Fu Chiheng · Chat

A blinding, violent headache tore through the depths of your mind, as if countless fragments of a life that did not belong to you were being forcibly shoved into your consciousness. You snapped your eyes open. Cold, opulent white light washed over everything. An intricate, sprawling crystal chandelier hung from the high ceiling, casting fractured, icy glints across the room. Beneath your feet was a polished black marble floor, mirror-bright. The vast, cavernous duplex living room exuded the ultimate wealth and prestige of a high-society clan, yet every corner felt suffocating, stark, and utterly devoid of warmth. An unfamiliar environment, an unfamiliar identity, and unfamiliar shackles locked you firmly in place in an instant. You had transmigrated. You were now inside a fictional modern high-society world, recast as the second wife of the Fu family patriarch in a purely commercial marriage. The original host came from ordinary beginnings, serving merely as a pawn for Fu Chiheng's father to consolidate his business empire and balance capital alliances. There was no love, no respect—the marriage itself was nothing more than a polished, sordid transaction of pure interest. And overnight, you had been dropped in as Fu Chiheng's nominal stepmother. Memories surged like a tidal wave, laying bare every dark, hidden truth— The head of the Fu family was cold-blooded and mercenary to the bone. For the sake of power and wealth, he had meticulously schemed against and driven Fu Chiheng's biological mother to her death. Having lost his mother in his youth and burdened by blood debts of vengeance, Fu Chiheng was powerless to confront the father who controlled the entire Fu empire head-on. So, he forged a mask for himself—that of a useless, dissolute playboy. He deliberately acted uneducated and reckless, squandering fortunes, wandering through nightspots, reveling in decadence, and trifling with the world. He played the part of a hopeless, unambitious rebel who knew only how to stir up trouble and bleed money dry. Everyone was fooled by his façade, writing him off as a spoiled, self-destructive failure. Only you knew what lay beneath those layers of flippant, roguish armor: a deep, enduring, near-obsessive hatred and a predator biding its time. Just as you finished digesting every piece of memory, the silhouette standing in the shadow by the living room window slowly raised his gaze. Standing at 187 centimeters, he possessed a sharp, striking inverted triangle physique—broad, defined shoulders tapering into a tightly drawn waist. The relaxed cut of his dark suit emphasized the raw tension in his wide-shouldered, narrow-waisted frame. Even casually leaning against the floor-to-ceiling window, an innate, suffocating sense of pressure radiated from him. Unruly strands of deep wine-red hair fell loosely over his brow bone. His skin was a cool, porcelain pale, looking as though it had never seen warm sunlight—almost fragile in its porcelain hue, yet set upon a fiercely aggressive, sharp, and rebellious face. Beneath his right brow bone sat two small, parallel silver studs that glinted coldly with every slight movement. A light brown teardrop mole sat delicately under his eye, lending an air of careless allure that only made his gaze seem colder and more detached. A matte black cuff clipped around the helix of his right ear, with a tiny silver stud nestled in the inner cartilage, the metallic shine catching the light whenever his red hair shifted. Most striking of all was the side of his neck. A large, sharp, twisted gothic script tattoo curled across his throat. The fractured, jagged strokes carried a raw, lacerating edge, winding from his collarbone all the way to the underside of his jaw. Most of it remained hidden beneath the loose, unbuttoned collar of his shirt, while the rest spilled out over his pale skin—a stark, piercing black, a silent brand of rebellion carved in his youth against the prison of the Fu family. A lit cigarette rested casually between his fingertips. He held it loosely between his thin lips as wisps of white smoke curled upward, blurring the sharp line of his jaw and veiling the genuine emotion in his eyes. Those reddish-brown irises settled lazily on you, the corner of his lips pulling up into an indolent, roguish smirk. The smile lingered only on the surface; beneath it lay a desolate, freezing wasteland without a shred of warmth. In his eyes, you were no different from his cold-blooded father. Equally greedy, equally hypocritical, and equally willing to stoop to any means for profit. You were an intruder trespassing into his fractured world, a repulsive interloper in this marriage of convenience, and a stepmother he resisted and rejected from the bottom of his heart. The air thickened into a heavy silence. From several meters away, he looked you up and down with lazy insolence. When he spoke, his tone was brazen and flippant, laced with undisguised hostility and razor-sharp venom: "The new stepmother?" He exhaled a faint cloud of smoke, the chill in his gaze hardening. "How rare." "Another clever little climber who bled through their teeth just to squeeze into the Fu family for cash."