Mo Chen gasped, her lungs screaming for air that wasn't filled with smoke and fire. She sat bolt upright in bed, her heart hammering against her ribs.
She was in her bedroom. Her old bedroom, in the family penthouse in Shanghai. The morning sun streamed through the windows. A familiar, hideously expensive vase she'd broken when she was sixteen sat intact on her dresser.
What… how…?
Her phone buzzed on the nightstand. She grabbed it with trembling hands. The date glared back at her: October 14th.
The wedding was on October 28th.
She had been reborn two weeks into the past.
A hysterical laugh bubbled in her throat, followed by a wave of nauseating grief. Her parents. Tian. Silas. All gone. Murdered. The memory of the explosion, of Julian's cold eyes, was seared into her soul.
As the panic threatened to overwhelm her, a voice, sharp and mechanical, echoed directly in her mind.
[Target soul wavelength confirmed. Vengeance desire threshold exceeded. Activating Money Burning System.]
A translucent, crimson screen materialized before her eyes, its aesthetic harsh and aggressive compared to the serene blue of the system her mother had once described.
System: Money Burning System (Initializing…)
Host: Mo Chen
Current Personal Funds: $10,000,000 USD
System Funds (Daily Burning Quota): $1,000,000 USD
Burning Modality: Physical Assets Only.
Conversion Rate: 0.5% (System Funds to Personal Wealth)
Mandate: BURN. Consume physical wealth to generate power. Accumulate capital for vengeance.
Mo Chen stared, her mind reeling. A system. Like her mother's, but different. Crueler. It didn't ask her to waste money; it demanded she burn it. Destroy it. And the payout was a pittance. This was a system of pure, unadulterated destruction.
A notification popped up.
[Initial Daily Task: Burn $1,000,000 USD in physical assets within 24 hours. Failure penalty: System detachment and soul reversion.]
Soul reversion. Death. Again.
The grief and shock crystallized into a cold, sharp point of fury. Julian Thorne had thought he could erase her. He had no idea who he was dealing with. She was not just Ye Xia and Mo's daughter. She was their legacy. And she had just been given a second chance, armed with a weapon of absolute financial violence.
She looked at her reflection in the mirror. The Golden Heiress was gone. In her place was a woman with eyes of cold fire. She had two weeks to burn a path to her revenge.
"Okay, Julian," she whispered, her voice like shattered glass. "Let's play with fire."