The perfect mother system

Preparing The Battle

Kate sat quietly in the small room that had been given to her on the day she was born — the illegitimate daughter's room, tucked away in the far corner of the General's mansion where no one important would have to look at it. The walls were plain. The furniture was old and worn at the edges. Everything about the space had been chosen to remind her of her place.

She had spent years hating this room.

Now she barely noticed it.

Her mind was too busy turning over everything the system had shown her. The memories of Kate Chen had settled fully by now, no longer flooding in all at once but sitting quietly in the back of her mind like a library she could walk through at will. She knew this mansion. She knew every servant who had been told to ignore her and every hallway that led somewhere she was not welcome. She knew her sister's laugh and her stepmother's cold eyes and the way her father looked through her whenever they were in the same room.

She also knew what was coming.

In three days, a carriage would arrive from the Lu estate. It would not be a grand arrival. There would be no celebration, no formal send-off from the family. Kate Chen was being handed over like something unwanted being passed to someone equally unwanted. Her sister had made sure of that. The engagement transfer had been arranged quietly, without ceremony, because drawing attention to it would have raised questions nobody in this family wanted to answer.

Kate did not mind.

She had no interest in a send-off from people who had never wished her well.

What she needed was to be ready.

She closed her eyes and turned her attention inward, the way she had learned to do in the short time since the system had bonded with her.

Ding. Host has accessed the System Mall. Current balance: 1000 points.

She went through the inventory carefully, the way she used to make decisions back in her old life when she had very little money and needed every choice to count. She could not afford to waste points. She did not know how long this mission would take or what obstacles she would face along the way, and she needed to be strategic.

The body fragrance pill had already been purchased. That had been instinct more than strategy, but she did not regret it. Lu Chengzou hated women, but he was still a man. If she could make him comfortable in her presence before he had any reason to be, that was an advantage worth having.

She purchased the beauty pill next.

She was not vain. She had never had the luxury of vanity. But she was entering a household full of people who would be watching her, judging her, looking for weakness. Kate Chen had already been beautiful, but the original body had been underfed and tired from years of being overlooked. Kate wanted to walk through those gates looking like someone who could not easily be dismissed.

Ding. Beauty pill consumed. Effects active.

She felt a warmth move through her, slow and gentle, like sunlight spreading across skin. Nothing dramatic. Nothing that would make her unrecognizable. But when she opened her eyes and looked at her reflection in the old bronze mirror on the wall, she saw the difference. Her skin had an evenness to.

She turned back to the mall.

The fake pregnancy pill caught her attention and she stopped on it, thinking. It was fifty points, the same as the fragrance and beauty pills. She understood its purpose. There might it now. Her eyes were clearer. The shadows beneath them had softened. She looked rested in a way Kate Chen had probably never looked in her entire life.

Good come a time when she needed to buy herself space, to create the appearance of progress before the reality of it. Lu Chengzou needed an heir. His family needed proof that the marriage was moving forward. If things moved slowly, if he kept his distance the way his reputation suggested he would, a fake pregnancy could serve as a bridge.

She did not purchase it yet. She would keep it in mind.

What she bought instead was the painless pregnancy option.

She was going to be a mother in this world, one way or another. That was the mission, and beyond the mission it was the thing she had wanted most in her entire first life. She had no intention of fearing the process. But she also saw no reason to suffer more than necessary. Fifty points was a reasonable price for that particular comfort, and she paid it without hesitation.

Ding. Painless pregnancy option secured and active for future use.

That left her with 850 points.

She closed the mall and sat back, looking at the ceiling of the small room that had held Kate Chen's loneliness for so many years. She thought about the mission ahead. Lu Chengzou, cold and scarred and surrounded by walls. A household that would look at her and see the illegitimate daughter of a general, handed over in place of the sister who had refused. No status. No allies. No history in that place that could work in her favor.

She had faced worse.

In her first life she had been infertile, divorced, and had died on a street corner saving a child that was not hers. She had built nothing and lost everything and still, when it mattered, she had acted without hesitation. That was who she was. That was what she had brought with her into this second chance.

She stood up and moved to the window. Outside, the courtyard of the General's mansion was busy with afternoon activity. Servants moving between buildings. Her stepmother's voice somewhere in the distance, speaking to someone in the sharp tone she reserved for people she considered beneath her. Her sister would be inside somewhere, probably pleased with herself for escaping this fate and not thinking at all about what she had passed on to Kate.

Let her be pleased.

Kate watched the courtyard and thought about three days from now. The carriage arriving. The gates of the General's mansion closing behind her. A new place, a new role, a new life opening up in front of her.

She was not afraid.

She had the system. She had her points. She had beauty pills working quietly in her bloodstream and body fragrance that would make her presence feel like something rare rather than something threatening. She had a plan that was still forming but already had a shape to it.

And she had something else.

She had wanted this, in her bones, since before she could remember. Not the dynasty or the Duke or the politics of any of it. But the children. The family. The chance to be someone's mother in a way she had been denied in her first life.

The system had chosen her for a reason.

She intended to prove it right.