Chapter 1: Awakening to a New Role

“I’m sorry, Susu. It seems I… I can’t return your feelings.”

The art room lay bathed in the fading light of dusk.

Half-drawn curtains bisected the room, casting it in contrasting light and shadow. In the warm embrace of the fading sun, a girl with a high ponytail stood, her gaze shifting with a palpable sense of guilt.

Her left hand ceaselessly squeezed her right arm, and her shoulders trembled almost imperceptibly.

Perhaps from a recent bout of strenuous activity, tendrils of hair at her temples clung to her skin, damp with sweat, and a faint, fresh scent emanated from her.

A blazer was casually draped over her shoulders, its presence a defiant challenge to the oppressive August heat.

The top button of her long-sleeved shirt remained undone, revealing her delicate collarbones, glistening with moisture.

Strands of her chestnut hair, resembling a cow’s tail, adhered to the shimmering beads of sweat.

On the darker side of the room, a pink-eyed girl stood with her arms hanging loosely at her sides, clad in an apron stained crimson with paint.

Her knuckles, curved slightly inward as if clutching some unseen void, trembled with agitation.

A paintbrush tumbled from her grasp, rolling to her feet, its smooth wooden handle emitting a sound like a distant wheel, starkly audible against the sole backdrop of cicada song.

The girl remained rooted to the spot, her gaze fixed on the slender, athletic beauty with the ponytail before her.

Having finally mustered the courage to confess her feelings, only to be met with such a crushing defeat, her emotions were undeniably a tangled knot.

Astonishment, bitterness, resentment… a vibrant palette of feelings swirled within her, poised to paint the inevitable grey hue of youth.

Such was how it should have been.

Yet, it wasn’t the magic of heartbreak that had seized her so utterly.

Instead, a buzzing electrical hum reverberated through her mind, and with a sudden pop, the balloon containing her buried memories burst.

Her head felt as though a sharp, alien object had pierced it, the pain spreading rapidly like a colony of snow sprites.

Her consciousness seemed to undergo a tumultuous wash cycle in a tumble dryer, and even upon its release, it remained in a precarious, unsettled state, the aftershocks still reverberating.

Her pink eyes widened into elongated slits, as if attempting to engulf her pupils entirely, creating a disconcerting impression of an anime character whose eyes had lost their sparkle—an effect amplified by an element of sheer terror.

Qian Surou incredulously touched her own face, oblivious to the ink smudged on her hands, much like a blind person attempting to ascertain the form of a new object.

She remembered!

Qian Surou, once one among the countless otaku salarywomen.

That day, after returning home from three hours of overtime, she cheerfully brewed a cup of hot coffee and opened her game library.

Her eyes immediately fixated on the exquisite promotional art on the store’s homepage—it was the new yuri galgame, her absolute favorite genre.

–Blossoming Choice

The reheated convenience store bento box steamed invitingly, its aroma causing her empty stomach to churn with hunger.

Upon seeing the pink-haired beauty on the title page, who shared her own name, Qian Surou’s last shred of resistance against temptation vanished.

With a slight tremor of her hand, she completed the purchase.

“Heh heh, let me get a taste of this first.”

As everyone knew, due to the shift from export to import, the galgames made by these ‘madams’ were utterly unhinged, each demonstrating their unique brand of wild creativity, truly a “divine host scattered like flax.”

The bizarre was standard fare; the more aesthetically pleasing the visuals, the more they lured players in for the kill.

In comparison, slaughterhouse workers seemed like living Bodhisattvas.

Having endured such inhumane trials, Qian Surou’s ‘digestive organs’—her capacity to stomach anything—were exceptionally well-developed, endowing her with an unshakeable confidence.

‘At most, I’ll shed a few tears,’ Qian Surou silently added.

Then, Qian Surou learned a profound truth: humiliation was far worse than eating *censored expletive*!

Dawn broke!

After exhaustively combining thirty options, clearing four endings, and collecting all the CGs for the track team senior, drama club senior, classmate heiress, and infirmary teacher, Qian Surou finally reached her breaking point.

“Argh!—Bleep! This pink-haired, devoted best friend, who’s top-tier in looks, practically has ‘I like you’ written all over her face, and you—bleep!—tell me she’s un-conquerable?”

“I have to suffer through the entire game, then tearfully bless the protagonist as she finds new love? What kind of lesbian hell is this?”

“—Bleep! Her family goes bankrupt, her mother’s hospitalized, she works herself to the bone like a spinning top, yet still has to support the protagonist’s romance.

The ending is still pure agony: she forces a smile when she receives the protagonist’s wedding invitation, collapses with the gift she never gave, and dies of sudden cardiac arrest after resuscitation fails.”

The pain! It was too much!

Qian Surou immediately opened the comments section, her emotions too volatile to stabilize.

Her small hand clicked a one-star review, her palm swept across the keyboard, and her dancing fingertips, employing every insult she had ever learned, thoroughly ‘greeted’ the author.

Finally, she typed: “If only Qian Surou had a voice, she would have won, okay?!”

Less than five minutes after posting the comment—

The author replied: [Will she win?]

Qian Surou: [She will!]

The keyboard clattered loudly.

Her memories began to fragment, then a flood of Qian Surou’s three years of high school memories rushed in.

Many details of her relationship with the protagonist had never been mentioned in the original work.

At that moment, a sudden epiphany struck her, and a ethereal voice seemed to drift across vast oceans of consciousness, arriving before Qian Surou.

[Of course. For you have already merged with the original Qian Surou, and including this confession, all of these were choices you made yourself!]

“Are you the game’s author?”

The concept of transmigration was widely known, and such a guess immediately formed in Qian Surou’s mind.

The more she pondered it, the more convinced she became, and she began to formulate words of plea, hoping the other party would grant her leniency.

‘If only I had known that writing a bad review would lead to transmigration, I would have endured it, and the world would have been a better place,’ she mused.

Even without being particularly sensitive to internet trends, having been exposed to various pushes and influences, she generally understood what was happening.

So, Qian Surou analyzed her current situation: she had likely transmigrated at birth and one day suddenly recalled her past life, then used her foreknowledge to steer events in a direction favorable to herself.

Some stories even escalated, bestowing ‘golden fingers’—special powers or advantages—upon their protagonists, who were undoubtedly lucky individuals.

[No. Your cause of death was sudden cardiac arrest due to overwork. Given your profound obsession, and the fact that your death mirrored Qian Surou’s in the original work, your soul compatibility was exceptionally high. Therefore, we provided you with a special transmigration service.]

[Your final obsession was set as a challenge mission. Unfortunately, you failed. We are no longer able to resist the world’s corrective force. Please continue to play the role of the devoted female supporting character until the protagonist finds true love. Should your performance be unsatisfactory, the World Will shall impose punishment.]

The sound of the summer wind drumming against the glass reached her ears.

‘Who are “we”?’

‘What is the world’s corrective force?’

‘And what exactly is this punishment?’

Qian Surou’s questions erupted like a cascade of bubbles, yet the entity that could answer them seemed to have been divinely summoned, vanishing from the mortal realm.

With things as they were, she could only follow their instructions for now.

‘Playing the devoted female supporting character?’ Qian Surou found the notion utterly ludicrous.

‘Heh heh, did she even need to act?’

‘Standing right here, heartbroken and unwilling to give up, was the very essence of her pathetic self.’

‘Did they even understand the sheer value of eight stunning CGs packed into a single chapter of the original work?’

Moreover, this was no electronic screen where pixelated characters lived; there was no rewind button.

Everything that was meant to happen had already unfolded, and the Qian Surou standing here was truly her, her affection for the protagonist undeniably genuine.

‘Perhaps this was what they meant by high soul compatibility.’