Everyone in my family knew I was a Bond-Seeker with ninety-nine lives.

And still, not one of them loved me.

During the holiday, I woke up early making breakfast for my family. My mother threw it all angrily.

“You filthy little curse. Don’t dirty my kitchen.”

When my father was hospitalized after a car accident, I stayed by his bed for three days and three nights.

The moment he woke up, he grabbed the IV bottle beside him and smashed it against my head.

“Was killing your twin sister not enough for you? Now you want me dead too?”

I used my scholarship money to buy my elder brother a brand-new laptop.

He threw it straight off the balcony and watched it shatter on the ground below.

“I’m not using anything bought with a cursed girl’s money. I don’t want it shortening my life.”

On my eighteenth birthday, I handed a love letter to Ethan Whitmore, the boy next door I had secretly loved for years.

He tore it to pieces right in front of me.

“What, were you hoping to trade my feelings for points? Get lost, Natalie. I don’t want you getting me killed.”

In the end, the System ruled that my bond had failed.

Then it took my life back.

I thought no one would grieve for me.

But before it disappeared, the System spent the last of its energy broadcasting every memory I had across every major platform.

“Is that cursed girl really dead?”

My mother stood beside the hospital bed, my death certificate clutched in her hand. For one brief moment, she looked stunned. Then something in her face snapped.

She tore the paper to pieces.

“Impossible. That girl has always been impossible to kill. She fell off a cliff when she was little and still made it back alive. How could she pass out today and just die?”

My father’s expression hardened. He kicked the hospital bed over.

My body, already stiff and ice cold, hit the floor with a heavy thud.

“Enough with the act. Get up.”

He stared down at me with disgust.

“Did you spend your points on some fake-death trick? You’re still so young, and your mind is already this rotten. What, you wanted the whole family terrified for you?”

Connor Hayes, my brother, crouched beside me and checked my breath.

Then he looked at my motionless body.

For one split second, all the color drained from his face. But he quickly forced out a cold laugh.

“She deserved it.”

His voice was sharp with hatred.

“If she hadn’t stolen her twin sister’s life in Mom’s womb and traded it for that System, would our family have ended up like this?

“It’s all her own fault. She killed her own sister. How were we supposed to let someone like her get close to us?”

My father’s face had gone pale too, but he nodded as if Connor’s words had given him something to hold on to.

“Exactly. If she could sacrifice her own sister for that System, of course we couldn’t let her win us over so easily. She brought this on herself.

“She was willing to trade her own family for cheat powers. This is the price she deserved to pay.”

My mother covered her mouth and began to sob softly.

“Maybe this is for the best. They were twins. They came into this world together. It’s only right that they leave together too.”

Her voice trembled, but every word cut into me.

“She kept that System for twenty years. Now it’s time for her to go apologize to her sister.”

My spirit hovered above them, watching as they searched for a reason to make my death feel justified.

I trembled harder and harder.

Only then did I finally understand why every bond had failed.

They had known about the System all along.

They all believed I had traded my twin sister’s life for it. They believed I had gained some kind of stolen power from her death.

That was why they hated me.

That was why they called me cursed.

They were not afraid I would love them. They were afraid that if they loved me back, I would drag them to their deaths too.

But none of it was true.

Before I came into this world, I had been an abandoned orphan.

After the System bound itself to me, I was born from my mother’s womb. I thought I had been given another chance. I thought this time, with a real family and a real name, I might finally be loved.

But more than twenty years had passed, and they had never loved me once.

They dressed me in old, ill-fitting clothes and fed me whatever leftovers had already spoiled. Whenever outsiders asked, they would say, “A child born under a curse can’t be spoiled too much.”

They watched me like I was a thief.

And yet they trained me like a starving dog.

Every so often, they would toss me the smallest scrap of kindness. Just enough warmth to make my Affection Score move, just enough to make me believe they might care after all.

Then, the moment I reached for that hope, they would shove me back into the dirt.

Even then, I had only thought they hated me because my twin sister had died and I had survived.

So I tried harder.

I tried to be good. I tried to be useful. I tried to make them love me.

All I ever got back was deeper disgust.

Even after death, I was still something they hated.

Before I realized it, tears were slipping down my face.

“Host, don’t cry.”

A cold, mechanical voice rang out behind me.

I turned and saw the System that had been with me through countless lonely days and nights. For the first time, it had taken a visible form.

A black cat stood in front of me.

Expressionless, it padded toward me and placed one small paw in my palm.

“You are good,” it said. “Very good. The failed bond was not your fault. Do not doubt yourself.”

“Reading Host’s memories... 1%... 50%...”

As the percentage climbed, the cat’s black fur grew lighter and lighter, as if one touch would make it disappear.

I froze. Then panic surged through me.

“System, what are you doing?

“Stop. Stop reading my memories. You’ll use up all your energy.”

The black cat floated into the air and brushed its face against my cheek.

“Host, they owe you a debt. It is time they paid it back.”

Then its body slowly turned transparent.

“Memory extraction complete.

“Memory Broadcast Protocol activated.”

Before I could tighten my fingers around its tiny paw, the last of its energy burned out.

It dissolved into a wisp of pale smoke and vanished without a trace.

With everything it had left, the System began broadcasting my memories.

The screen in the morgue went black.

When it lit up again, it was playing a memory from the year I turned ten.

Back then, I had been hiding behind a door.

In the small box at the lower left corner of the screen was my mother’s face in real time, every flicker of her reaction livestreamed for everyone to see.

“Mom, happy birthday.”

In the memory, I stepped out carefully from behind the door, holding a metal tin in both hands as I offered it to her with hopeful eyes.

My thoughts from that moment played in the background.

“I spent six months collecting bottles around the neighborhood. I saved every penny myself to buy this hand cream. Mom loves looking pretty. She’ll definitely like it.”

The System’s voice cut in without mercy.

“Host, we do not have time to waste on someone like her. She is not one of your bond targets. Her Affection Score will not help you survive.”

I smiled and argued back softly.

“But she’s my mom. She’s the person I love most.”

The System seemed to roll its eyes.

“Yes, yes. A mother who has never treated you like her daughter. A mother who looks at you with nothing but disgust. A mother who wishes you would just die.”

My mother was sitting at her vanity. She glanced at me coldly.

“What is that junk in your hands?”

I looked at her with nervous anticipation.

“It’s hand cream. I bought it with the money I saved from collecting bottles.”

Before I could finish, she slapped the tin out of my hands.

“You dug through trash cans and brought me garbage as a birthday gift?

“Natalie, you little curse. Are you trying to ruin my birthday? You bring bad luck everywhere you go.”

The carefully wrapped tin burst open on the floor.

A cheap tube of hand cream rolled out, along with a neatly folded test paper marked with a perfect score.

My mother glanced down at them.

Then her face twisted into an expression that said she had expected nothing better from me.

When she looked at me again, there was not a trace of warmth in her eyes.

Only hatred.

Only disgust.

“Go back where you belong. Today is my birthday. I don’t want to see that cursed face of yours.”

Her voice was cold enough to freeze me in place.

“Don’t bring your bad luck near me.”

I stared at the gift I had prepared so carefully, now scattered across the floor.

Tears filled my eyes, but I did not even dare make a sound.

“Host,” the System said in the memory, “I told you not to waste your heart on this vicious woman. She does not have one.”

“No!”

In the livestream box at the lower left corner, my mother suddenly screamed.

“That isn’t me!”

Her face was twisted with panic and rage.

“This has to be AI-generated. How could I ever be that kind of person?”

“Turn it off. Turn it off right now!”

My mother rushed toward the screen in the morgue and clawed at the wall, trying to find the switch.

“Who the hell is behind this sick joke?”

Her voice shook with rage.

“Let me tell you something. I’m not someone you can mess with. I’ll collect evidence and sue every last one of you.”

In the livestream box, her face twisted into something ugly and frantic.

She grabbed the power cord and yanked it out.

But the memory did not stop.

The livestream did not stop either.

The screen kept playing as if it had never needed electricity at all.

In the recording, ten-year-old me stood there in clothes that hung awkwardly off my body. My eyes were red and swollen as I looked up at my mother and asked helplessly,

“Mom, why do you hate me?

“Why do you keep calling me cursed?”

The truth was, when my mother gave birth to me, she had almost died from complications.

We had been twins.

The older baby died.

The younger baby survived.

My mother and I had both made it through the same disaster. Once, she had held me in her arms and said she was grateful I had come into the world.

She said she would love me properly.

She said she would give me my sister’s share of love too.

But at some point, I did not know when, the way she looked at me changed.

The love disappeared from her eyes.

Then came disgust.

She stopped calling me her precious daughter.

She started calling me cursed.

She said I was born vicious.

She said I did not deserve to be her child.

In the livestream box at the lower left corner, comments began flooding in one after another.

[Wait, isn’t that Diane? The parenting influencer? I thought she was supposed to be a great mom. She treated her own daughter like this?]

[God, you really never know what people are like behind closed doors. I’ve followed her for ten years. I never imagined she could be this cruel.]

[Is this staged? Even if it is, who acts like that toward a child? That’s sick.]

My mother panicked.

“No. Please, don’t misunderstand. These videos are all AI-generated.

“I had my reasons.”

Her voice rose higher and higher.

“It was her fault. It was that cursed girl’s fault. She killed her own twin sister and traded her sister’s life for a System. She’s a murderer. She’s bad luck. I did nothing wrong.”

She kept explaining to the livestream.

But watching her, I finally understood something.

She cared far more about her image being destroyed than she cared about what she had done to me.

Maybe the System had been right all along.

My mother had never kept me in her heart.

She had never truly seen me as her daughter.

My father stared at the screen, his brows drawn tight.

“Who the hell is trying to ruin us?”

He grabbed a stool from the morgue and swung it at the screen with all his strength.

The glass shattered.

Only then did the livestream image cut out.

But in the very next second, my father’s phone began ringing nonstop.

Call after call flooded in.

He answered one of them, his face dark.

“What's going on? Every ad screen, TV, and phone in the city is showing your family’s private business right now. It’s everywhere. The buzz isn’t dying down.

“And no one can turn it off.”

His friends kept sending him video after video.

Every electronic device seemed possessed.

Even the radio at a roadside barbecue stand, one without any screen at all, kept repeating the same sentence on a loop.

“You don’t deserve to be my daughter. You are nothing but a cursed girl.”

A vicious glint flashed through my father’s eyes.

“Someone is targeting us.”

My mother stood there in a daze.

“Could it be her?”

Her voice dropped into a frightened whisper.

“Could that cursed girl have come back for revenge after she died? I knew she was bad luck. Even dead, she won’t let us have peace.”

My father shook his head.

“Natalie never dared to do anything to us when she was alive. What could she possibly do after death?”

He pulled out his phone and called his assistant.

“Find out who’s behind this.”

His voice turned cold.

“And check whether Sterling Group has made any moves.”

During all this, my mother glanced down at her own phone.

She had always been an influencer, so her inbox was full every day.

But today, her phone had been completely drowned in messages.

Not one of them praised her.

Every single one was tearing her apart.