I, A Loyal Dog, Awaken to My Fate as Cannon Fodder - Chapter 33

A City International Airport.

Shen Yinan boarded the plane before dawn. Looking out from the cabin window, it was pitch black outside.

She had left, actively choosing to leave Cheng Wanqiu.

She hadn’t left a single letter or even a message, but she assumed Cheng Xian would tell his niece.

Knowing that this would surely hurt Cheng Wanqiu deeply, she was afraid that if she saw Cheng Wanqiu’s tears, she wouldn’t be able to leave.

I’ll be back soon, as soon as I eliminate the last male lead, she thought.

Shen Yinan’s phone rang. She set it to silent and stared at the caller ID: “Miss.”

Those two words made her draw a sharp breath. She hesitated for a long time, torn between answering or not.

She watched it silently. Miss must have discovered her departure by now and was likely heartbroken.

The senior student sitting next to Shen Yinan noticed her staring at her phone and gave her a reminder: “Aren’t you going to answer it?”

Shen Yinan was startled and decisively swiped toward the red area, hanging up the call.

“Is there something you need, Senior?” Shen Yinan retracted her phone and turned her head to ask softly.

You Mingzhi was the key to approaching the final male lead; she was his younger sister.

Shen Yinan was willing to pay any price, whether it meant using herself or others, just to ensure the danger threatening her and Cheng Wanqiu vanished from this world.

The senior was merely a stepping stone for her to get close to the male lead.

“It’s nothing, I’m just happy to be studying abroad with you. Thank you for always staying by my side.”

As she spoke, her head began to lean toward Shen Yinan’s shoulder. Shen Yinan felt a surge of panic.

“Ahem.” Shen Yinan let out a light cough and found an excuse. “Senior, I need to use the restroom.”

Shen Yinan unfastened her seatbelt and slipped away under a false pretense.

In Shen Yinan’s heart, there was only ever Cheng Wanqiu.

You Mingzhi noticed the anomaly. Shen Yinan’s deliberate distancing made her feel irritable. What she wanted was simple: just to have the person she liked by her side.

She would never have imagined what kind of demon she was bringing back; Shen Yinan was that very demon.

After a sixteen-hour flight, they arrived in the Northern Country from A City. It snowed there year-round; even in summer, the temperature was only around ten degrees Celsius.

There were few entertainment activities in the Northern Country. After getting off the plane, everything felt as if it had come to a standstill, and one could feel the slow passage of time.

It was only because the person she loved wasn’t by her side that it felt this way.

Shen Yinan felt a twinge of regret for leaving Cheng Wanqiu; the symptoms of withdrawal began to plague her heart.

Reason told her that dealing with the last male lead was the best choice, but she couldn’t bring herself to be cruel to her own feelings.

In just a few short hours, it felt as if she had been away from Cheng Wanqiu for several lifetimes.

Connecting to the airport WiFi, Shen Yinan immediately sent a message to Cheng Wanqiu to report her safe arrival. She wrote down everything she wanted to say, including the letter explaining her departure without saying goodbye.

[Miss, I’ve landed. We both need some growth. I don’t want to be your dog forever; I don’t want to be toyed with by you all the time.]

After sending that long paragraph, a sense of shame washed over her. Shen Yinan began to worry about what Cheng Wanqiu would think after reading those words.

Would she think she was being melodramatic, and then grow disgusted with her and throw her away?

Shen Yinan waited for a long time, her heart hanging in suspense. She had already left Cheng Wanqiu, yet her heart was still being held in the palm of Cheng Wanqiu’s hand.

When Cheng Wanqiu saw the message, she let out a “wah” and burst into tears. Shen Yinan had finally responded to her; she had thought Shen Yinan didn’t like her anymore.

[I never treated you like a dog,] Cheng Wanqiu typed while crying. [I’ll wait for you to come back.]

A surge of warmth rose in Shen Yinan’s heart. With that one sentence from Cheng Wanqiu—”I’ll wait for you to come back”—her heart was already satisfied.

From then on, Shen Yinan reported what she did every day to Cheng Wanqiu; their romance simply turned into a long-distance one.

Cheng Wanqiu would share her life at A University. Without Shen Yinan there to take meticulous care of her, she gradually became independent and learned to look after herself.

During the flu season, Cheng Wanqiu fell ill and was stuck in bed. Last year, Shen Yinan had sat on a stool and taken care of her for a whole week before she got better.

But this time, she struggled to climb out of bed to pour her own water and draw the curtains herself while she recovered.

Even while sick and unable to attend school, she would chat with Shen Yinan on her phone until one or two in the morning.

[Ugh, being sick feels so awful. Shen Yinan, can you sing to me to help me sleep?]

Shen Yinan felt quite helpless; she was very shy about such things.

[Please, I’m begging you, pretty please?]

Shen Yinan couldn’t withstand Cheng Wanqiu’s intense persistence. [Alright.]

A moment later, a voice call went through, and Shen Yinan’s soft humming could be heard from the other end of the line.

The melody was graceful and pleasant, and Shen Yinan’s voice possessed a unique quality that gave the song a different kind of purity, as if one were listening to a concert.

If her humming were posted online, it would definitely be a cover with over 100,000 saves, the kind that becomes an overnight sensation.

But this would make things difficult for Shen Yinan; given her personality, she was very easily embarrassed.

“Miss, are you asleep?”

Faint snoring came from the other side of the phone. Shen Yinan listened carefully and asked tentatively.

After a long time without hearing Cheng Wanqiu speak, Shen Yinan finally hung up the phone and let out a sweet smile.

Time flew by in the blink of an eye, and it was once again the end of December. The Cheng family organized a hot spring trip for their members.

Cheng Wanqiu encountered the owner of the hot spring shop again. Last year, she and Shen Yinan had accidentally overheard the intimate affairs between the two owners.

Only a year had passed, and the two had broken up—not she and Shen Yinan, but the owner and his wife.

One must remember that the owner had acted as an experienced elder to give Shen Yinan a lesson, saying how happy it was to be a “dog.”

Shen Yinan had retorted, saying that if one stopped even being human, what was the point of being a dog?

In just one year, the owner and his wife had split up.

On Christmas Day, Shen Yinan answered Cheng Wanqiu’s call and heard this news.

The last male lead, wearing a white lab coat, was pleading for mercy. “Don’t… don’t kill me…”

Shen Yinan was oblivious to him, holding her phone in one hand and a dripping bloody knife in the other.

“Waaa, last year I saw them together so happily, but this time I went back and they’ve split up. We won’t break up, will we, Shen Yinan?”

Listening to Cheng Wanqiu’s lament over the phone, Shen Yinan took a step forward in the cold winter. “We won’t break up.”

A shrill, ear-piercing scream echoed on a remote road in the Northern Country.

Shen Yinan muffled the phone inside her clothes, preventing the wretched sound from traveling to the other end of the call.

She had finally finished off the last male lead; the heart that had been hanging in suspense finally settled.

He enjoyed disassembling living small animals, laughing out loud as he watched them suffer in agony.

If he hadn’t set his sights on Shen Yinan, he wouldn’t have met his end at her hands so soon.

This fellow was a ticking time bomb as long as he lived; now that he was dealt with, everything was at peace.

You Mingzhi drove over and saw the dripping knife in Shen Yinan’s hand; her heart skipped a beat.

She pointed at Shen Yinan and screamed like she had gone mad, “You lunatic, you killed my brother!!!”

Even though Shen Yinan had muffled the phone tightly, the sounds from this side still reached Cheng Wanqiu’s ears.

Shen Yinan had killed again.

Before Cheng Wanqiu’s heart could even grow cold, in a flash, the world changed.

With the death of the last male lead, Shen Yinan’s sudden awakening of her “cannon fodder consciousness” was explained, and she remembered a great deal.

She remembered at least ten past lives.

In the previous ten lives, she had been indecisive and procrastinated, causing Cheng Wanqiu to be bullied by the three male leads. She had been a complete cannon fodder—weak and sensitive.

A casual, insignificant word from Cheng Wanqiu would bother her for a long time, yet in the end, she watched as the only person who was ever good to her fell into a living hell.

Her “dignity” and “face” hadn’t helped Cheng Wanqiu one bit.

Cheng Wanqiu also awakened the memories of those ten lives. She hated those three men more than anyone else.

She clenched her fists, her teeth trembling uncontrollably, making a “creak-creak” grinding sound.

Cheng Wanqiu lay on the tatami mat in the hot spring suite, her limbs spread out. She moved the phone away and stared silently at the ceiling.

She gladly pretended not to hear the tragic screams from the other end of the phone.

By the way, there was a certain senior who had played an indispensable role in her falling into the hands of those three scumbags.

In the first life, it was that senior who saw Hu Ying forcibly taking her away and did nothing.

She had cried and begged her for help, only for the senior to say nonchalantly:

“I think Senior Hu Ying likes you quite a bit, you should just accept it.”

Cheng Wanqiu’s fingernails nearly sank into her palms; only she knew the pain of having her spark extinguished.

The senior had taken a fancy to Shen Yinan. When Shen Yinan refused to submit even to the death, the senior had ordered people to beat Shen Yinan to death with clubs right in front of her eyes.

She even blamed her: “If you hadn’t refused to let go, the dog under your hand wouldn’t have been beaten to death.”

Cheng Wanqiu had watched Shen Yinan die before her eyes; her tears had almost run dry, and her eyes suffered temporary blindness.

There were countless other evils the senior had committed; she was an accomplice to those three scumbags.

When Cheng Wanqiu was in her 40s, lying in a filthy cage, looking like a withered corpse, she made a wish to the gods before she died. She wanted to achieve a Happy Ending with Shen Yinan; otherwise, she would be trapped in that tragic past for all eternity, never to find release.

Shen Yinan had awakened, which was something unexpected in those ten lives—a bug.

She had changed her fate of dying young and counter-killed the three scumbags.

The sound of a woman screaming shrilly came from the other end of the line. In a few swift moves, Shen Yinan finished off the senior, that accomplice.

Pulling her phone out from her thick clothes, Shen Yinan’s voice was somewhat choked with emotion. “Miss, wait for me to come back. Let’s spend New Year’s Eve together.”

“Okay.”

With that single “okay,” Shen Yinan’s heart softened.

Even a short-lived cannon fodder like her had finally lived to see the ending.

Wiping the blood from her hands and perfectly disposing of the two corpses, Shen Yinan walked out of the remote, deserted snowy fields of the Northern Country.

Cheng Wanqiu: “When you come back, let’s do the things we haven’t been able to do yet.”

Shen Yinan’s face turned red with shyness, and she gave a weak reply.

“Mhm. I want to stay with Miss forever from now on.”

Shen Yinan bought a flight ticket back home that very night.

They had broken through the cage of ten tragic Bad Endings and finally welcomed a Grand Reunion.