She died on her thirty-ninth birthday.
There was no funeral. No grieving friends. No family. She died completely alone.
It was a bleak, pathetic end.
It wasn't until the very moment of her death that the realization finally hit her: she had brought this all upon herself.
Looking back, her entire life had been a spectacular failure. And the root cause of it all was simple—she had spent her whole life relying on men.
She had never once thought to rely on herself.
There was a time when she had it all. She was the center of attention, a star everyone orbited around. She lived a life of privilege, with countless people at her beck and call.
But in the end, it was all smoke and mirrors.
She had been born beautiful. For as long as she could remember, men had swarmed around her. She had no skills, no career, and no ambition, yet she managed to marry three times—each husband wealthier than the last.
She believed in the one thing she knew to be true: beauty was a woman's greatest weapon.
She never saw the need to work hard. Why would she? She was gorgeous. She could trade her looks for a man's favor, and through him, get everything she ever wanted.
Validation, luxury, envy, high society, endless wealth.
But back then, she failed to understand one crucial truth: relying on a man is a gamble you eventually lose. Love built solely on a pretty face has an expiration date.
At twenty-nine, a sudden car accident changed everything. Severe burns covered most of her face. Her legs were paralyzed. Her body was failing. The doctors gave her ten years to live.
She became "hideous." She was bedridden, trapped in a broken shell.
It was a cruelty few could endure.
In those dark days, she hoped her husband would stand by her, to hold her hand through the final leg of her journey.
But reality was colder. When she was at her lowest, her husband gave her the wake-up call of a lifetime.
He offered her a lump sum of money to divorce him. He had already moved on to someone new and had zero interest in playing nurse.
He was disgusted by her. Disgusted by her lost beauty, her sickness, her dying body.
She fell into despair. This was the man who had once doted on her, the man she thought truly loved her. But this was his true face.
That was the moment she woke up. Relying on men was the original sin of her failed life.
She may have been vain and greedy, but she still had a shred of pride left. She signed the divorce papers, took the money, and checked herself into a nursing home to wait out the clock.
Her final years were incredibly lonely, but they brought clarity.
She had spent a lifetime scheming to trade beauty for profit, neglecting real connections with family and friends. She had looked down on her poor relatives and "useless" friends.
So, in her final decade, she had to endure her pain in isolation.
No friends. No family.
The entourage of men who used to wait on her hand and foot? Gone. Her three ex-husbands? Not a single visit. It was as if she had ceased to exist. All that past warmth had been nothing but a performance.
She was filled with regret. She hadn't done a single thing right.
Trusting men, leaning on men—that was her fatal mistake.
It was laughable, really. The woman who thought she could conquer the world through men finally realized on her deathbed that men were the least reliable thing in the world.
But it was too late.
The trauma ran so deep she developed a severe phobia of men. She couldn't stand the slightest physical contact with a male; it triggered a physiological revulsion, nausea, and emotional breakdowns. The nursing home eventually had to assign her an all-female medical team.
In those last ten years, she started watching movies. It was the only thing that calmed her mind.
Sometimes, a particularly touching film would move her, making her feel like maybe, just maybe, her life wasn't entirely wasted.
Eventually, she started learning how to make them.
She felt like a total failure, but she wanted to leave something behind—proof that she had existed. She used her money to hire a famous director as a private tutor.
It seemed ridiculous—a dying, paralyzed woman trying to learn a new trade in her final years. But then, she and her teacher discovered something shocking.
She was a natural. She had an extraordinary gift for directing.
She spent a decade studying film with an intensity that most people couldn't muster in thirty years. Her teacher's most frequent comment was, "So much talent... what a waste."
Despite being confined to a wheelchair, with blurry vision, slurred speech, and only the use of her hands, she studied religiously.
Because, for the first time in her wasted life, she had found something she truly loved.
After shooting a few experimental shorts, she finally completed her debut feature film just before she died.
Due to her health, it took years to finish. The film told the story of a woman discarded by high society who shifts her mindset to reclaim her identity.
Film distributors were stunned. The quality was undeniable.
When it was released, it caused a sensation. It was a masterpiece—melancholic, raw, gritty, and isolating.
It exposed the vanity of high-society wives, showing that they were the ones with the sickness of the soul. Compared to the so-called "losers" they mocked, they were the real failures. They just wouldn't realize it until they lost everything.
It was a film dripping with irony.
The director was hailed as a genius.
But when the public learned the director was on her deathbed, the questions started. Why did she wait until the end of her life to make her first work? What had she been doing all those years?
Such a talented director, dying so young. What a tragedy.
Yeah, she wanted to know too. What had she been doing all those years?
Her life felt like one big, sick joke.
She spent a lifetime trying to lean on men and ended up with nothing. She spent a lifetime avoiding hard work, only to discover her true genius when the reaper was already at the door.
If she could do it all over again, she would never rely on a man. She would build her own empire with her own two hands. How different would her life have been?
But it was too late for "what ifs."
Shortly after the film hit theaters, she died.
If there is a next life, she vowed, I will rely on myself. I will never use my looks as capital again. I will never depend on a man.
Never again.
She closed her eyes, accepting the end.
And then, she snapped them open.
She wasn't in a hospital room. There was no smell of antiseptic, no sea of white linen.
She was in a bedroom. An exquisite, feminine bedroom.
There was a mirror in front of her. But the reflection... it wasn't her. It was a young girl.
A stunningly beautiful Western girl.
Confused, she tried to sit up, but a sharp pain pierced her skull.
Memories—foreign, chaotic memories—flooded her mind, instantly overwriting her own reality.
Then, it settled. She absorbed the life of the body's original owner.
What is this?
She stared at the stranger in the mirror, trembling. Not from fear, but from adrenaline.
Did God think her death was too pathetic? Was this a second chance?
Had she really traveled from 2017 back to 2008, landing in Ireland?
She sat on the edge of the bed, sifting through the girl's memories.
The girl's name was Eva Codi. Born in a small Irish country town, currently living in Dublin.
Eva was eighteen. She was vain, petty, a compulsive gambler, and a pathological liar.
She was a hypocrite who used her "dream of being a director" as a prop to make herself seem interesting.
She was a greedy girl who had been stringing along a sugar daddy for the past six months.
The original Eva had managed to claw her way out of the countryside and get accepted into the directing program at the National Film School in Dublin. But she had no intention of actually studying. Instead, she used her beauty to navigate the social scene, hopping between wealthy men.
She eventually latched onto her current patron—her sugar daddy.
She didn't care about cinema. She cared about using her street smarts to squeeze money out of him, which she promptly threw away at the casino tables.
Her grand plan was to get the sugar daddy to marry her so she could live in luxury forever.
These memories felt terrifyingly familiar.
This girl... she was exactly like her former self.
The only difference was that Eva hadn't learned the lesson yet. The lesson she had paid for with a lifetime of misery:
Whether you trade on your looks or rely on men for status, it's all a mirage.
It's a house of cards.
Building a life on beauty is like building a castle on sand.
If you want to succeed, if you want to live a life above the rest, you can't rely on anyone.
You can only rely on yourself.