Rebirth14 min read
I Made a Deal with a System and Married the Wrong Man
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I woke up with my cheek pressed into something soft and utterly unfamiliar.
I sat up. The blindfold over my eyes blurred as the world tilted. My hand tore the red cloth away. A yellow floral blouse. A red skirt that swallowed my knees. A big fake flower pinned to my chest. I touched the fabric like it might be a trick.
“This can’t be right,” I murmured.
A small mechanical voice answered, not from the room but from inside my head. “Host, welcome. I am the system. Call me Small GuaGua.”
“My task?” I snapped, still half in shock. “What is my identity in this world? Where am I?”
The system poured a dossier—page after page—straight into my memory. It was a book-world, an old novel called My Overbearing Town Boyfriend. I was told, plainly: you are the novel’s villainous secondary heroine. Your mission: partner with the male supporting role, raise him to fortune and glory—without stealing the male lead. Complete tasks, earn points, and you will be allowed to return to your real life.
I laughed. “You’ve bound a galactic commander—one of the best tacticians in the Cluster—to the role of a dizzy, jealous village woman?”
“Host, your compliance is required,” Small GuaGua hummed. “Also, your current point balance is zero.”
I looked at my reflection in a battered mirror. My face was softer here. Two braids with red ribbons. Innocent eyes. The body under the cotton clothes felt different, smaller, more fragile somehow. It would do.
When he entered the little wooden room, he filled it like a warm shadow. Tall, hair dark like a storm cloud, skin the color of late summer. He smelled of sweat and earth. He stumbled across the threshold, still smelling of liquor.
“You’re up,” he said. His voice was rough. “You… you married me? Why?”
I kept my voice small, and played the part. “Do you love me?”
He blinked. “What did you say?”
I pressed my lips into the shape the system insisted on. “Do you love me? Say it out loud. Say it three times.”
He flushed purple and then lunged for the blanket, embarrassed and furious. “You—stop that. Have you no shame?”
I pulled the blanket back like a child playing house. “Say it. Please.”
“Stop! This is ridiculous.” He left, slamming the door.
When the door thudded closed, I called the system. “Do you… have any of those pills? The ones that help men say the words they’re ashamed to speak?”
Small GuaGua paused. “Pill costs five points.”
“I have zero points.”
“Credit, then?”
“Credit, please.”
The system yielded. I grinned. Five points for a pill. I’d earn them.
I had been a starship commander once—hard-edged, used to men bowing and to giving orders. Now I had to be soft. The system reminded me: Restore the original villain’s manner—weak, delicate, coquettish. I rolled my eyes. If an act got my rewards, I would act.
At breakfast the next morning, I learned two things: one, my “husband” Pascal Chase adored me. Two, townwomen loved gossip like bees loved sugar.
“Morning,” said a woman with a braids-and-sun hat grin. She led the gossip pack; her voice had the oily patience of someone who had practiced cruelty. “Our new wife wakes early?”
I put on innocence the way a commander used to don armor. “I get up early,” I said. “I like the morning.”
“Humph. Too good for the fields,” another woman said. Their eyes were knives. The village had decided I was a foreign-born, useless city-doll. Fine. I’d play the role only where it suited me.
Later that day, when Pascal fussed and tried to take my work from me in the kitchen—“You’re my wife, you shouldn’t be doing this”—I turned my face small and wide.
“Do you love me?” I asked.
His face crumpled. “I—yes. I do.”
I smiled and pushed him further. “Say it three times!”
The scene was as certain as a code routine: he stuttered, blushed, mumbled, fled. I dumped the ‘love' pills into the porridge anyway. If he waited long enough, he’d say whatever I required.
Small GuaGua fed me the novel’s maps of desire, the beats of scenes. The male lead—Gavin Forsberg—had his own trajectory. The girl everyone adored—Lenora Curtis—glowed on her own pages. The male supporting character—my husband Pascal—was supposed to be rich, proud, loyal. In the original plot his loyalties and his choices ended badly. That was the line: I had to carry him to the top but not so far my actions destroyed everything. The system called it “as close to canon as possible.”
I was bored with canon in the Cluster. Here I had a system and a set of levers. I would win.
At first, my choices were small: learn how to farm, pull weeds, get calluses. The book said I should be “soft,” so I turned my soldier’s strength into gentle actions. I cooked, fanned, laughed like a willow in a summer breeze. People noticed. Pascal beamed. He had that plain, honest love that made my iron jaw warm for a moment.
“You can’t keep doing this,” I scolded him softly one evening, when he stood stiff and ridiculous in front of others. “You don’t have to punish yourself. If you want to learn, tell me.”
He looked at me like I had placed a star in his palm. “Teach me,” he said.
So I did. I taught him arithmetic, and politics, and the memory of histories I’d learned from centuries of reading. He proved slow but steady. I found, to my annoyance, that teaching him felt…good. It was not the scheming I’d expected to enjoy. I kept my plans secret: points, market leverage, the system’s rewards.
But novels have viruses. Lenora Curtis was where the plot bled. She glowed too cleanly, smiled like a bell, and had a circle of men orbiting her like mad planets. She could be sweet, but the original had her sliding into petty schemes—planting ideas, nudging hearts. If she ground her heel into Pascal’s pride, trouble would follow.
“You shouldn’t let them talk,” I told Pascal one afternoon as Lenora passed us, cheek pink with laughter.
“Who?” he asked.
“Those who sneer. They’ll make stories.” I smoothed my hands down my cotton skirt. “Let them be. They’ll forget.”
They did not forget. The next day in the square, a ring of village women gathered, and Lenora took her place among the meek, the white dress making her seem like a stage light.
“She made our guest eat burned porridge,” one woman hissed. “She thinks she’s better.”
“Salt and pepper,” another said, and then they laughed.
I folded my hands, hid a smile, and then let my eyes flash. If Lenora wanted my husband’s pity and the town’s favor, she would take it. If she took it by tricks—if she planted the idea that Pascal was incompetent—I would strip the idea bare.
“Lenora,” I said, slipping next to her. “Do you want to come see the river? It’s clear today.”
Those who misunderstood us were the ones who would make me necessary. Lenora was pure drama. She tried to fold me into a worldview where she was fragile, persecuted. “You’re mean,” she whispered once, plaintive and practiced.
“Am I?” I asked. “You tell me. Are you the frightened dove you pretend?”
Lenora flinched. Passion for survival made her quick with a smile. Men blurted their sympathies; Gavin’s calm eyes watched and kept something afar.
Not all threats were pretty. A man named Gunther Caruso—one of the men who orbited Lenora—had teeth like worry. He harassed. He got cocky. He pressed uninvited hands on things that didn’t belong to him.
One afternoon in the maze of corn, we heard the wrong voice. “I’ll make you belong to me,” a low voice said.
Gavin bolted like a protective animal. He shoved the man back, and the man flashed a small knife. The fight pivoted like a bad program—Gunther snarled, pulled his blade; Gavin pushed; one of the other young men tried to intervene.
I had a hundred reasons to let the plot play out. The system told me: the main couple’s confrontation with danger is a beat that leads to their bonding. But Small GuaGua also tilted the scale: “If they die, host, the novel collapses and you fail the mission.”
“Do we let them do heroics?” I asked the little voice. “Or do I stop this myself?”
“How will saving them help your points?” Small GuaGua asked. “It won’t. But their survival keeps the book alive.”
I picked up a stone and launched it. It flicked Gunther’s hand and the knife clattered to the soil. Panic scattered. In a few seconds, the scenario devolved into drama: Gunther, enraged and humiliated, struck a match and, in a blind flare of spite, set a dry clump of corn smoldering.
“Fire!” someone screamed.
The flames licked fast. Corn stalks were tinder. People panicked. For a second I felt the old commander’s instinct—prioritize, rescue, get people out. I moved like a legalist algorithm: cut lines of cornstalks, shout directions, pull children and old men clear. We saved the couple—Gavin clung to Lenora, wounded, but alive.
When the smoke cleared I felt something shift in the village. People who had mocked us watched the charred rows and the burned corn and realized how close hunger sat to their feet. An old man bawled beside an ashen pile; a neighbor—Gilbert Morris—offered bags of what flotsam of grain he had. The goodwill surprised me. A small community stitched itself back together.
Then the reckoning came. Gunther, who had held a knife and struck the match, vanished into the night. But some of his misdeeds could not be undone. The men who had been smug saw their pride crushed.
Small GuaGua, ever pragmatic, declared: “Save the couple. No rewards. But—system shop open. Choose one item.”
I refused gimmicks like the “soft-bone pill” the shop showed first. There were ridiculous things, “love arrows” and “happiness candies.” I scrolled until I found the simplest tool: a scrub brush that, when used, made the target favor you. “Good-feel Brush,” Small GuaGua called it.
“You want me to use magic on people’s hearts?” I asked.
“It raises their affection temporarily,” Small GuaGua replied. “But you can also make friends without magic.”
I bought the brush with the reward the system offered. I used it not on Gavin—he was not mine to pull—but on a younger boy who had resented me, Erick Lucas. The brush swiped his jaw and his stubbornness softened. He called me a saint within hours. The system’s numbers clicked up: good. Points gained.
But the story’s undercurrent kept tugging at me. The novel’s original path cast a different shadow: a damaged man falling into crime, a woman thrown into madness. The part that unsettled me most was the villainess who had done far worse in the original—someone who would throw others under carts for a crumb of advantage. If the narrative still insisted on putting them on self-destruction, I would not let cruelty be the easy path.
So I made a choice: keep them alive and make their punishment public. If a villain insisted on cruelty, the village would see.
I knew enough patterns to orchestrate revelation. I collected evidence, subtle and cruel: whispered exchanges caught on the back of a broom, a scrap of a letter, the strange gold that surfaced when someone thought no one was watching. The raw material of gossip, once assembled and given a voice, can topple a throne.
When I had enough, I called a meeting in the square. “All of you,” I said. “You remember the corn that burned?”
They shuffled, crowded, the circle closing tight. “Someone set it on purpose,” I said, and let my voice be the cleft that split rumor open. I unrolled the proof—witnesses, the scorched match with a name on it, the knife found under a bush. The square smelled of coal and old shame. “Gunther Caruso lit that match.”
Gasps. “No!” Lenora breathed, white as a moth. She was beside Gunther, fingers interlaced like a plea. “Stop—this isn’t true.”
I did not raise my voice. I raised the truth. “And there was another plan,” I said, and took my next card from my sleeve: a note, folded too many times, with a promise to Gaspar—no, Gunther—to make Gavin look incompetent, to lure him out as a fool. I read it aloud.
“How dare you?” someone shouted.
Lenora went pale. Her composure cracked. “I didn’t—” She tried to scramble free from the tightening knot of looks. Men’s mouths polished blade-like with accusations; women narrowed their lips.
“You plotted to ruin these people’s harvests to gain attention,” I said. “You worked with a selfish man who threatened violence.”
Lenora’s face flickered through the stages the system had said villains go: arrogance, denial, panic. “I didn’t mean—” she whimpered.
“You wanted pity and applause,” I said. “You wanted the stage. You sent a knife into a man’s hand and a match into a child’s scrawl. You and your accomplice thought of others as props.”
Then the village took over. Older women who had been watching now spoke with the weight of elders. An elder woman—Ute Cardenas—recounted how Lenora had laughed in the market when a mother couldn’t buy salt. A young farmer, Emmett Gallo, told of a loan that had vanished after Lenora had insisted on a “favor.” The weight of local testimony pressed on them.
Lenora moved from denial to outrage. “This is slander,” she cried. “You’re the liar.”
Gunther’s bravado dissolved into a shriek. “They’re liars!” he howled. “They’re jealous!”
A boy—Erick, the one I’d used the brush on—stood up for me. “You hurt our harvest,” he said. “You hurt people we love.”
Their reactions cracked in unison: whisper, then louder; cellars of resentment opened like mouths. “Shame!” someone shouted. “You ruined our corn! You burned what fed our children!”
I watched them move from fury to action. In a public square there are ways to punish and to teach. They took from Lenora’s house the trinkets she had paraded—cheap tokens paid for by other people’s generosity—and publically unwrapped them. They displayed the empty promises: the dresses allegedly “bought” with borrowed grain and the letters where she’d asked for favors. The spectacle was not blood but worse for a social creature: exposure.
Gunther, because his actions were violent and clear, faced a different punishment. The men who had always thrusted their chests into the center now surrounded him. “To the station,” Emmett said. “We walk him there together.”
He tried to lash out. They restrained him. He begged, then cursed, then collapsed into the shame of being dragged. The villagers paraded the evidence to the local constable. The public trail—people whispering, neighbors nodding, a sacking of the props—was satisfying in a way the battlefield had never been. It was a proper, human retribution. It was slow and thorough. The crowd’s noise was not a baying but a naming: liar, arsonist, thief.
Lenora’s fall was public and precise. She first pleaded ignorance, then, as witnesses lined up, she imploded. “You don’t understand,” she sobbed, “I wanted to be loved.”
“You had it all along,” I said gently. “Not by taking, but by giving.”
She had expected veiled dismissal or private revenge. Instead, the village—for better or worse—did what communities do: they stripped her of power in front of their eyes. No torches, no brutality, but the worst wound of all: to be watched and understood and to have everyone choose to look away.
Gunther’s punishment was harsher in spectacle: arrested, shamed, dragged through a route that took him past every field he had helped destroy. People spat and named him. He reacted with fury—then shock—then the slow crumple of a small, poorly-built man facing consequences too big for him. He stopped yelling and began to whisper apologies that no one wanted.
The whole punishment scene lasted long enough to be final: people spoke his history, his attempts to charm then bully. They showed the knife. They showed the burnt earth. They let him see the family baskets badly singed, the smoke-stained children. He imploded.
When the dust settled, the village’s anger had been directed at two targets, and their response wasn’t a ritual murder. It was exposure, exile, and law. Gunther was taken away. Lenora was left among neighbors who would no longer smooth words for her. She lingered, watched on benches, her white dress now soiled.
“You did well,” Small GuaGua muttered in my ear afterward, mechanical admiration threaded with an odd softness.
I shrugged. “I did what the village needed.”
The system rewarded me, as expected: points, a notch up on the ledger. But more than that, the village began to lean toward Pascal. People once suspicious of me now praised his kindness. He swelled with…something like pride.
There were, of course, tiny moments of sweetness I hadn’t expected: the night Pascal learned to write his name and pressed the pencil hard and proud; the time he drove the village’s only tractor and came back covered in dust like a crown; the way he timidly stood when I said, “I’ll teach you math.” Those were the real payments.
Small GuaGua kept a ledger. “Another line of tasks unlocked,” it said one day. “Help the younger siblings of your partner pass their exams. Twenty points.”
I looked at Erick and Josephine Hu—both hungry-eyed and honest. You don’t need to be cruel to win a system. You need to be efficient.
“You’re not here for love,” Pascal said one evening as we stood beside our glass-encased snake—my odd little pet placed inside a homemade jar—looking at the town lights. “Are you?”
I kept my answer small. “I’m here to finish.”
“But—” he hesitated. “You’ve changed things.”
“I made choices that saved people.” My voice had a residue of the commander I’d been—clean, sharp. “Sometimes saving the book saves the people in it.”
He put his hand over mine. His rough palm fit mine like a bandage.
When I at last chose the brush in the system shop, it felt petty. But small things move mountains. The brush fixed Erick’s anger into devotion and the town’s gossip into something gentle. I finished one task, then another. Each time, I traded points for knowledge, books Small GuaGua sold for a price—books on farming, on modern yields, on how to mix fertilizer with soap when nothing else was available.
We taught, we planted smarter rows, we’re careful with seeds. Pascal applied himself. The boy who had once flinched at my acting laughed and learned. The village’s fields grew steadier. Lenora kept to herself most days. Gunther was a memory on a page flogged by the station.
And yet, I kept feeling something strange in my chest when Pascal—clumsy, earnest—told me he loved the way I had taught his family. It was not the starship-love I had felt for a fleet; it was smaller, specific. The way a soldier leaves a bookmark in a book he cannot finish: an anchor.
“Do you ever wish to leave?” Pascal asked me once, under the tin roof while rain stitched the night.
“I made a deal,” I said. “I will. But not before I get what I need.”
He nodded, not angry. “Then let me be your home while you do it.”
The system hummed, impatient and forever hungry for scores. I had signed away a part of myself and leased another to Small GuaGua. I would keep my end. For now, I would ride this novel, fold its rough edges, turn villains into lessons, and make the system give me the tools I wanted.
We would harvest this land, teach its children, patch up their barns, and, when the time came, I would take my reward and return to the stars. But somewhere between the cabbage rows and the cobbled lanes, a different life rooted in me. The life of a woman who could play fragile and still carry a sword.
When the final task ticked as complete—rescue the main couple, raise the support to pass exams, keep the book from crashing—the system offered me something small and absurd. An item floated before my hands in the shop: a little green diamond that looked like a frog. Small GuaGua winked. “An accessory,” it hummed. “Talismans sell well.”
I placed it on the shelf beside the glass dome where the snake shed its skin. Then I went to the Tigerhead Photo Studio and picked up the photograph we had taken on that first day—the one that smelled of old solvents and now felt like proof we had existed.
I tucked the photograph into my pocket, felt the weight of it. The little green frog glinted, and the system chirped, delighted. “Host, your main task progress is now twenty percent.”
Twenty percent. I had time. I had plans. And a small village that had, upon the edge of disaster, shown me how to make punishment public, how to save, how to teach, and how to be gentle without losing the steel inside.
I touched Pascal’s shoulder. “Let’s go home,” I said.
He lifted me with clumsy pride. The tractor’s engine rumbled like a living animal. We drove back through the fields where the burned earth had been replaced with plowed rows. Under the tin sky, I thought of the system’s ledger, the brush on Erick’s jaw, Lenora’s stripped pretenses, and the green frog in the palm of my hand.
I had come back into a body that wore braids and a floral blouse. I had come to play a weak woman in a novel that loved melodrama. I had also come with a commander's mind.
That night, as the village settled and the system hummed in my ear, I arranged the snake inside the glass dome—my small, living war prize—and put the photograph next to it. The little frog glowed faintly. I set the green diamond near the old tigerhead photo studio snapshot.
I closed my eyes and listened for the system’s mechanical breath. “Small GuaGua,” I whispered.
“Yes?” it replied.
“Remember this,” I said. “If you ever think your host is a gamble, remember that sometimes a commander enjoys the theatre. And sometimes she changes the script.”
Small GuaGua popped a tiny sound I guessed was approval. “Host, of course.”
Outside, a crow called, and somewhere, a child slept with a hand on a warm belly. I grinned at the world I had stitched from borrowed pages and decided I would finish the job. I would gather my points, trade for tools, teach a handful of students how to read, and then—one day—ship back to the stars.
But not before I left the village better than I found it. Not before the people who had tried to burn what fed others learned the true cost of their flame.
I slid the photograph into a small wooden box and closed it. The frog gleamed one more time, like a heartbeat.
The End
— Thank you for reading —