I Became the Backup's Mother in the School Beauty's Story

[Complete] [Ending hint: I am your future boss, not your future wife.]

Yan Mu was thirty-seven and had a handsome, refined husband who, the moment he came home, would hole up in the bathroom and refuse to come out.

For a while, she suspected he was flirting with young women over chat. In an hour, he could probably get through six or seven of them. In short, the bathroom was his paradise.

If her husband's company hadn't been running smoothly and bringing her a nice share of the profits every year, she would have divorced him long ago.

Their son wasn't any better. Every day, he trailed after the campus belle, acting as her backup option year after year, tirelessly and without complaint. But once he got home, the little brat put on a different face and came up with new ways to ask her for money.

Then Yan Mu had a dream.

In the dream, her dear son was a textbook cannon-fodder supporting character in a standard male-oriented novel. Sure enough, the campus belle rejected his advances and remained devoted to the male lead while he was still struggling financially. Her son spent years throwing himself at her, yet never gave up on his lowly, hopeless love.

Her husband wasn't any better. He was the typical father of a supporting character. His company was little more than a front, and the future male lead would crush it with a single blow.

The ending for her, the poor mother, was even worse. Her son drove her into a heart attack, and she died on the spot.

Wonderful.

Yan Mu now faced two choices: save the father and son and get their lives back on track, or take the simpler, more direct route and leave the unfortunate supporting character and his father behind.

After much thought, considering the joy of becoming a mother after carrying a child for ten months, and remembering how her husband had spent years catering to her preferences...

Of course she chose the latter.

Staying in that house for another half hour would be an insult to the warning in her dream.

-

Shen Guangyao realized that everything in his family had changed.

His beautiful, gentle wife no longer knocked on the bathroom door.

She had left.

He thought he could blame it all on their unfilial son.

The truth was the exact opposite. She seemed more disappointed in him, while their dim-witted son had seen her get into another man's car.

He didn't believe it.

Shen Guangyao irritably stubbed out his cigarette in the bathroom and casually tossed his son the black card he'd always dreamed of having.

The veins on his hand stood out. He had to admit he was so jealous he was going mad, to the point of hiring that idiot to spy for him...

He figured the pretty boy outside must have a death wish.

If she came to her senses, he would wait for her to come back.

[Extra scene:]

Shen Jue kept going further down the road of pursuing the campus belle, but like a blind man walking at night, he never managed to find the light...

Until one day, the campus belle actually came to him of her own accord.

She even called him "big brother" in a soft, tender voice.

He really thought his efforts had moved heaven and earth. But was the campus belle's true goal actually to have him become her real brother!?

I want to be your lover, but you want to make me your stepbrother?

His parents had barely been apart for any time at all, and now the campus belle wanted her mother to marry his father?

He wanted to spend every day with the campus belle, but he never meant to break up his own parents!

How could anything in this world be so outrageous!

[Content warning: Reconciliation-chasing arcs for both the wife and the mother are unavoidable. Please read with caution if you dislike these tropes.]

[A silly comedy with no regard for logic. Don't ask. It's a dramatic urban romance about middle-aged feelings, and a cautionary tale about men who spend too much time in the bathroom.]

[Synopsis archived in October 2022 and lightly revised on April 17, 2023.]

Here's the preview for A Supporting Female Character Who Shares the Male Lead's Years of Poverty~

We spent three years together in Ohio, living quiet, uneventful days while treating each other with respect. During his lowest, most downtrodden days, we looked after and supported each other. Or, more accurately, most of the time it was me, a poor college student, taking care of him and his children.

I'd heard him talk countless times about how the Cheng family had been ungrateful and opportunistic toward him. I knew all about how the wicked Miss Cheng had toyed with his feelings, only to choose another marriage alliance.

He made it.

Ohio couldn't hold him back. After securing a huge amount of new financing, he cleared his name and decided to take the children back to China. On the night before we left, his dark eyes were especially deep and tender as he vowed, "I'll give you the most luxurious wedding imaginable."

My face had been full of smiles, trusting and relying on him.

But then a terrible dream surfaced in my mind. This man, who kept insisting he loved me so deeply, would marry the vain eldest Miss Cheng less than half a month after returning to China.

They had the cliched script of rekindled love, marriage first and love later, and children bringing them together.

As for me, I was just an idiot like Wang Baochuan, accompanying him around low-end wholesale stores in America to buy piles of cheap goods and save him money, converting every dollar into yuan in my head and being too reluctant to spend it.

-

I could accept him choosing any woman once he became rich. I just never thought he'd debase himself again by trying to please Cheng Shuangyi.

How could he do that?

He wasn't just betraying me. He was betraying those poor, filthy years of his life, and the last shred of decency left in him as a man.

That night, I packed up the few belongings he had. I bundled up every piece of furniture in the house that bore any trace of him and threw it all away. I left him with just one sentence: "Get out, and go as far away as you can."

[Extra scene]

After returning to China, Shen Qi spent his nights in revelry and luxury. The people who had once looked down on him and tossed him aside like trash suddenly returned to his world, begging for his forgiveness.

He thought he was the winner.

But his heart felt hollow, and that foolish woman's image often lingered in his mind.

He had never thought he loved her that much. He believed their relationship had been nothing but a means to an end. Yet he could no longer find a single sincere heart among anyone else.

At last, he heard that she was coming back to China. He frantically ordered his two children to dress up, then went with them to the airport to welcome the woman whose eyes had once been filled with him...

But she walked past him coldly.

As though their three years together had never existed.

-

There are also a few older works on my author page, including The Wealthy Family's Mom Takes Her Kids on Wild Adventures, The Wealthy Heiress Teams Up with Her Mother-in-Law, and I Became the Darkened Male Lead's Children's Mom.

Theme: Achieving unity between personal and social value.