At midnight, I received a text message from an unknown number.

【A famous female star has a surrogate child.】

I glanced at it, thinking it was just a gossip headline, and ignored it, throwing my phone aside to sleep.

After a while, I woke up suddenly and grabbed my phone to carefully check that message.

I remember, in my previous life, at this time, that famous female star hadn't been exposed yet.

I opened the browser to search, and as I expected, it was true.

The person who sent the message seemed to know what I was thinking, and quickly sent another text message.

【Meet me at the hotel rooftop tomorrow at noon.】

My heart sank instantly, how did he even know where I was staying!

In the dark, life and death are but a thought away...

——

At noon the next day, I arrived half an hour early at the agreed location and found that the person was already there.

"Who are you?"

The man paused for a moment, then turned around.

——It was Zhou Qian.

I wasn't surprised. Since the day I saw him, I had a guess in my heart.

In my previous life, he was busy with company affairs, living a reclusive life, and not particularly close to Zhou Ran and Zhou Xun, so it was unlikely for him to happen to bump into me like this.

Furthermore, his words were very strange, and I immediately became suspicious.

Zhou Qian smiled gently, with a hint of approval in his eyes.

"You have a calm demeanor."

I didn't react, I just confirmed, "You've also been reborn."

Zhou Qian nodded, "Yes, but our situations may be different."

"What do you mean?"

But Zhou Qian didn't want to say anymore. He leaned against the wall and lit a cigarette, hoarsely saying:

"I'm a businessman, you have to offer information of equal value to exchange with me."

I frowned.

I had long known that I was no match for Zhou Qian, which is why I had been avoiding contact with him since I was reborn.

He was a shrewd businessman. In my previous life, he could withstand the halo of the Mary Sue novel's female lead for so long, only falling in love with her under the careful care of his sister, which proved that he was not an ordinary person.

At the very least, he was not on the same level as Zhou Ran and Zhou Xun, let alone Zhou Xu.

I chose to tell the truth, "This is not a real world at all, we are all in a novel, a Mary Sue novel."

"All the supporting male characters are inexplicably falling in love with the female lead, but there is only one male lead, and all of you have nothing but a tragic death."

Zhou Qian paused, realizing that the cigarette between his fingertips was almost burning his hand.

The cigarette butt was crushed on the ground, and Zhou Qian lowered his head with a self-deprecating smile, "So that's it..."

I didn't understand, furrowing my brow, "Can we talk about it now?"

Zhou Qian hoarsely began,

"...It's not my first time being reborn... I've forgotten how many times I've died. Every time I wake up, I can't change the tragic ending...

"No matter what I do, in the end I will lose my legs, fall in love with your sister, and then be humiliated and killed by Zhou Qi... There's nothing I can change."

I closed my eyes for a moment.

I understood that Zhou Qian telling me all of this meant that he wanted to bind me to him, and I had no other choice but to agree... I couldn't beat him.

Gathering myself, I spoke straightforwardly, "I'll help you, but you can never use me and my family as bargaining chips."

Zhou Qian lightly smiled, "Of course."

I gritted my teeth and cursed silently in my heart, a smiling tiger.

After talking with Zhou Qian for nearly two hours, he also figured out my situation.

He swore, "Actually, if I hadn't found you, you would have reached a dead end."

I didn't respond.

Indeed, when I was just reborn, I was filled with hatred, with no other thoughts except making them suffer.

But now, I gradually found myself powerless, not knowing how to make them suffer endlessly, nor how to fight against the mechanisms of the Mary Sue novel.

That's what I thought, but I still resisted, "Even with you, we still can't do anything, we can't resist the novel's mechanisms."

Zhou Qian chuckled, "That's not necessarily true."

I looked at him skeptically, "What do you mean? Do you have a way?"

"Not at the moment... But who can say for sure about such things..."

——

When I returned to the hotel room, my sister called me in tears.

"Sis! You were right, Zhou Qi doesn't love me at all! He refuses to marry me no matter what!"

I pondered for a moment and softly comforted my sister,

"Don't worry for now... how about I talk to him?"

My sister instinctively retorted, "How can you talk to him? Would he listen to you?"

I lightly laughed and guided her, "Big sis knows how... Just bring him out tomorrow at noon, and big sis will invite him to lunch."

My sister hesitated, but in the end, she agreed.