Chapter 1

Five years into the apocalypse, Xiang Changge died in a natural disaster.
When she opened her eyes again, she found that she had entered an old-school novel she had just read not long ago, and in her mind there was something calling itself a “system” shrieking noisily.
Looking at the fine weather, blue skies and bright sunshine, and sniffing the delicious smell of food in the air, Xiang Changge threw a few punches at the empty air and wolfed down five airline meals in a row, then finally agreed to the so‑called “save the supporting female character” mission the system was talking about.
In this old-fashioned novel, the male lead has a fiancée who dies young. The fiancée’s family is fabulously wealthy; money is the most useless thing in the world to her. But she has never known what happiness is—melancholy is her inborn talent.
After she learns that the male lead’s kindness toward her is only because of guilt and because of the responsibility imposed by an engagement arranged by their elders, she takes the initiative to withdraw, fulfilling the perfect love between the domineering-CEO male lead and the passionate little white‑flower heroine.
Yet because there is nothing in this world worth her lingering for, on her twenty‑fourth birthday she chooses to leave this world alone.
Xiang Changge’s mission is to help the supporting female character regain her faith in life and live happily.
Having just been threatened by the system that if she failed the mission she would be “cremated,” Xiang Changge smacked her lips, which still faintly tasted of dried earthworms, and said, “That’s it?”
System: “…”
A confident‑type host? Interesting.
Mission One: Guide the supporting female character to eat three proper meals a day on time.
At seven‑thirty in the morning, the butler Xiang Changge strode in as if the place were uninhabited, hauled the sleepless‑all‑night Yu Qing—who was sitting in the bay window, gazing at the sunrise at a forty‑five‑degree angle—over to a dining table laid out with forty‑nine dishes. After handing her a bowl of plain congee, Xiang Changge proceeded to sweep the rest of the feast clean by herself.
Cradling her bowl and watching the person across from her eat with great relish, Yu Qing, driven by a momentary impulse, took a spoonful of congee. Then she suddenly realized something. “Didn’t I lock the door? How did you get in?”
Xiang Changge: “Oh, they taught lock‑picking at Butler Academy.”
Yu Qing: “…”
Mission Two: Guide the supporting female character to feel the joys of life.
After thinking it over, the next day Xiang Changge handed Yu Qing a contract.
Yu Qing, who thought it was a resignation letter, took it and glanced at it, only to see the title: [Wilderness Survival Show Season Two Filming Details]. Participants: Yu Qing, Xiang Changge.
Yu Qing: “?!!!”
After a butler inexplicably appeared in her life, Yu Qing’s days became like this—
Sitting alone in the studio, staring at a newly finished painting steeped in melancholy, she mocked herself, “As expected, melancholy is my gift…”
Suddenly, someone shouted from outside the door, “Miss Melancholy, time to eat!”
Startled, Yu Qing’s hand jerked, and a streak of glaring gold appeared across the painting.
When Yu Qing was playing the piano in the music room until the sky grew dark, she watched the last ray of sunset disappear beyond the horizon and murmured in a low voice, “I live in darkness and cannot see a single glimmer of light…”
With a click, the huge European‑style chandelier overhead, made up of ninety‑nine little flower‑shaped lights, switched on. The blinding light made Yu Qing reflexively close her eyes, and a familiar voice came from the doorway: “Miss Darkness, dinner!”
“…”
*Miss Mealtime x Miss Melancholy (crossed out)*
*A transmigrator who feels lucky just to have grass to eat and whose combat power is maxed‑out x a frail, melancholy, soon‑to‑die supporting character who has lots of money but wants lots of love (checked)*
Content tags: urban, fated encounters, transmigration into a book, lighthearted, wilderness survival, healing/salvation
Main characters: Xiang Changge, Yu Qing Supporting characters: begging humbly for five‑star reviews
Others: live streaming, entertainment industry
One‑sentence summary: Oi, Miss Melancholy, time to eat.
Theme: The best hope is the kind you tie to yourself; you have to be your own light.
“What use is having so much money? In this bustling, noisy world, all money brings her is loneliness. The longer that string of digits grows, the deeper the hollow in her heart becomes.”
“What she needs is a great deal of love.”
“In the empty villa, without the slightest trace of human warmth, Yu Qing thought that perhaps she should already have gone together with her parents. The life she bought by clinging on, and a rat crawling through the gutter in darkness—what difference was there?”
“At that thought, she hesitated no longer.”
“This kind of painful life, repeated day after day, she had already grown utterly weary of. After saying ‘happy birthday’ to herself in her heart, Yu Qing tightened her hand and gave her own life release.”
“Mm…”
Chewing on the dried earthworms that had only been wiped free of mud before being seared over a fire, Xiang Changge felt that familiar bitter, earthy taste spread through her mouth.
Freeing up one hand, she flipped back a few pages in the novel lying across her knees—a book so tattered it looked like someone had used it in the bathroom and then thrown it on the ground to be stepped on eighty times over, with some places worn so badly the words were no longer legible.
She located the section describing gourmet food and started reading it for the three hundred and sixty‑fifth time with gusto.
As she imagined the taste of those exquisite dishes through the words in her mind, she kept right on chewing and chewing with her mouth.
It was now the fifth year of the apocalypse. Everything edible had already been eaten, yet society still had not recovered order. The world seemed to have gone back tens of thousands of years, returning to the Ice Age.
No, it was more terrifying and more complicated than the Ice Age.
Five years ago, after a sudden downpour of acid rain, countless people turned into zombies that knew nothing and felt nothing, wanting only to devour flesh and blood. In an instant, humanity lost a full seventy percent of its numbers.
In the five years that followed, zombies, acid rain, tsunamis, earthquakes, blizzards, extreme heat…one natural disaster after another came in succession with no pattern to be found, and every one of them consumed the living things on Earth.
For those who had survived until now, beyond their own abilities being strong, luck accounted for an even larger share.
Xiang Changge thought so too.
After brushing shoulders with death countless times and still living just fine now, how could she say her luck was bad?
Even though at the moment she worried about food, clothing, and shelter every day, she had at least picked up an old-school novel of unknown date.
It contained descriptions of the supporting female character’s extravagant lifestyle, including quite a few passages about food. In ancient times there was Cao Mengde picturing plums to quench his thirst; in modern times there was her, Xiang Changge, using reading as a side dish to her meal—different paths to the same end.
[Kung Pao chicken, hibiscus chicken, salted pork and bamboo shoot stew, eight‑treasure duck, crab‑roe noodles… Tonight the kitchen was making Chinese food. The dishes were extremely rich, filling the entire two‑meter‑long marble table.]
[As usual, and utterly uninterested, Yu Qing picked up a piece of the salted pork and bamboo shoot stew with her chopsticks, but before it reached her mouth, she seemed to catch a whiff at the tip of her nose and stopped her chopsticks again.]
[She stood up and said only, “Take it away,” then headed upstairs, leaving behind the two aunties who had taken care of her since she was little, watching her departing back with worry, wanting to speak yet saying nothing.]
Reading this, sitting in a low, half‑collapsed building with three walls open to the wind, nothing left but the structural frame—who knew whether to call it ruins or a condemned building—Xiang Changge had a dried earthworm in one hand and the novel on her knees in the other. She squeezed her eyes shut hard.
This was the literal embodiment of “some die of drought, some of flood.”
Even though she had already read this book she had found over and over from beginning to end, every time she reached this part, Xiang Changge—who could put a hole in granite with one kick—still felt a deep sense of powerlessness.
The main content of this old-school novel went something like this:
The male lead, Shangguan, has a fiancée he has been engaged to since childhood, named Yu Qing.
The Yu family is rich enough to rival a nation. After Mr. and Mrs. Yu died in a plane crash, their eighteen‑year‑old only daughter Yu Qing inherited all of their assets and became the youngest richest person in City A.
However, Yu Qing was a premature baby and had been frail and sickly since childhood. If not for the Yu family’s wealth, if she had been born into an ordinary family, she would definitely have died young long ago because they could never have afforded the expensive medical treatment.
Because of her weak health, Yu Qing spent almost all of her time cooped up at home, carefully attended by several family doctors. Even how many sips of water she drank each day was precisely calculated.
Not to mention a person—even an animal, living such a life without any freedom, like an experimental subject, would not end up with a sound mind.
The book’s evaluation of her is: “Melancholy is her talent. Words like ‘Lin Daiyu’ and ‘sickly beauty’ seem as if they were born to be used on her.”
Yu Qing has an air of seeing through the mortal world. She is interested in nothing. After her parents’ death, the only thing that could make her so much as turn her head was the male lead, Shangguan, who had grown up with her and often came to keep her company when she was like a caged bird confined at home.
To her, Shangguan was like an older brother.
In a world where she had no one else left, Shangguan was, in Yu Qing’s heart, her only family.
As for Shangguan, he had thought his life track had long been set: study hard, go to school, inherit the family business, marry Yu Qing, and shoulder the burden of both families’ companies…
But unexpectedly, one day, a girl who was obviously poor but forever optimistic and upbeat, stubborn and tenacious like an unkillable cockroach, burst into his life like a ray of dazzling sunlight and, with her light, flooded his world.
Unconsciously, his gaze lingered on her more and more, longer and longer.
In short, this was an old-school story about a domineering CEO falling in love with a tough, sunshiney “little white‑flower” who fell into his life from the sky. But because he was already engaged and his fiancée was so frail she seemed like she could die at any time, he didn’t dare tell his fiancée he wanted to break off the engagement and go bravely pursue his own love.
He could only be moved by the heroine while still thinking about his responsibility toward his fiancée. This back‑and‑forth tearing made both him and the heroine suffer miserably, tormenting both their hearts and livers.
If one had to summarize the theme of the whole novel in a single passage, it would probably be:
“I love you, but I’m sorry, I still have responsibilities. But if you ask me not to love you, I can’t control myself. Missing you and my love for you will kill me. I know I love you, but I’m very sorry, I can’t love you.”
The role of Yu Qing, the supporting‑character fiancée, in the middle of all this includes, but is not limited to: when the domineering CEO has the heroine pressed against the wall, eyes red, saying, ‘I can even give you my life,’ the heroine sobbing, ‘You’re a man with a fiancée, don’t be like this,’ while tears silently fall. Then the male lead, looking at her, feels his heart twisted with pain and pounds the wall in agony.
Only after the male and female leads have tortured each other in love for three hundred chapters, when everyone around them knows about their relationship, does the only one kept in the dark—Yu Qing, the supporting character—finally realize that the male lead already loves someone else.
It turns out that to Shangguan, she is nothing more than a responsibility born of the two families’ promise and the help the Yu family once gave his family, and that she has, without knowing it, caused Shangguan and the heroine, Chu Keke, to be troubled for a long time because of her.
Without a word and without even blinking, Yu Qing sets Shangguan free and calls off the engagement.
You would think that from then on the male and female leads could finally live happily together, but instead Yu Qing, finding nothing in the world worth clinging to, chooses suicide.
After that, the male lead feels that it was only because he broke off the engagement with Yu Qing that her death came about, so both he and the heroine carry this burden in their hearts and sink into an even deeper level of painful entanglement.
“…”
Because there was nothing to do in life besides picking through trash and desperately trying to figure out how to live a little longer—bored yet exciting—Xiang Changge had forced herself to read all of this again and again.
Every time she read it, she had only one thought in her heart: The author sure took their time taking this dump.
Aside from wanting to give the heroine one slap, the male lead two slaps, and the author three slaps, Xiang Changge also wanted to use the Eighteen Dragon‑Subduing Palms on that supporting character Yu Qing, who was sad every day, leaving Manchu‑Han banquets untouched so she could just stare at the stars and the moon and stand around in the cold wind.
Because her health was poor and she couldn’t do strenuous exercise—that part Xiang Changge could understand—but if you’re frail, why do you stay curled up at home every day? Doesn’t that just make you even weaker? At least go walk a couple of laps under the trees in that eighteen‑mu garden of yours and get some sun, right?
And what’s with, “Even though she has an enormous fortune, she has never known what happiness is; only from the male lead can she feel a tiny bit of warmth”?
Money can’t buy happiness? Can’t buy people to care about you? The male lead only shows up once every ten days or half a month—how much “warmth” can he possibly give?
If all else fails, hire a few gentle, beautiful older and younger sisters to live with her, chat with her, gossip, play mahjong, lie in bed together with the heater on. She refuses to believe she still wouldn’t feel “warmth”!
Forcing down the speechless anger in her heart, Xiang Changge closed her eyes, swallowed the dried earthworms in her mouth with effort, then, without even looking, picked up a rock from near her foot and casually flung it off to her side at an angle.
A zombie that had wandered over after catching the scent of a human, baring its teeth and stretching its head through a crack in the crumbling wall while letting out a low, hissing growl, had its skull struck dead‑on in the blink of an eye.
Its head flew three meters away with a smack, rolled twice on the ground, and then finally came to a stop.
Ignoring the headless zombie body that swayed twice more before collapsing with a thud, Xiang Changge carefully picked up another piece of dried earthworm, popped it into her mouth, and crunched down noisily.
“Rich as a tycoon and still depressed? Must be she’s just bored stiff.”
No sooner had Xiang Changge rasped out this comment in a voice hoarse from long‑term lack of water than she suddenly sensed something, and she snapped her head up to look at the sky.