Chapter 1 — Reborn: This Hell Is Mine

The Moment the Car Plunges into the Abyss

The screeching sound of brakes in the rainy night was the last sound Đường Ý Vy remembered clearly before everything fell apart.

The car slid on the wet road, the headlights swept into a crooked streak of light between the two rows of trees along the pass, and in the moment the wheels lost all grip, she heard herself let out a wordless scream. Not because of pain. At that time, it was not yet painful. But because in her mind, right in the midst of extreme panic, a strangely clear thought flashed through: the car's brakes had no problem three days ago, her familiar mechanic had just checked the entire system before the trip. So why on this night, right when she left the one-year wedding anniversary party to go home alone because Bách Nguyên was stuck answering an emergency call, did the car's brakes completely lose their effectiveness right at the most dangerous turn?

She didn't have time to find the answer. The car crashed through the railing blocking the road, throwing her body forward, and in the last moment before the darkness swallowed all her senses, the face that appeared in her mind was not Chung Bách Nguyên, not anyone else, but the familiar gentle smile of Kỷ Tuệ Nghi - the adopted sister she loved like her own for more than twenty years, standing in the corner of the banquet room tonight, raising a glass of red wine to congratulate her sister, eyes sparkling as if about to cry with happiness.

Ý Vy never thought that would be the last look she would see in her life.

Then everything sank into a black void, no sound, no feeling, only the feeling of falling, falling forever without seeing the bottom, as if the whole universe had decided to erase her from existence.

When Ý Vy opened her eyes again, the first thing she noticed was the familiar smell of the bed sheets - slightly rough cotton fabric, smelling of fabric softener that she had stopped using a long time ago because Bách Nguyên didn't like it. She lay motionless for a while, her heart beating rapidly, her breathing rapid as if she had just run away from a nightmare. But when she raised her hand to cover her eyes, the sunlight shining through the thin curtain onto her skin was so warm and real that it couldn't be an illusion.

This was not her and her husband's bedroom in the Chung family villa.

It was the small room she had rented three years earlier, when she was a newly graduated interior designer living on a small salary and staying up all night drawing plans for her first client.

Ý Vy jumped up, her heart seeming to stop for a beat. She looked around the room—the old desk beside the window, the landscape poster she had bought cheaply at the night market, and the old phone on the nightstand that she clearly remembered replacing two years earlier. She reached for it with trembling hands and almost dropped it. The screen lit up, displaying the date.

She read it three times before she dared to believe it.

Exactly three years ago. Exactly this day.

It was the day the Ánh Dương Charity Fund—the organization founded by her late adoptive mother, Ninh Diễm Thu—held a large fundraiser at a hotel in the city center. The design company where Ý Vy worked had been invited to decorate the venue. At that party she would meet, for the first time, the tall young general manager of Chung Nguyên Group: Chung Bách Nguyên, whose cold eyes held something she could not look away from.

A fateful day, in its truest sense.

Ý Vy tightened her grip on the phone. A cold feeling ran down her spine—not from fear, but from the realization that she had died. She clearly remembered the car plunging into the abyss, the sound of breaking glass, and the last moment she saw Tuệ Nghi smiling and raising her glass. Yet somehow, beyond any scientific explanation, she was alive again, carrying every memory of the next three years—three years that would lead to marriage, seemingly perfect happiness, and finally a cruel death at the hands of the person she trusted most.

She sat quietly on the bed for a long time, letting all the memories flood back into their proper order.

She remembered loving Bách Nguyên sincerely, without calculation or scheming. She missed their simple but warm wedding, the evenings they ate together after long workdays, and his embrace whenever work left her exhausted. She also remembered the times Tuệ Nghi had stopped by, always arriving when Bách Nguyên was present and always slipping a seemingly casual remark into their conversations. Strange rumors about Ý Vy had begun spreading among Bách Nguyên's friends before the wedding; at the time, she had dismissed them as jealousy from outsiders and never suspected who was behind them.

And she remembered, more clearly than ever, that last night. The night the mechanic later - when the police did a cursory investigation and concluded it was just an accident due to slippery roads - said something she ignored because she was too miserable to think clearly: the brake system had signs of being tampered with but there wasn't enough evidence to confirm. Bách Nguyên then requested a re-investigation, but before the results could be obtained, he himself had a small suspicious accident not long after, forced to stay in the hospital, and the investigation gradually sank into oblivion.

The last memory, the most real and painful, was Tuệ Nghi's face that night. Not during the toast, but in the brief moment before Ý Vy left the party table for the parking lot, when she happened to turn and saw her foster sister watching from afar. There had been no love in those eyes, only a cold emptiness that Ý Vy had blamed on the harsh party lights. Now, with every memory threaded together in the mind of a woman who had died and returned, she understood that she had not misread them.

Those were the eyes of someone looking at their prey one last time before taking action.

Ý Vy put down the phone and clasped her hands on her knees, trying to steady her breathing. Three years. She had three years to prepare for everything to come: today's fateful encounter with Bách Nguyên, Tuệ Nghi's gradual intrusion into her life, the malicious rumors, and finally the plot that would lead to her death. She did not know how she had received this second chance, or whether Ninh Diễm Thu had somehow taken pity on her unfortunate adopted daughter. But she knew one thing for certain: she would not let history repeat itself.

In her previous life, she had believed absolutely that the sisterly love between her and Tuệ Nghi was the purest love she would ever know, only to pay for that belief with her life. In this life, she would still love her adopted sister as before—at least on the surface, at least until she understood the truth—but she would no longer close her eyes to warning signs.

She stood and walked to the mirror hanging on the old wardrobe door. The reflected face was younger than she remembered, without the fine lines later brought on by the pressure of being a CEO's wife. The eyes still held the clarity of a twenty-four-year-old who had never experienced betrayal. But behind them was a mind that had lived through the entire cycle of love, trust, betrayal, and death.

"Okay," she said softly to the image in the mirror, her voice so calm she even surprised herself. "If fate gave me a second chance, I wouldn't waste it."

She looked at the clock. The Sunshine Foundation's charity party will start at seven o'clock tonight, at the Diamond Hotel in the city center. The Việt Lam Interior Design Company where she works received the contract to decorate the event space two weeks ago, and she, as the design specialist in charge, will be there early to supervise the final completion. That is also the reason why she was present at the right moment when Chung Bách Nguyên entered the main hall, the fateful moment that started everything that has happened and will happen.

In her previous life, she remembered being so nervous that she dropped the decorative fabric sample board right in front of him, an embarrassing incident that accidentally became the start of the first conversation between the two. In this life, she did not intend for things to turn out exactly the same — not because she wanted to stay away from Bách Nguyên, the feelings she had for him in her previous life were real, not fake, and she believed that if fate had arranged for them to meet again, then it must also be part of this second chance. But she will no longer be the naive, clumsy girl who let everything take her away without any preparation.

She opened the closet and took out the navy blue office outfit she remembered wearing that day, but this time she stopped and changed to a different dress — elegant beige, more delicately cut, something that in her previous life she kept in the closet for months because she was afraid to wear it to the company. One small change. But Ý Vy clearly understands that sometimes the fate of a person's entire life can turn in a different direction with just the smallest changes.

The phone on the table vibrated with a text message. She picked it up, not too surprised to see the sender's name.

"Sister, remember to go to the charity party on time tonight. I heard that this year the Sunshine Foundation invited a lot of big people. Who knows, maybe you'll meet a good fate." Accompanied by a small heart emoji, cute as always.

Ý Vy looked at the text message from Kỷ Tuệ Nghi for a long time, her finger lightly gliding across the screen. In her previous life, she would smile, touched by her sister's concern, and then text back a few cheerful words. In this life, she still smiles, but that smile no longer comes from blind trust, but from a completely new alertness — she is seeing, for the first time in more than twenty years, that a seemingly harmless text message can have a completely different layer of meaning.

Who knows, maybe you'll find a good fate.

That sentence, now read through the eyes of someone who had died at the hands of the person who wrote it, sounded like a cold prophecy.

Ý Vy typed back a short, gentle reply as always: "Yes, I will arrive on time. Thank you for reminding me." Then she put down the phone and took a deep breath.

The three years ahead were full of traps that she once walked through with her naivety and paid with her life. This time, she will walk through them with eyes wide open, with a heart that still loves but is no longer easily deceived.

That hell, in her previous life, was the place where she was buried. This life, she told herself, will be where she stands firm and takes back everything that belongs to her.