Chapter2

Over the next few days, my life completely unraveled.

Thanks to my plummeting image, I lost two major skincare sponsorships. Notifications flooded my phone, pinging one after another: Given your recent public image... we have decided to suspend our partnership. I swiped the emails away without replying.

The comment sections were even uglier. Is Chloe on meth? She looks like a literal skeleton, it’s disgusting. Unfollowing, I’m not watching a dying girl livestream. I stared at the words for a long time before finally force-closing the app.

Meanwhile, Mia’s engagement was blowing up. She started posting her "glow-up" daily vlogs. In the videos, her smile was radiant, accompanied by captions like: So grateful for this beautiful life. All the spotlight that used to be mine was being siphoned, drop by drop, over to her.

I kept my mouth shut. Instead, I began a secret experiment of my own.

On Wednesday night, I locked myself in my bedroom. Sitting in front of me was a bowl of ghost pepper tortilla chips. I picked one up, my fingers trembling slightly—not because I was afraid of the heat, but because I hadn't felt a single physical sensation in three weeks.

I shoved them into my mouth, chewing blankly, piece after piece. No pain. No spice. Zero bodily reaction. It was like chewing on a pile of cardboard.

My jaw didn't stop moving as I grabbed my phone and pulled up the feed from the hidden package-monitoring camera I had set up in our living room. My finger hovered over the screen, my heart hammering against my ribs.

On the glowing screen, Mia was curled up on the couch watching a show, a glass of juice in her hand.

The exact second I swallowed my fifth ghost pepper chip, the Mia on the screen let out a bloodcurdling shriek. The glass slipped from her hand and shattered on the floor. She clamped both hands over her mouth, writhing in agony on the couch before wildly grabbing a water bottle off the coffee table and chugging it. Her face flushed a violent crimson. Tears and snot streamed down her face, as if she were gargling burning coals.

I stared at the feed, my throat tightening, my fingers leaving white-knuckled dents on the edge of my phone case.

This was no coincidence.

Everything I ate—the taste, the sensation—transferred directly to her. And not just the taste. The nutrients, too. That was why I was starving to death despite binge-eating, while she glowed with perfect health. She was an invisible parasite, leaching off my flesh and blood through some unseen, twisted umbilical cord.

I slipped out of my room, padding soundlessly to the hallway corner just outside the living room. Shrinking into the shadows, I held my breath.

Mia was hunched over the kitchen sink, dry-heaving. Her shoulders trembled violently as she gasped for air, whispering fiercely to the empty room.

"System... you said you could block pain and extreme flavors," she whined, her voice cracking. "Why the hell did that burn so much?!"

The air remained dead silent, but Mia’s expression shifted. Her eyes glazed over for a second, her face relaxing as if listening to a voice broadcast directly into her skull.

"I get it," she muttered, slowly straightening up. She wiped her wet face, her tone hardening into something icy and calm. "As long as I keep draining her vitality and nutrients, my stats will max out. She’s barely hanging on. Once she finally drops dead, I’ll be the most popular girl on campus... and Liam will be totally mine."

So that was it. The "System."

She wasn’t just stealing my senses and my food. She was murdering me.

I pressed my back against the cold drywall, my chest heaving, biting down hard on my lower lip. The initial shock of pure terror evaporated, quickly replaced by a bone-chilling wrath that clawed its way up from the soles of my feet.

She thought this system made her invincible. She thought I was just some helpless prey, waiting to be bled dry.

But she forgot the golden rule of nature: when a parasite sucks its host dry, or when the host turns itself into poison—it’s the parasite that dies first.