The perfect mother system

Chapter 2: The Childless Duke Heir

Kate barely had time to process what was happening before the system spoke again.

Ding. Host, prepare for mission transmission.

She felt a strange pull, like the ground beneath her had dissolved. The world around her went dark for a moment and then, just as quickly, she was somewhere else entirely. She could not see anything yet. She could not feel her body properly. But she could hear the system, steady and calm inside her head.

Ding. Host transferred successfully. Please prepare to receive the original body's memories.

She wanted to ask questions. She had so many. But before she could form a single word, the pain hit her.

It started at the back of her skull and spread forward like fire cracking through ice. Kate gasped, or tried to. Her hands flew to her head and she squeezed her eyes shut as image after image poured into her mind. Faces. Places. Voices. A whole life that did not belong to her, flooding in all at once.

Ding. Memories transferred successfully.

Slowly the pain faded. Kate sat still and let the memories settle, the way sediment sinks to the bottom of a glass after being shaken. When everything was quiet again, she opened her eyes and began to sort through what she now knew.

The body she had been given belonged to a girl named Kate Chen. She had lived in the Xia Dynasty, a world nothing like the modern city Kate had left behind. There were no cars here, no hospitals, no phones. There were dynasties and generals and courtyard mansions and the kinds of family politics that could ruin a person before they ever had a chance to live.

Kate Chen had understood that reality from the time she was small.

She was the illegitimate daughter of General Chen, which in this world meant she was barely considered part of the family at all. Her mother had been a concubine, long since gone, and Kate had grown up in the shadow of the general's proper wife and her daughter. That daughter was the legitimate heir. She had a name that people spoke with respect, a future that had been planned and protected from birth. Kate had neither.

What Kate had was her face.

She was beautiful, and that was both her only advantage and her greatest curse. Her legitimate sister had noticed the way people looked at Kate and had despised her for it from childhood. The stepmother, the general's wife, had spent years finding small ways to make Kate's life harder. Taking things from her. Speaking badly of her to the general. Ensuring that Kate was kept beneath the sister in every way that mattered.

The original Kate had endured it. She had kept her head down and survived. But she had not been at peace. Beneath the quiet surface she had burned with the desire to one day make them pay for everything they had done to her. That wish had been so strong it had still been alive in her at the moment of her death. It was why the system had chosen this body. The original Kate had unfinished business, and now it was Kate's business too.

She would have to fulfill it.

Ding. Host must help the original body achieve her revenge. The Child of Destiny on this plane is Lu Chengzou, the Duke heir. Host must help him father children.

Kate turned the name over in her mind. Lu Chengzou. Even as she thought it, more memories surfaced. Fragments that explained who he was and why he mattered.

The Lu family was one of the most powerful families in the Xia Dynasty. Their wealth and influence stretched across provinces. The Duke himself was aging, and Lu Chengzou was his heir, the one who was meant to carry the family forward. On the surface, he had everything. A title. Land. Power that most men in this world would spend their entire lives chasing.

But there was a shadow over him that people whispered about when they thought no one important was listening.

When Lu Chengzou had been young, barely of age, a maid in the household had done something unforgivable. The details in Kate's new memories were blurry, the way shameful things often are when they get passed from one mouth to another, but the result was clear. Something had been done to him without his consent, and he had never recovered from it. Not emotionally. Whatever warmth or openness he might have had before that day had been sealed away afterward. He had built walls around himself that no one had ever found a way past.

He hated women. Not his mother. Not his sisters. But every other woman who came near him was regarded with suspicion at best and cold hostility at worst. There were stories of women who had tried to get close to him for their own reasons, women who had wanted the title or the wealth or simply the thrill of the challenge, and none of them had fared well. Some had been thrown out of the estate. Others had simply disappeared from society, their reputations quietly destroyed.

And there was another rumor, one that followed him like a second shadow.

Lu Chengzou was said to be infertile.

No one said it to his face. No one with any sense would. But people talked, and the talk had spread far enough that families with daughters had begun to quietly avoid the match, no matter how powerful the Lu name was. What was the point of marrying into a dynasty with no future? What good was a title if the line ended with him?

The engagement between the Lu family and General Chen's household had been arranged years ago, back when the two families still saw value in the alliance. It had originally been intended for Kate's legitimate sister. She would have been the one to go to the Duke estate. She would have been the one to marry Lu Chengzou.

But her sister had refused.

She had heard the rumors. Infertile. Dangerous. A man who destroyed women who came too close. She had gone to their father and wept and carried on until the general relented and agreed that the engagement could be passed to the other daughter instead.

To Kate.

The illegitimate daughter. The one no one fought to protect. The one whose future had never been anyone's concern.

And so now it was Kate's future that was bound to a cold and dangerous man in a dynasty she had never lived in, in a body that was not originally hers, with a mission that could not be walked away from.

Kate sat with all of this for a long moment.

Then she thought about the system mall. The pregnancy pills she had already purchased. The 1000 points sitting in her account. She thought about what the system had told her. More children, more rewards. One child, 100 points. Twins, 200 points.

She thought about how badly she had always wanted to be a mother.

She straightened her back.

Lu Chengzou could hate women all he liked. He could have walls ten feet thick and a reputation that made entire families flinch.

Kate had a system, a mission, and nothing left to lose.

She was ready.