Professional Death Faker [Quick Transmigration] - Chapter 1

I cheated.

I’m sorry to start with that, but it’s the truth. I have a legal partner, and he treats me wonderfully.

Surrounded by an enviable life of happiness, I secretly and shamelessly fell in love with others.

This sin gnaws at me day and night. I can’t sleep. I’ve lost a terrifying amount of weight. I suffer from violent bouts of vomiting, dizziness, and intermittent blindness. Sometimes, I even hallucinate. Terrified that this filthy secret would hurt the man I love, I went for a check-up in secret. It turns out I have gland cancer malignant, late-stage, and fully metastasized. My chances of survival are zero.

I felt a wave of relief.

Perfect. I’m finally getting what I deserve.

I’ve booked an appointment at a euthanasia clinic for two weeks from now. I haven’t told a soul. I chose to have my remains dissolved in strong acid so that not a single trace of me remains.

Fortunately, I don’t own a single thing in this world that truly belongs to me. It saves me the trouble of handling an estate.

I hope everything goes smoothly.

That way, I can take this shameful secret with me to the grave.

When the System arrived, Shen Buqi was hunched over his desk, writing a suicide note.

He was wearing an oversized white shirt that had been washed so many times the fabric felt limp and thin against his skin. The sleeves were rolled up in several folds, revealing a pair of pale, skeletal wrists. His collar was buttoned strictly to the very top.

The hem of the shirt clung to the lean curve of his waist, hanging loosely over the sharp silhouette of his spine.

He peered through his lenses, his slightly long fringe brushing against the edges of his worn metal frames. Under the glow of the desk lamp, his eyelashes cast small, flickering shadows.

Even when he looked up, the dark depths of his eyes remained obscured.

His complexion was deathly pale, as if he hadn’t seen the sun in years, making him seem almost translucent against his bleached cotton shirt. His deformed right hand was hidden in the shadows, encased in a thin, worn black glove that fit like a second skin over his slender fingers.

Even his neck collar was frayed at the edges.

“Mu Chuan,” Shen Buqi whispered, greeting the System. His voice was as soft and airy as a lullaby.

That was the name of his current persona. Using it helped him stay in character.

Shen Buqi was genuinely pleased to see the System. Time moved differently in the Main World compared to these lower planes; he had been waiting for eight years. Behind his glasses, his eyes crinkled with delight, looking like a child finally welcoming a new friend to a party. “Welcome aboard.”

The System: […]

The System didn’t want to be “aboard” at all.

Shen Buqi didn’t belong to their “Terminal Cannon Fodder” department.

He was the notorious, eccentric director of the “Melodramatic Heartbreak” department next door—a workaholic fanatic who would immerse himself in the most ridiculous plots just to hit his KPIs. This was a man who, if the script demanded it, would lie in a pool of his own blood, perform CPR on himself just to stay alive long enough to finish three more gut-wrenching plot points, and then die satisfied.

If it weren’t for the fact that everyone in the Terminal department was currently busy dying, averaging 3.925 deaths per person per day and they were desperately short-staffed, they never would have asked for his help.

“What’s with the long face? Be happy, be proactive,” Shen Buqi encouraged. “Your task list is almost complete.”

Mu Chuan was going to die very soon.

Terminal gland cancer, full-body metastasis—there was no point in treatment. Shen Buqi had already booked the appointment; he just had to wait out the fifteen-day cooling-off period.

During these final fifteen days before his “death exit,” there wasn’t much specific plot left to follow. So, following his usual habits, Shen Buqi planned to boost his own department’s performance on the side.

A little “freelance” work, if you will.

Looking at Shen Buqi’s freelance to-do list—which was printed in size 5 font and stretched three meters long—the System couldn’t bring itself to be cheerful. We.

“Let’s align our goals,” Shen Buqi invited cheerfully. He opened his notebook, his tone as light as if they were discussing dinner plans. “My name is Mu Chuan, an E-rank Alpha. The other person in this house is Pei Shu. As of now, I have committed three unforgivable sins…”

Before he could finish, his phone vibrated.

The System grew nervous. Is it Pei Shu?

“Hmm? No.” Shen Buqi picked up the phone to reply while answering in a patient, gentle voice. “It’s my second affair. Nineteen years old, S-rank Alpha, a professional racer…”

The System: ?

The System let out a mental shriek. An affair??

Why on earth would Mu Chuan cheat?!

On paper, this was a character blessed by god-tier luck. He was a mere E-rank Alpha, an orphan, an ex-con with only a high school education and not a penny to his name—yet he was married to a top-tier Omega who was the envy of the world.

All because of a “god-awful” accident.

The System pulled up the historical records. Shen Buqi had been in this world for eight years.

From age seventeen to twenty-five, he had played Mu Chuan: a mild-tempered Alpha with no education or special talents, who knew nothing but housework. He was a man so plain he would vanish in a crowd.

He was the private chef, the behind-the-scenes stream moderator, the masseur, the nutritionist, and the personal assistant to the megastar e-sports pro, Pei Shu. He was also his legal spouse.

The marriage was a total secret.

For eight years, almost no one knew. Because the marriage began in disgrace—a debt Mu Chuan owed Pei Shu. Mu Chuan never forgot the irreparable wrong he had done.

It happened when they were seventeen.

Mu Chuan was a lucky orphan. A scholarship from the Pei Corporation gave him a chance to attend a top-tier university in the capital.

And Pei Shu, the most prized heir of the Pei family and an S-rank Omega standing at the peak of society, happened to be his classmate.

He followed Pei Shu around, running errands, helping out, and joining the same clubs.

One rainy day, while they were moving equipment, Pei Shu underwent a sudden, unexpected secondary differentiation. Pei Shu told Mu Chuan to find the school doctor, but in his panic, Mu Chuan not only jammed the door lock but also smashed the only bottle of suppressants.

The two of them were locked inside a club lounge.

Rain lashed against the windows.

Thunder rolled.

Mu Chuan was not the kind of Alpha who could satisfy an S-rank Omega.

His gland was poorly developed; he barely had rut periods, and his pheromones were pathetically weak almost colorless and odorless. If you pulled his collar tight and sniffed his neck, you’d only catch a faint, chilly dampness, like a rainy night at the bottom of a frozen lake.

“Like a rotting wooden boat covered in moss, a rusted key, a discarded empty fish tank, or the pitiful rainwater evaporating from a stone crack…” That’s how Pei Shu had described it.

Consequently, Mu Chuan had quickly lost consciousness under the suffocating, heavy scent of the Omega’s cold rose-honey pheromones.

That blackout stripped him of any clear memory of the event. Naturally, everything he knew about that afternoon came entirely from Pei Shu’s later account.

When he woke up, he was lying in Pei Shu’s lap.

Pei Shu’s clothes were disheveled; his expensive, aristocratic school uniform was wrinkled and stained with shocking spots of blood at the collar.

Sunlight slanted in through the window.

Pei Shu looked down at him, his face pale. One hand gripped his collar, and the gland at the back of his neck was a bloody mess. He gave Mu Chuan a weak smile that was impossible to read.

“You did something terrible,” Pei Shu said. His cold fingers ran through Mu Chuan’s hair, gently stroking his scalp. “But I can forgive you. It wasn’t on purpose.”

Pei Shu’s voice was low and damp. “A person as stupid as you… You could never do anything right anyway.”

Mu Chuan had permanently marked Pei Shu.

That was the conclusion of the medical report.

Pei Shu fell ill a few days later with a persistent high fever. It was discovered that Mu Chuan’s low-quality pheromones were the culprit.

Punishment was inevitable. Mu Chuan never protested; he believed he deserved it. Even though he was sent to prison, had three ribs broken, suffered spinal hardening, and ended up with a permanently disabled right hand, he felt it was a fair price to pay.

As for his life after prison, an Alpha who had committed such an unforgivable act against an Omega didn’t need to worry about continuing his education.

He was expelled. His belongings were tossed out into the street. His textbooks lay scattered in puddles.

It was raining that day, too. Overwhelming humidity flooded his thin lungs with every breath. He could barely open his eyes. As he knelt in the mud, fumbling to pick up his notes, the shadow of a black umbrella covered him.

Pei Shu had grown much thinner.

Dressed in a heavy black trench coat, he stepped through the puddles and the scattered pages.

Mu Chuan gripped a page that had turned to mush in the silt.

Pei Shu held the umbrella, eyes downcast. His voice was slow and gentle as he called Mu Chuan’s name. He said if he had been discharged from the hospital sooner, he wouldn’t have let them treat him that way.

Seventeen-year-old Mu Chuan clutched the stack of neatly written notes—now blurring in the rain until his deformed knuckles turned white. After nearly half a minute, he slowly let go.

He deserved it.

He thought: I deserve this. I did something wrong. I should be punished.

He only felt guilty toward Pei Shu.

Staring at Pei Shu’s reflection rippling in the puddle, he asked tentatively, “…Are you better now? Does it still hurt?”

Pei Shu’s expression turned strange.

After a few seconds, the corner of Pei Shu’s mouth twitched like a lightning strike, as if he were amused by something filthy.

“It doesn’t hurt,” Pei Shu whispered. The pauses between his words were suffocating. “My future is ruined.”

“A permanent mark. Current medicine can’t fix it.”

“My family has abandoned me.”

“My engagement is cancelled.”

Pei Shu knelt down. He used his long, cold fingers to catch Mu Chuan’s chin, forcing him to look up. He seemed to savor the look of shock, guilt, and despair that crushed Mu Chuan in that moment.

With a hand clad in expensive lambskin, he gently took the ruined notes and held Mu Chuan’s twisted right hand.

…Once again, Mu Chuan fell into that hazy, wet, chaotic memory, like something bloated and white from being underwater.

“Get up,” Pei Shu told him.

“You won’t need these things anymore. You’ll never have a use for them again.”

“No one wants you anymore. And no one wants me.”

In the blinding mist of the rain, Pei Shu whispered in his ear, “Ah Chuan, you did something very bad. You hurt me. You need to marry me.”

Mu Chuan followed Pei Shu home.

He couldn’t refuse any of Pei Shu’s arrangements.

A secret marriage because Pei Shu was an adult and needed to change his registration to “married” to avoid certain troubles.

Living in Pei Shu’s house because Pei Shu couldn’t live without those “trash” pheromones.

Taking care of Pei Shu.  because he had hurt him. He had ruined him. He had done something irredeemable, making it so Pei Shu couldn’t survive without him.

He had thought this way for eight years. He had been drowning in guilt for eight long years.

In those eight years, Pei Shu had built his own empire. Without his family’s help, he was now the world’s number one e-sports star, with five world championships and twelve MVPs. He had hundreds of millions of fans.

Mu Chuan took care of everything—Pei Shu’s daily life, his food, his clothes, his injuries. He even helped off-camera during live streams.

Pei Shu was good to him.

He was always good. Pei Shu would pick out white cotton shirts for him—soft ones, a size too large, so they would naturally expose part of his gland.

Pei Shu would cook pumpkin porridge for him when he was sick.

Pei Shu would buy him scarves, masks, and collars.

Following Pei Shu, he lived a life of luxury that he couldn’t have imagined in the orphanage a penthouse duplex, six-meter floor-to-ceiling windows, a walk-in closet, smart home systems, a private bar.

Pei Shu was a perfect spouse.

Mu Chuan truly believed he had stumbled into an unimaginable stroke of luck. He felt that this life was a bonus gift attached to an eternal sin, which only made him feel more guilty.

Every night, lying beside Pei Shu with his wrists bound by a silk cloth held by the sleeping man, Mu Chuan’s heart was eroded by endless remorse.

He hadn’t slept well in eight years.

Later, a stomach ailment developed. Then came the stiffness and slow reactions. Sometimes, his forgetfulness reached terrifying levels.

Fearing he would become a burden to Pei Shu, he used the month Pei Shu was away at an intensive training camp to see a doctor in secret.

That was when the “devil’s tentacles” took hold.

He cheated.

…Despite being so happy, so disgracefully lucky, and living a life others would die for, he had committed such a nauseating mistake.

His heart had betrayed Pei Shu with three different people.

The first was a Beta Correction Supervisor. When the man held his shoulder and handed him a cup of hot tea, Mu Chuan couldn’t help but grip the burning glass tightly.

The second was a nineteen-year-old Alpha racer. When the boy took him racing through the mountains, shouting excitedly in the sunlight, Mu Chuan didn’t hold his breath in time. He failed to pull away from the boy’s clean, sharp scent of citrus and lime.

The most unforgivable was the third—the gentleman who invested in Pei Shu’s team. They met because Pei Shu had, on a whim, taken Mu Chuan to a social event. Following Pei Shu’s instructions, Mu Chuan went to offer a toast.

When the man draped a suit jacket over Mu Chuan’s shoulders and used a warm towel to wipe his trembling fingers, asking, “Are you okay?”… Mu Chuan had actually, shamelessly, shed a tear.

Shameful.

Filthy.

Unforgivable.

In the deep of the night, Mu Chuan would tremble, breaking out in cold sweats. Using two fingers, he would laboriously and clumsily type out his confession in his suicide note.

He had smiled once when the racer dragged him out for a drive. He replayed the memory over and over, making sure it wasn’t too much—it was just a small smile, quickly retracted.

He did accept a cherry candy from the supervisor.

He chewed over every detail, wondering if there was anything else he had done to wrong Pei Shu. The images that flashed in his mind made him close his eyes in despair.

Even as he repented, even in the cracks of this devastating guilt, he still found himself uncontrollably missing those three men.

He truly was a shameless, pathetic, and sinful creature who deserved to die.

Fortunately, that day wasn’t far off.

The System: […]

The System: Is the dramatic reading really necessary?

Does he have to perform the narration with background music and so much emotion??

“I can’t help it. I’m just so overwhelmed with guilt,” Shen Buqi replied.

He adjusted his mood and continued in that dull, sincere tone. “An Alpha like me, from a small town, raised in an orphanage… I worked so hard to get into university, but before I could see the world, I married Pei Shu. Eight years have passed in the blink of an eye…”

The System: […] Then don’t cheat!!

And with three people!

THREE!!!

The System could turn a blind eye (or lens) to Shen Buqi’s side hustles, but seriously—how did Mu Chuan, a bland, wooden Alpha whose breath was barely audible and who never left the house, manage to mess up the character relationship map this badly? His social score was a 2.1!

“Perhaps,” Shen Buqi said, having just finished replying to a message. He downloaded a high-def photo of the nineteen-year-old racer’s abs and saved it to a hidden album.

He set down his hot phone and took a sip of warm water. His throat moved slightly against the collar of his shirt as he swallowed. “A dying ember will always attract a few stray moths.”

The System didn’t follow. Huh?

Shen Buqi rubbed the fuzzy ball the System had transformed into. He tore a page from his letter to fold a tiny rocking chair for it, his pale fingertips patiently smoothing the creases.

The paper let out a fragile, protesting crinkle.

He was listening to something. The System thought it was a radio or a podcast, but when it tapped into the signal, it realized it was surveillance software.

Who was Shen Buqi bugging?

“Ah, it’s Pei Shu.” Shen Buqi adjusted his headphones. “He’s chatting with someone. He’s talking about me…”

Pei Shu was attending a Global Excellence Summit supposedly the world’s most luxurious event. The guests were all financial titans, tech moguls, e-sports legends, and F1 champions. It was a fifteen-day event held at the seven-star “Astral Manor.”

Every guest stayed in a private villa suite with a dedicated butler, a private hot spring, and a personal helipad.

Pei Shu hadn’t brought Mu Chuan.

He lied to him, saying he was going to a training camp.

Through the static of the audio feed, the sound of crystal glasses clinking rang out clearly. Music, drifting footsteps, and the sound of champagne bubbles popping filled the air.

After a moment, Pei Shu’s voice—husky and slightly tipsy  came through clearly. “The one at home? …I can’t bring him out. He’s an Alpha from the countryside. He doesn’t even know how to use a smartphone properly.”

“He’s plain-looking and slow-witted. He’d only ruin your fun.”

The System followed the data stream to see Pei Shu. Despite his words, Pei Shu was fidgeting with his phone, constantly unlocking the screen. He kept refreshing his flight info and opening and closing the flight path application for his private jet.

That precious right hand, insured for tens of millions, was unconsciously tapping the table, the rhythm growing heavier and more anxious.

The champagne glass reflected his bloodshot eyes.

“You guys play. I’m going back the day after tomorrow,” he said. “The one I keep at home… he’s incredibly clingy. If I’m not there, he turns into a mute. He’s too scared to even leave the house.”

“He spends all day huddled in the bedroom. He shakes when he sees a stranger. He’s afraid of the phone, afraid of the rain, afraid of the sound of running water.”

Pei Shu unconsciously rubbed his wedding ring. His voice was low, each word drawn out. “He’s even afraid of the sun. He keeps the curtains tightly shut all day, like a creature that can’t handle the light…”

His voice turned airy. “A little wretch like him… If he didn’t have me, he’d probably die of fright in his own bed.”

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