I Became a Cannon Fodder in a Tearjerker Novel

[1]

Shen Zhiyi gets bound to a Cannon Fodder System and enters a melodramatic tragedy. In the novel, after the male and female leads go through the stand-in-for-a-beloved-first-love trope, the fake-death trope, the love-and-hate-each-other trope, and the chase-your-wife-to-the-crematorium trope, they finally get their happy ending and become a moving love story.

As for Shen Zhiyi, she has four cannon-fodder secret identities: the female lead's doomed maid, her doomed wet nurse, the physician who is to be buried with her, and the vicious supporting woman's personal maid. Her mission is to keep all four secret identities intact and survive until the ending.

Shen Zhiyi enters the story in a deadly situation:

The female lead drinks the hot soup Shen Zhiyi brings her in her role as a cannon-fodder maid, gets poisoned, and lies in bed, barely breathing. Meanwhile, Shen Zhiyi's other cannon-fodder secret identity, the physician to be buried with her, kneels on the ground trembling and says, "Unless we get the antidote, there's nothing we can do for Miss. There's no way to save her!"

The male lead flies into a rage and sweeps his sleeve. "If you can't save her, every one of you will be buried with her!"

Shen Zhiyi: Do you think you're the leader of some tragic-love club?

Male lead: "Who poisoned her? Drag them out and execute them on the spot!"

The next second, Shen Zhiyi is told her mission has failed, and she has to start over.

Shen Zhiyi: You absolute lunatic!!! Anyone with half a brain knows the one carrying the soup is just a disposable scapegoat!!!

[2]

After Shen Zhiyi starts over again and again, she finally catches the culprit, but he bites through his tongue and kills himself the very next second.

Shen Zhiyi tries everything to stop him, but keeps failing over and over. She's had enough. Pointing at the culprit, she says, "You've got food stuck in your teeth!"

The culprit bares his teeth. "Huh? Where?"

[3]

The culprit is successfully captured and identifies the person behind it all as the vicious supporting woman. The one who paid him to poison the female lead was her personal maid, Shen Zhiyi's fourth secret identity.

The male lead flies into another rage. He orders the vicious supporting woman confined to her home to reflect on her actions and her personal maid executed on the spot!

Shen Zhiyi: What the hell did I do? I'm just a hardworking wage slave! Great, so I do all the work and take all the blame, huh?

Finally, she can't take it anymore. Since she's going to die anyway, she might as well go out in a blaze of glory. As she passes the male lead, she reaches out and smacks him hard across the face, then yells, "Tragic-love freak! Lunatic!"

Reader's note: The female lead has four secret identities, but she can only control one at a time. The other three are basically NPCs while she's controlling one, and will keep repeating their meaningless, mechanical tasks and plotlines every day.

Theme: Be self-reliant, keep striving, and never give up.