chapter 1
I worked in the underworld for ten years before I finally earned enough merit to buy myself another life.
They even threw in a little bonus.
A system.
Not the kind that handed out money for breathing or made CEOs fall in love with me at first sight. Mine was called the Lies Come True System.
If someone insisted on a lie in front of me, the lie would become reality.
The first time I used it in this new life was at the dinner table.
My foster mother picked up the only chicken drumstick and dropped it into my foster brother’s bowl without even looking at me.
“Boys need meat,” she said. “If he doesn’t eat well, he’ll turn stupid. Girls can survive on buns and pickles.”
I lowered my eyes and tore off a piece of dry steamed bread.
My foster brother grinned and bit into the drumstick.
Then, right in front of us, his expression froze.
A string of drool slipped from the corner of his mouth.
His eyes lost focus.
He started laughing at nothing.
My foster mother screamed and shook him. My foster father lunged to his feet so hard he knocked over his stool. They shouted his name, slapped his face, cried that he must have been possessed.
I sat there quietly, chewing the stale bread.
So it was true.
The system really worked.
After that, I stopped doubting anything.
At eighteen, they wanted money to cover my foster brother’s future marriage expenses, so they spread nasty rumors about me all over the village. My foster father stood in the middle of the road, swearing to anyone who would listen that he had seen me sneaking into the cornfield with an older crippled man.
“I saw it with my own eyes,” he shouted. “That was my daughter. I’d know her anywhere.”
I looked at him and asked softly, “Really? You’re that sure?”
He sneered. “Even if I were blind, I wouldn’t mistake my own daughter.”
The next second, he clutched his face and started screaming.
He had gone blind.
Completely.
That was the life I crawled through before I froze to death in the street at fifteen in my last life.
Back then, I had thought I died because my parents simply did not love me.
Then I learned the truth.
I was never their daughter at all.
In this life, before I could be crushed all the way to the end again, the richest family in the city found me and brought me home.
The Meng family.
My biological family.
On the day I returned, my foster mother grabbed my biological mother’s hand with a strange expression on her face, like she wanted to say something but did not dare.
Finally, she muttered, “Whatever you do… don’t lie in front of that girl.”
My mother did not understand.
Neither did my father.
Not yet.
They would.