yu said, nodding at the contract.
"Yes."
"All of it."
"Every clause." A pause, and then, quietly: "I read it twice."
He had written that contract. Well — the Original Host had written it. The content was almost entirely mosaic to him, which he was increasingly grateful for, because the non-censored framing around the mosaics was already enough to make him feel like a profoundly unpleasant person by association.
"And you understand the terms," he said, because this was apparently something villains said.
"Yes."
"Including—" he gestured at nothing in particular, hoping it looked meaningful and not like he was waving at the air, "—the specific terms."
Shen Cixi looked at him steadily. "Yes."
A pause stretched between them.
006 whispered: "The Original Host would now proceed to demonstrate his authority in a manner the system cannot display. However, given your constraints, perhaps consider establishing dominance verbally."
Xie Yu thought: with what, exactly? A strongly worded statement about his general personality? A monologue about his four sports cars?
"Good," he said finally, in the most authoritative voice he could produce. He leaned forward slightly, resting his elbows on his knees, and looked at Shen Cixi with what he hoped was a villainous directness. "Then we understand each other."
Shen Cixi nodded.
Another silence.
Xie Yu had now exhausted approximately sixty percent of the strategic approaches he had prepared. He was running low on material and the scene, as far as he could tell, was not yet over.
"You should eat something," he said.
006 made a sound that was, unmistakably, a strangled noise.
Shen Cixi blinked. For the first time since entering the room, something flickered across her face that was not composure — a small, brief disruption, like a stone dropped into still water. "...What?"
"You took the bus," Xie Yu said, because he had started this sentence and there was nowhere else to go with it now. "And it's almost nine at night. You should eat something."
She was staring at him.
He was, internally, also staring at himself.
"Host," 006 said, in a careful whisper, "that was not villain behavior."
"I know," Xie Yu said through his teeth, hoping his expression didn't reveal that he was having a conversation with a voice in his skull.
"In fact, it was almost the opposite of villain behavior."
"I am aware."
"The Original Host would not—"
"The Original Host would have done something that I literally cannot read, so we are improvising, thank you for your feedback, please stop talking."
Shen Cixi was still watching him. Something about the way she was watching him had changed, he realized. The calculating quality was still there, but there was something layered underneath it now, something he couldn't immediately name. Her head had tilted a fraction to the left, like a person encountering something they had not accounted for.
"I'm not hungry," she said.
"Room service runs until midnight."
"I said I'm not hungry."
He looked at her. She looked at him. The contract sat between them on the table, its pages precisely aligned.
"Fine," Xie Yu said. He leaned back. He gestured toward the second bedroom of the suite — he'd checked earlier, there were two — with a negligent wave that he was fairly confident read as dismissive rather than helpful. "That room is yours. Don't touch anything that isn't yours."
Shen Cixi stood. She picked up a copy of the contract — her copy, he assumed — and tucked it under her arm. Then she crossed the room without another word, and just before she reached the hallway, she stopped.
She didn't turn around.
"You're different," she said, "from what I expected."
Then she walked away, and the door to her room clicked shut behind her.
The penthouse suite was very quiet.
Xie Yu sat on the sofa and stared at the ceiling for a long moment.
"006," he said.
"Yes, host."
"On a scale of one to ten, how badly did I just do?"
A pause. "The system is unable to assess accurately," 006 said diplomatically, "because there is no available baseline for comparison, given that eighty-three point seven percent of the source material is inaccessible."
"Ballpark it."
Another pause. "The villain of a protagonist-abuse novel," 006 said, very carefully, "just offered the protagonist dinner and gave her a private room."
"That could still be menacing."
"Host."
"It could."
"You also told her not to touch things that weren't hers. That was, admittedly, more threatening. But the dinner offer largely canceled it out."
Xie Yu closed his eyes. Outside, Jiang City glittered in its amber sprawl, indifferent and enormous, completely unaware that somewhere in its skyline, a dead man was sitting in a five-star suite trying very hard to be a villain and producing, by all available metrics, something closer to a reluctant roommate.
"We'll do better tomorrow," he told himself.
006, displaying unusual mercy, did not comment.
But through the thin walls of the suite, if Xie Yu had been listening very carefully, he might have heard the sound of Shen Cixi in the next room — not crying, not panicking — but sitting on the edge of the bed in the dark, holding the contract in both hands, with a look on her face that no one had ever described to him.
Because no one had ever thought to write down what Shen Cixi's face looked like when someone offered her dinner for the first time in a very long while.
And it was not, even remotely, the expression of a woman who was going to let this go.