Lin Chen was twenty-eight years old, and he hadn't seen the sunrise in six months.
Not because he was avoiding it. It was just that his only window faced a brick wall, his blackout curtains stayed permanently shut, and somewhere along the way, his body had forgotten what daylight felt like. His circadian rhythm had dissolved into a shapeless sludge of caffeine, anxiety, and the faint hum of his computer fans.
He lived in a rental studio so small that his bed touched his office chair whenever he leaned back. His desk was secondhand, scarred with coffee rings that predated him. He worked, ate, and slept in a radius of about six feet. It wasn't a life. It was a holding pattern.
But Lin Chen was a good programmer. A self-taught hacker who had clawed his way from community college to a six-figure salary at a mid-tier cybersecurity firm. His specialty was penetration testing; breaking into his own clients' systems before the real criminals could. He was paid to think like a thief, to find the cracks, to exploit them before anyone else did. And he was very, very good at it.
The cost, though; the cost was everything.
---
His day;if you could call it that, started at nine in the evening. He'd wake up groggy, heart already tapping an anxious rhythm against his ribs. He'd drink yesterday's coffee cold because heating it took time he didn't have. Then he'd check his logs, his alerts, his queues.
From ten at night until six in the morning, he worked. Code. Debug. Pen test. Ignore his mother's texts; she worried too much, and he didn't know how to explain that he was fine, just busy, just tired, just one project away from slowing down. He'd ignore the headache that lived behind his right eye like a tenant who refused to leave.
From six to seven, he'd shower. Eat something microwaved. Stare at the brick wall outside his window. Sometimes he'd press his palm against the glass and imagine what it felt like to be on the other side of it.
Seven to nine: sleep, if he was lucky. Usually it was just lying there, heart racing, unfinished code looping behind his eyelids like a screensaver stuck on repeat.
Nine to noon: client meetings over Zoom, camera off. He learned to sound coherent. Learned to say "I'll look into that" and "Let me circle back" and other soft phrases that meant nothing but kept people from asking questions.
Noon to two: more work. More coffee. The tremor in his hands was getting worse, but he told himself it was just fatigue.
Two to three: lunch. Instant noodles or protein bars, eaten over the keyboard.
Three to nine: sleep. Sometimes. Or just lying there, staring at the ceiling, thinking about all the things he should have done differently.
He hadn't taken a vacation in four years. He hadn't had a conversation longer than ten minutes that wasn't about work. His last relationship ended when his girlfriend said, "You love your laptop more than me," and he hadn't argued, because she was right.
He told himself it was temporary. He was saving for a house. He was building a reputation. He would rest when he had enough.
There was never enough.
---
He used to have friends. Or maybe they were just people who tolerated him for a while. They stopped inviting him out after he canceled for the tenth time. He couldn't blame them.
His mother called every Sunday. He let it go to voicemail. He'd listen to her messages later, he told himself—when he wasn't in the middle of a script, when he wasn't chasing down a vulnerability, when he wasn't so damn tired.
"Chen'er, have you eaten? Your father's knee is acting up again. Nothing serious. Call me when you can."
He never called back. He'd text: Busy. Love you.
After a while, she stopped leaving voicemails.
The only living thing in his apartment was a rubber plant on his desk; a gift from an old coworker who had quit to "find balance." Lin Chen watered it irregularly, usually when he noticed its leaves looking droopy. It was somehow still alive. He envied it.
---
When he wasn't working for money, he hacked for fun. Not maliciously, he wasn't a criminal. He just liked puzzles. He'd break into poorly secured smart home devices for the thrill of it. He'd trace botnets back to their command servers. He once found a backdoor in a major corporation's HR system and reported it anonymously, then watched the news for three days to see if anyone would notice.
It was the only time he felt alive. The rush of cracking a system, the quiet satisfaction of outsmarting someone else's bad code that was his version of a sunset, his version of a weekend, his version of a life.
But even that started to fade. The headaches got worse. His hands shook so badly sometimes that he had to brace them against the desk to type. A twitch bloomed under his left eye and refused to leave.
It's just stress, he told himself. I'll sleep it off after this project.
There was always another project.
---
It was a Tuesday. Or maybe a Wednesday. Lin Chen had been awake for roughly forty hours, running a penetration test on a banking client's API. He'd found three critical vulnerabilities. He'd written the report. He was about to save, shut down, and collapse into bed.
Then his chest tightened.
Heartburn, he thought. Too much coffee.
He reached for his water bottle. His hand missed.
The tightness spread to his left arm. Then his jaw. Then his back. He tried to stand. His legs didn't respond.
He fell sideways out of his chair. The impact with the floor was dull, distant, like it was happening to someone else. His laptop clattered down beside him. The screen glowed: a terminal window with half-written code. The last line was a comment he'd typed hours ago, half-joking, half-pleading.
# TODO: fix memory leak. also, sleep more.
Lin Chen lay on the cold floor of his studio apartment, staring at the ceiling. His phone was on the desk, out of reach. His chest felt like someone had parked a car on it. His vision narrowed to a tunnel—a slow, quiet fade to black.
This is it, he thought. This is how I die. Face-down in a room no one will enter for days.
He thought about his mother. Her voicemail he never returned. Her face the last time he saw her—Christmas, two years ago. She had hugged him too long. He had pulled away first.
He thought about the rubber plant. It would die too, probably. No one would water it.
He thought about all the code he never wrote, the games he never played, the person he never became. All the sunrises he'd traded for one more hour of work.
And then, very quietly, he thought: I just wanted to rest.
The tunnel closed.
---
There was darkness. Then there was a sound like a dial-up modem—a sound he hadn't heard since childhood, when the internet came through phone lines and you couldn't use the landline and the web at the same time.
Then a voice. Flat. Mechanical. Almost amused.
"Subject: Lin Chen. Cause of death: cardiac arrest secondary to exhaustion and malnutrition. Irony level: high. Transmigration protocol initiated. Destination: novel world 'The Heiress Returns for Revenge.' Assigned role: Shen Hao (villain). Good luck. You're going to need it."
Lin Chen didn't have time to argue. Didn't have time to process. He was too tired to be afraid.
He closed his eyes—or thought he did—and let the darkness take him.
---
When he opened them again, he was lying on silk sheets.
Sunlight poured through floor-to-ceiling windows—real sunlight, golden and warm. The air smelled like jasmine and fresh coffee. A beautiful woman slept beside him, her dark hair spread across a pillow that probably cost more than his old rent.
His first thought: I'm not dead.
His second thought: Where am I?
His third thought—after a translucent system panel materialized in front of him and helpfully explained his situation—was: I'm in a novel. As a villain. Who dies.
He should have panicked. He should have strategized. He should have done something clever.
Instead, Lin Chen—who had spent years running on empty, who had died at his desk because he refused to stop—looked at the breakfast tray on the bedside table, at the personal chef visible through the kitchen doorway, at the complete and total absence of deadlines.
He smiled. For the first time in months, he actually smiled.
Soft rice, he thought. Naps. No overtime.
He lay back against the silk pillows, closed his eyes, and let out a long, slow breath.
This wasn't a crisis. This was paradise.