Blurb：
Kicked out the moment the real heiress returned? For Leon Shaw and Lucy, it was revenge. For me, the transmigrated cannon-fodder fake heiress, it was freedom. They thought throwing me out with nothing but a phone would break me—little did they know this workhorse thrives on survival. While Lucy whispered plans to keep me as a pet through the villa’s poor soundproofing, I was already budgeting $8,000 into a new life. From a Louis Vuitton-clad impostor to discount-store chic, I turned luxury into cash and embraced my true self. Playing from behind? That’s where I shine.
Content：
The day my parents’ real heiress returned, I was kicked out of the house.
My adoptive parents insisted I experience the hardships their biological daughter had endured for twenty years.
Hah, what hardships? For a real workhorse like me, isn’t this just a matter of…. downgrading my lifestyle?
Playing from behind is what I do best!
At midnight, a heavy rain was pouring down in New York City.
I stood outside the Shaw family villa, with nothing but the clothes on my back and my phone glued to my hand.
Less than two hours after the real heiress came home, my adoptive parents threw me out.
Lucy said that since she suffered for twenty-two years on my behalf, I should get a taste of being destitute too.
The heavy door slammed shut, and the cold rain slapped hard against my face.
As a working-class girl who’d transmigrated into the role of a cannon-fodder fake heiress, I had enjoyed the young mistress lifestyle for less than twenty-four hours before becoming dirt-poor again.
I circled the villa and found a sheltered spot under the first-floor terrace, right below my brother Leon’s room.
“Don’t worry. She’s broke. Once she gets a taste of being nobody, she’ll come crawling back, begging for your attention..” Lucy’s voice carried down through the drainpipe.
Tch. The villa’s soundproofing isn’t all that great.
No wonder Leon, who was all over me this afternoon and seemed like he wanted to play with fire, was sullen and silent tonight.
Turns out he was planning to keep me as a pet. Well, he’s got another think coming.
For Leon, owning only one luxury apartment means he’s too poor to survive. But for a real workhorse like me, having two hundred bucks in my wallet is enough to scrape by for half a month!
And my balance still had $8,000 left from this month’s “allowance.” It might be pocket change to the wealthy, but for ordinary folks like us, that’s enough to live on for years if we budget carefully.
What they see as falling into the dust is, for me, just downgrading my spending.
Twenty minutes later, the Uber I called arrived. The driver got out, held an umbrella for me, and opened the car door—full service. It brought back that young mistress feeling, worth the tearful twenty percent surge price I paid.
I don’t get those drama heroines who choose to walk in the rain until they get a fever. Life’s hard enough without inventing struggles.
Afford a doctor is unnecessary.
The driver dropped me off at the nearest motel. I found a deal for $80 a night.
I took a hot shower, changed into the motel’s pajamas, and sent my clothes to the front desk for dry-cleaning.
Before bed, I chugged two packets of NyQuil I’d ordered for delivery.
When you’re on your own, you have to take good care of yourself. For people like us, our health is our most valuable asset.
If no one else pities you, you have to pity yourself.
I woke up feeling refreshed.
Wearing my freshly cleaned clothes, I went to a nearby discount store. I squeezed into a crowded stall and haggled fiercely, spending twenty dollars on four T-shirts, three pairs of shorts, and a pair of sneakers.
As she bagged my items, the stall owner grumbled, “A nicely dressed girl like you, driving such a hard bargain! And you even get a nice shopping bag.”
Of course. I needed a decent bag to get a good price for my Louis Vuitton set.
It’s a shame these lambskin shoes are ruined, though.
Rich people might have money to burn—the soles wore out on the first day. I can’t even sell them second-hand.
But this phone case studded with rhinestones is worth something.An $800 phone with a $3,000 case.
If I hadn’t checked my recent shopping lists, I wouldn’t have believed money could be spent so recklessly.
And yet the original owner of this body, this cannon-fodder girl, had to go pick up some random guy at a dive bar? Isn’t that just pure brain-dead behavior?
I spent the whole morning busily converting all my valuables into cash.
Now, nothing on me is worth more than twenty bucks. Total discount-store chic. Now this is the comfort zone that matches my spending habits.
With sixty-five hundred dollars newly added to my balance, I walked with swagger.
I struck gold! I deserve to treat myself well.
I ate a bowl of spaghetti in a small alley near the CBD. The meat sauce wasn’t plentiful, but it had a good mix of lean and fat. The garlic bread was crispy, and the sauce was homemade by the owner—so fragrant you could smell it from blocks away. Best of all, it was cheap: five bucks for a large bowl, and you could ask for more pasta.
I hadn’t eaten properly from last night until lunch today, so I slurped it down quickly. At the bottom of the bowl, I scooped up a few crispy bits of fried meat coated in sauce and let out a satisfied burp.
Before I sold my clothes, I didn’t even dare to eat a messy sandwich, afraid I’d get mustard or grease on them and lower the resale value.
Dressed in luxury, I felt anxious. Downgrading my lifestyle, I felt perfectly at ease.
I guess I’m just a simple soul who can’t handle the fancy life.
In the afternoon, I used my digital ID to get a new SIM card and swapped my $800 phone for $200 device.
Ah, the familiar operating system—so satisfying! I don’t have to worry if I drop it anymore. So durable.
I scrolled through my chat history. These past few days, aside from sarcastic remarks and cold mockery, I’d received “offers” from rich second-gens, led by my so-called brother, proposing to keep me.
Screw them! Their money has fried their brains.
How did the original owner end up like this? Her social connections were terrible—she didn’t even have a reliable friend she could even borrow money from.
The most irritating message was from Leon, who spoke like some feudal lord: “Have you learned your lesson yet?”
What is this, the Middle Ages? Is he going to have me thrown in the stocks?
I replied with a “Get lost!” and blocked him.
Learn my lesson, my ass! What a piece of work!
After selling everything I could, I checked out of the motel carrying a large black trash bag.
It held all my belongings: a few changes of clothes and the motel’s complimentary toothbrush and slippers.
Motels inside the center of New York City are too expensive. I planned to move outside.
The reason I hadn’t left the prohibitively expensive New York City yet was that, as a graduating senior, I was about to receive my diploma and degree.
Before I transmigrated, my own education had ended after junior high when my parents sent me off to work in a factory—I was basically one of the kids who fell through the cracks of the education system.
Thinking that I was soon to be a certified certified graduate, ready to join the workforce, I felt a little excited.
The plots in these novels really stretch logic just to torment a side character, don’t they?.
A perfectly able-bodied person with a college degree, deliberately choosing to work at the exact bar where the male lead hangs out?—wasn’t that just asking for trouble?
I went back to campus the day after the graduation ceremony, intentionally avoiding it.
Seeing Lucy’s triumphant, superior face once was enough—I had no intention of subjecting myself to that again.
Actually, we were in the same dorm, though I’d only stayed there a handle of times.
During college, I’d lived in the spacious apartment my family owned nearby—complete with a housekeeper.While Lucy, who was always out working part-time jobs, used to be green with envy.
The classic trope of setting up a contrast purely to stir up hatred—this was one of the reasons Lucy targeted me.
But it wasn’t my fault. It wasn’t even my parents’ fault. They were just migrant workers who came to the city for work. By coincidence, they happened to give birth in the hospital room next to the VIP suite on the same day, and their biological child was swapped by a business rival of the Shaw family.
The original owner’s parents might have been poor, but they did their duty responsibly. They worked hard to raise Lucy until she got into the same university as me before both passing away from illness.
I don’t understand why the Shaw family had to humiliate this elderly couple so cruelly. What did they do wrong?
Is it just that poor people don’t deserve to have children?
The day after the graduation ceremony, I went alone to the advisor’s office to pick up my diploma and degree certificate.
I wasn’t going to let Lucy lead a group of side characters to humiliate me at the graduation ceremony—that plot wasn’t happening.
The graduation photo was just a formality, not a mandatory ID picture. The president moving my tassel wouldn’t earn me an extra dime, so why should I subject myself to humiliation for a bunch of classmates I might never see again?
My advisor looked at me with concern and said, “Clara Shaw, if you need any help, you can tell me.”
“It’s alright, I’m fine. Thank you, Professor.” Aside from that group of lunatics from the Shaw family, most people in this world seemed perfectly normal.. I was doing okay.
Compared to the heiress who was set to inherit a fortune, my fall from grace was dramatic.But compared to ninety percent of new graduates across the country who don’t get allowances from home and are waiting for their first paycheck, my pockets were still relatively full.
“Please save your help for those who need it more. I can manage on my own!”
That afternoon, I was proven wrong.
Having originally expected to walk into a family business, I’d missed the main recruitment seasons. Now, the job fair was sparse, with only a handful of companies left.
The few booths that remained had stacks of resumes thicker than the toilet paper in a public restroom.
As the crowd thinned out a bit, I saw one of the HR managers grab a stack of resumes and toss them into a nearby trash can.
A younger colleague next to him asked in surprise, “Manager, you’ve already gone through these? Were they not qualified?”
The manager smoothed his comb-over, once again strategically repositioned from the sides to the top, and said mysteriously, “Luck is also part of one’s capabilities.”
Screw that! I marched back: “Give me back my resume! I paid four dollars for double-sided printing.”
Mr. Comb-over looked startled. Seeing how furious I was and that I looked ready to throw down, he immediately started digging through the trash.
“Miss, miss, your luck is definitely as good as your looks. Here’s your resume, not a speck of dirt. We’re all just trying to make a living here, no hard feelings.”
I snorted coldly: “No wonder you made manager—So adaptable!” I whipped my head around, smacking him with my ponytail, and walked away.
If this place doesn’t want me, there are plenty others that will!
If nowhere wants me, I’ll work for myself!
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