Sweet Romance14 min read
Choose Me, Please — The Live-Stream That Broke a Court
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"System bound. Spatial jump complete."
"Memory synced. Live stream online. Host, watch the comments and interact."
The dizzy spin was still in my head when I opened my eyes. The courtyard light hit my face and then I closed my eyes again, forcing the world to steady.
"You're useless, Kassidy. Stop playing weak—both the Crown Prince and your cousin have seen through you. You're just a willful temptress!" A slim girl in pink stood by the handsome man everyone called the Prince. Her voice was loud, proud, satisfied.
I blinked, and the faces sharpened into place. My memory dump — the original's memories — laid out like a messy script. This was not a simple cutesy transmigration. It was a battlefield.
"Third sister, your mouth..." the one called Jiang Xuyu — in my head that woman was now Isabel Dean — started to retort. "Who do you think you are, Kassidy? Do you think the Prince and your cousin are fools?"
I let the live comments flow across my vision, the viewer-stream scrolling faster than I could breathe. Someone typed, "Pick! Who will she pursue? A: Prince Tomas Decker B: Cousin Brady Andersen C: Swordsman Egan Cervantes D: Rich playboy Scott Dillon — 30 seconds!"
My chest tightened. I looked at the Prince — Tomas Decker — his face like a carved jade statue, all courtesy and danger. My cousin Brady was earnest and upright. The swordmaster Egan stood quiet on the rooftop, his gaze a blade. In truth, only one man had seemed safe in the memory flash: the rich, distant Scott Dillon. The name of the wealthy man swam into focus like a lighthouse.
"Why don't you answer?" Tomas asked gently, the corner of his mouth twisting. "Are you playing at being coy?"
"I..." I fumbled for words. "I admire you, Prince Tomas, and I respect Cousin Brady, but I have no feelings beyond admiration."
"You mean your past words were all lies?" Tomas's brow tightened.
I shifted my gaze instinctively. "I— I only ever said what I thought flattering. I have no improper desires for you, Prince. I cannot accept the rank of a side consort."
"Is there another?" Brady stepped forward before he could stop himself.
I took a breath. The rooftop figure, the silent swordsman, slid down like a cat and knelt at the edge. He handed me a token, bland, practical — maybe a repayment vow, maybe a younger-brother's pledge. He left as quietly as he'd come.
I made my choice.
"I choose Scott Dillon," I said aloud so the comments would explode. "He is kind, wealthy, free of palace intrigue. I will not trouble your courts, Prince — nor Cousin Brady. My heart is set."
Tomas's jaw tightened. "I hope you will not regret this."
He swept away. The courtyard emptied until it was just me and the one who had watched from above — Egan — and the man waiting with a carriage, whose name I only really met now: Scott Dillon.
A husky voice came from the carriage. "Get in."
I obeyed the impulse and the audience. Camera eye and heart both said, "This one." The man who opened his eyes was... absurdly handsome. His face wasn't merely pretty; it made viewers fall silent and type swarms of emoticons.
"In that case, come sit," Scott said. His voice was cool and soft. "You were standing there like a question."
"Yes," I answered, and the viewers turned into a chorus.
"Are you really fond of me?" he asked after a while, like a test.
I blinked. The memory in my head said we'd said two sentences at a teahouse once. I swallowed and answered, "I am. Please don't feel pressured."
He smiled the tiniest smile, not flattering, not amused. "I will consider what you said."
On the carriage ride he looked at me in a way that was not searching. It was measured, curious. I felt both small and oddly safe.
When we reached my family's courtyard at the general's house, it was as if a plan of knives waited behind every wall. My stepmother — the proud, poisonous Lady Isabel Dean — ruled the manor. I knew the story: the original's reckless flirtations, the relentless scheming, a sudden savage demise. I had to be smarter.
They took me to the ancestral hall. It smelled like incense and old anger. The maids closed the shutters. They tied my wrists and threw me to the floor like a thing. The comments in my ear were a cruelly comic audience.
"Let me go!" I glared up at the old woman who had the face of entitlement and the voice of coal.
"This is for your good," Lady Isabel said. "Tomorrow you will be married off. The man I chose — he will ensure the household stands secure."
"You want me to marry a eunuch?" I hissed. The word tasted like rot. "A life without love, without dignity?"
"You are from low stock," Isabel said, venom balanced with a laugh. "You have no rank. What, think the Prince would wed the daughter of a disgraced concubine? Dream on."
They intended to send me to the big eunuch, the one who befriended power. I thought of my mother, Ana Henry, and her fragile smile. I thought of my system's cold reminder: play the role right, win or die.
"Get the carriage ready," Isabel told the maids. "Tomorrow we deliver her."
Later, fevered and trapped on the floor of the ancestral hall, I activated the live feed for my viewers. "Listen," I said into the camera. "Help me. I need ideas. Plan me out."
They typed and shouted blessings in a hundred languages, offering coins, advice, sappier slogans. A dark-souled counting of options came through: exchange props to escape, bribe a guard, win the heart of a protector. Scott had arrived precisely when the worst blow came because he wanted to — he said — to propose.
When the carriage came for me the next morning, I feigned fever. But Lady Isabel slapped me. "Don't glare at me," she spit. "Go. You belong to your betters."
The maids hauled me into the carriage, fingers like iron. My nails broke, blood spilled, and I thought the whole thing might unmake me. But then, like a bell in fog, Scott appeared and said, "I will take her."
"No," Isabel snapped. "She is promised."
"Promised to a eunuch?" Scott's eyebrow lifted. "You have a gall to call it a promise."
Words were weighed, and I felt them shift. He took me. He had come for me. He should have been an oblivious scholar; instead he was something else: reserved, precise, oddly free. He soothed my fever and laughed at my rude jokes. He had secrets I didn't know, and I found myself wanting to learn them.
At his house — his narrow lane of hidden courtyards, his so-called Cat Alley — he put me in a room and set a bowl of rice porridge beside me.
"How long was I out?" I mumbled.
"Not long," Scott said. "Take it easy. You'll be able to see your mother soon."
"I thought you were only going to propose." My cheeks warmed. He smiled, and the viewers in the stream went crazy for that tiny, private smile.
"You said you liked me. I heard it." He tilted his head. "When would you wish to be married?"
"Now?" I blurted. The memory said it should not be that easy. But my heart, which had been tossed by a strange wave of relief, said yes.
"Five days," Scott said. "It is a good day. We will set it."
The wedding came with red silk, with candled dragons, with a hush of gossip. The courtyard was filled with people who loved to watch a scandal. Tomas came, giving as much tension as a knife. Brady hovered like a loyal dog. Egan, the swordman, stayed just outside my sight, a silent witness.
"Are you sure?" Tomas asked, voice made of granite. He had wanted me once, hadn't he. He had said tender things that were not promises. I held Scott's hand at the threshold and answered.
"Yes."
He left in a whirl of gowns and vows. The chamber settled into married life.
The next morning, I woke under a red canopy and found Scott gone. There was a bowl of porridge and a note that said he would be back. I drank, adjusted to being a wife in a world that treated women like chess pieces, and began to learn the rules.
We were only a day into our new life when the first crisis hit. Scott had a secret: a private disorder born from a practiced, dangerous method of cultivation. He called it his "internal law" and he sealed it inside him. He had spent years enduring its backlash. A young woman from his household — Izabella Braun — had long been at his side, a sharp, bright pupil of a famed healer. She had always been close to him, laughing like a child, touching like a sister. She was jealous. She schemed.
One night in the study, Scott drank a bitter decoction and collapsed, his lips staining dark. Izabella screamed that I had poisoned him. The room tilted. I remembered the cookbook of systems and the sparring of viewers: "Who did it? Who's the traitor?"
"How dare you! He would never..." I snapped. "You brought the bowl in. You were the last to touch it."
She flailed a justification. "No— I would never harm him! I would never!"
But there were shreds of evidence. A shard of ceramic from the broken bowl. A maid who had been near the herb chest — though that maid, spring-girl Itzel Bacon, would not be around to testify. The dead maid was the bit of horror that stung: a small servant had fallen and died in the courtyard after being pushed, the original version said, or so the script had said. The audience split into rage and pity.
Scott lay unconscious. I could feel the live stream. My system offered me a single desperate option: redeem points for a rare Snow-Lotus, the only thing that could staunch the poison's bite for someone with a broken internal law. My points were gone but I had a sliver left. I spent it.
"I can't waste my points," I told myself aloud to the camera. "But what choice do I have?"
The flower arrived like an accusation. I chewed, pressed it down his throat. He gagged, convulsed, then the fever broke. The viewers went wild. "Streamer saved the husband!" they wrote like priests.
Scott woke tired and cold. He looked at me with something that was closer to feeling than arrangement. He said, "Why would anyone want to hurt me?" His voice wavered.
"Someone wanted me gone," I said. "Someone in your house had motive."
Scott's dark eyes narrowed, and he called the guards. "Bring Izabella. Bring everyone."
In the study, I watched as the household theater unfolded. Izabella arrived with her head bowed, like a condemned actress prepared to deliver her line.
"She poisoned you," Izabella wailed suddenly, pointing at me. "It was Kassidy; she wanted to trap you, or she wanted to kill you, I don't know!"
"Silence," Scott said. He had the calm of an executioner. He questioned the servants, the guards, the herb kitchen. The evidence was messy but an undercurrent pulled at it: a little girl — my maid Itzel — had gone to visit the herb-kitchen and gone missing; she had been found later, apparently dead. All the signs seemed to spiral back and stab me in the chest. The viewers howled for a scapegoat.
Then, as if the world offered a counterweight, the system I had — the streaming overlay — pinged with a trace message. "Detected: surveillance fragment retrieved." The live comments called it a "clip" and my fingers, moving like a conductor, played it.
"Watch," I said to the room, and I streamed the clip into the public feed.
The shard of footage showed it all — the furtive hand, the flash of a stained sleeve, the hurried whisper to the maid, a small show of money. Izabella's smug smile as she planted the maid to carry the poisoned bowl into the study — everything.
The room turned. The live comments spat fury. "Traitor!" "Expose her!" "Public punishment!" they cried like a crowd in a town square.
"How could you?" Izabella's face changed from triumph to a raw, open panic. "I didn't— you can't—"
"Stand up," Scott said quietly.
Izabella had always thought herself subtle, clever. Now she had the look of a plotted villain caught mid-act. Her color left. "You can't… it's not— I didn't mean that to happen—"
The servants were instructed to seize her. She was dragged before the study doors; the guests and staff formed a ring. The mansion's courtyard filled for a moment like a trial. The audience online multiplied like a choir.
"Isabel! You thought you could get away with it?" I said, but I meant it for both wrongdoers. Isabel Dean had done worse: she had plotted to marry me to a eunuch, to erase my family, to humiliate my mother. Both had used human life like props. Both needed to answer.
But in that moment I felt an unfamiliar heat: I was not content with a private imprisonment. The rules of the land demanded a public unmasking. I wanted their faces to be shown to the crowd. The system gave me a nudge: the streaming overlay could call the city magistrate to intervene if the evidence was strong. We had proof.
We set the punishment.
A week later, the market square in front of the General's Hall filled like a kettle boiling. Merchants shut their stalls and the town spilled its bread and watched. The magistrate sat, linen sleeve folded, and the official scrolls were placed on the table. People craned their necks to see the two women — Izabella Braun and Lady Isabel Dean — brought forward on either side of the escort. My heart thudded like a drum.
"Bring them forth," the magistrate intoned in a voice that carried to the edges of the market.
The crowd called out accusations and requests for spectacle. "Punish them! Make them confess!" "Show us their apologies!" Voices rose like wind.
Izabella walked first. At first her step was small and smug as a performer who expects applause. She stole a look at Scott, and her eyes flashed triumph. She thought she had an ally in public sentiment. For a breath, triumph made her mouth plump.
The magistrate unrolled the evidence: the shard of surveillance footage, the testimonies, and the poisoned bowl's clay pattern. I watched Izabella's face alter. Her earlier smugness vanished. She blinked, caught off guard.
"You planted a maid, bribed a servant, and mixed the tablet?" the magistrate read. "Explain."
"I—" Izabella's attempt at composure crumpled. At first she barked out words of denial, the flight of an accused who still hopes to bluff her way through. "I didn't— I never meant—"
"Answer!" the magistrate snapped.
The crowd leaned as if they could help the truth out of her. Someone shouted, "Show us the maid's confession!"
With a motion from the magistrate, the small intercom system I had activated minutes before replayed the maid's voice — an unfortunate, breathless confession recorded suddenly when she had been wrung by conscience. It named names. The air twisted.
Izabella's face folded from shock to denial. "She lies! She's a liar!" she yelled, voice hoarse. "I did not mean him harm — I—"
Her limbs collapsed like a puppet whose strings had been suddenly cut. A hush — a physical drop in the air — fell across the square. She sank to her knees before the magistrate, breath coming fast.
"Please," she croaked. "Please do not—"
The crowd made the ritual: first the shock, then the rage, then the clamor. Tongues snapped like flags in a storm.
"Bring the culprit's payments," someone cried.
A few bystanders began to chant. The maid's confession had placed tiny coins of payment into Izabella's hand in a glimpse of the recording; a clerk with shaking hands produced the coins and a small receipt. People gaped.
Izabella's face had gone through the stages: triumph, shock, denial, then a worrying, almost cinematic collapse. She grabbed at her chest and whispered the first small humiliations: "I didn't mean to— it was supposed to be a trick— to frighten, to test his heart—"
"Beg for mercy," the magistrate said. "Beg for the man's forgiveness and the people's."
Izabella dropped her head, voice small. "Please, Scott, please..." Her voice became ragged. The crowd took pictures with their little devices, some of which were the livestream corners; hands shoved forward to record the fall from grace. Cameras clicked and the live comments streamed with them: "Look at her now!" "She begged!" "Public justice!"
A stern clerk recited the penalty: Izabella would be banished from the capital's main households and confined to her teacher's estate for a year with limited practice — a public disgrace and professional invalidation. She would lose her right to practice in noble houses. The punishment was old-fashioned but stung: in a world that runs on reputation, it was a cut to the very thing that had empowered her.
As the clerk announced, Izabella's face slid from pleading to collapse. She screamed and clawed at the dirt, then at herself. "No— please! I have no place if you send me away! I will— I beg—" Her voice cracked. People whispered. Some wept. A child cried.
"It was not just her," I said softly into the magistrate's ear. "Isabel Dean conspired to traffic me into servitude. She tried to sell my life."
The magistrate's eyes flicked to the other woman who had been waiting with the pale mask of nobility. Isabel had stood there like a queen waiting to be coronated. Now her mask fell away.
"Lady Isabel," the magistrate said. "Do you deny orchestrating the forced marriage and the attempt to sell this woman to powerful eunuchs for favor?"
At first she smirked. She had been secure in the manor and in the brocade of family ties. "Do you have proof?" she asked, voice silk.
We did. The steward who had been bribed by Isabel, the small ledger with payments, the letters scripted in her hand — all presented like razor teeth. The clerk read names and sums aloud. The crowd's murmur swelled into fury.
Isabel's face turned first to blank, then to a spade of fear. Her eyes darted. "These are lies," she said at first; "forged!" Her tone flipped to indignation. "I would never!"
Then the witnesses spoke, one by one. The gardener, the steward, a bribe kept in a tea caddy — the evidence compiled like a sentence. The magistrate removed his spectacles and peered down.
"Lady Isabel Dean, by your own hand you conspired to trade a woman to a eunuch to secure favor. You humiliated a house, consigned a mother to danger. Explain."
"Explain?" Isabel's face buckled. She tried to stand on dignity and failed as the crowd's anger drove through her like wind. "No. I— I did what I did for the good of the family. Don't you understand? The General will be appeased—"
"You sold a human life," said a voice in the crowd, clear like a bell. "You did this for petty power."
Her bravado wilted. She moved through the stages the magistrate had catalogued into my earlier note: pride, shock, denial, then collapse. "You don't know," she whimpered. "You don't— it is for the house—"
Then, finally, she fell to her knees, hands clasped. "Please!" she begged. Her voice had lost its baritone. The very same crowd that had applauded her hand now turned cameras on her pleading, the light catching her face with no mercy. I heard a clamor of hands, of food sellers swapping gossip and snapping images. Someone — a woman whose daughter had been made to weep by Isabel — spat: "Beg, you hypocrite."
Isabel's voice rose and then split. She reached for mercy, a mimicry of humanity, and begged.
"I'm sorry! I'm sorry! Please!" she cried. "Please don't ruin us!"
Her husband — my father's friend, or at least an ally — stood still and then finally spoke, his voice thin with betrayal. "You sold us for gossip. You cheapened our line."
The crowd roared. Someone shoved a mirror under Isabel's face to force her to look herself. The magistrate, with legal temper, decreed as well: Isabelle would be stripped of the Dowager's privileges for a season; she would host public restitution and publicly apologize at market square for three days. She would also fund a women's fund to rehabilitate the orphaned maid's family.
Isabel's reaction now passed the required arc: she was at first indifferent, then aghast, then she denied, then broke, then begged. The crowd's camera phones recorded it like a modern tableau: the powerful brought low, public reaction ranging from shock to mockery, to applause. I watched her fall and felt an odd, unwanted vindication.
When it was over, both women were led out by guards as the crowd hissed and cheered in alternation. Bystanders crowded around, some taking photos, others weeping, others clapping. Someone shouted, "Justice!" Someone else was quieter: "Too late for spring-girl."
I took a step forward. "Stop," I told the crowd. "Punishment is not the same as justice. Do not turn a girl into a spectacle solely to relieve your hunger for drama."
A hush fell like silk. My stream was active, my viewers shouting in my ear — "power move" and "wisdom." I felt the weight of the choices I'd made: to expose, to punish, but to ask that mercy accompany our public scorn. The magistrate listened, the crowd murmured, and slowly it calmed.
Later that night, Scott took my hand. "You did well," he said. "You saved me, you exposed them. You did it with no theatrics."
"I had help," I said. "You were in danger. I couldn't watch and do nothing."
He smiled that small, private smile again. "You are a strange piece. You saved a man and, on a whim, wasted points. You are worth it."
Over the days that followed, Izabella's punishment bent her like a young tree pruned wrong, and Isabel's humbled reparations cleared a small path. The maid's family received a small stipend from the market; the steward who testified got protection. The stream had turned me into a living voice people listened to, and the town now watched me like a slow-burning show.
Yet the world did not settle. The swordman Egan remained in shadow, Prince Tomas never stopped watching, Brady's loyalty never wavered. New schemes hatched. The system kept pulsing with missions: more choices, more hearts to win, more survival games to play.
"What's next?" Scott asked late one evening as we shared tea in his quiet study.
I looked at him, the man who'd scooped me from a crate of despair and put a bowl of porridge into my hands. "We keep living. And maybe we let the live stream rest a little."
"Never," he said with a rare grin. "Who else would I watch argue with the city magistrate?"
"True. You would be bored without me." I smiled back. For a while, for the first time since I fell into this story, my heart felt lodged in two worlds but not broken.
There would be more fights, more public drama, more tricky alliances. But the day the market square watched two liars be unmade — that night the city spoke and I heard it. It is not the beginning of everything, nor the end. It was, however, unmistakably ours: a woman with the courage to expose a plot and a husband unusual enough to stand beside her.
The End
— Thank you for reading —