Chapter 1: I’ll Make You Feel Good Right Away
Inside a coastal sea-view villa on the south shore, the orange living room lights cast an ambiguous glow.
A tall, handsome man sat on an elegantly styled sofa, dark undercurrents swirling in his deep obsidian eyes.
Long, slender fingers gripped the chin of the youth straddling his lap, fingertips lightly caressing the smooth expanse of his neck.
Soaked nearly to the skin, Nan Zhou let out a soft laugh, his scorching breath hitting the bridge of the man’s nose alongside a wave of sweet pheromones.
“Are you sure?”
“Why are you wasting so much breath? Are you impotent or—”
A thumb pressed against the moist peak of his lips. “Answer me.”
A low, rumbling voice. An overtly possessive gesture. An imposing aura laced with dominant control, blending into a scent that drove people mad with intoxication.
Nan Zhou parted his thin lips slightly, enunciating each word: “I’m sure, babe.”
The next second, the man’s arms tightened.
Nan Zhou’s eyes snapped wide.
This fucking dog of a man actually dared to bite him!
He instinctively spat out a curse, “Your mother’s—!”
When he woke up again, all Nan Zhou felt was a full-body ache and limp exhaustion.
Struggling to roll over and sit up in bed, he still found the whole situation utterly surreal.
He had actually transmigrated!
Just two days ago, while vacationing and swimming at the beach, an ocean wave had caught him and dragged him under.
By the time he came to, he was lying on the sand, burning up from head to toe, his head swimming in a haze.
Acting purely on instinct back then, he had dragged himself to the nearest seaside villa in sight and pressed the front doorbell. After an agonizingly long, boring wait, the owner finally opened the door.
Nan Zhou figured it was mostly because the melody he rang on the doorbell was catchy enough to get the door unlocked.
He had always been confident in the melodies he composed.
What followed was the classic cliché script out of a novel.
A gorgeous guy whose face and presence checked every single one of his aesthetic boxes, plus an isolated house with two men all alone…
Except he never imagined the guy would bite him!
That single bite nearly sent Nan Zhou straight to the afterlife to meet his ancestors.
At the same time, strange memories and foreign concepts had flooded his dazed mind—he had transmigrated.
He had crossed into an ABO world, into the body of someone who shared his exact name!
Swinging his legs off the bed, he rubbed his sore, slender waist, took stock of his surroundings, and headed into the bathroom to freshen up.
A moment later, he pushed open the bedroom door.
The villa was dead silent. Not a soul in sight.
The best kind of one-night stand was parting ways cleanly the morning after, never crossing paths again.
Well, fine, so it wasn’t one night; it was two…
Doesn’t matter.
Nan Zhou found his shoes by the entryway and slipped them on. Stepping outside, a gust of cold wind hit him, making him freeze in his tracks. He turned around, snagged an oversized black overcoat off the coat rack that clearly didn’t belong to him, grabbed his fully charged phone, powered it on, and sauntered off in style.
The second the phone booted up, he received a call from this body’s manager, demanding to know where on earth he was.
“I don’t know either,” Nan Zhou said, glancing around. “Tell you what, I’ll drop you a pin. Come pick me up.”
Half an hour later.
Nan Zhou climbed into his manager Hao Jia’s car.
“How did you end up all the way out here?! You scared the crap out of me—I thought you couldn’t take the pressure and went off to kill yourself! Seriously, that bastard Lu Zhou is utterly revolting. Knowing damn well you had a crush on him, he milked you dry to push that couple-pairing during those two years in the temporary idol group! How many fans did he leach off you, and how much clout did he rake in?!”
“And look at him now! The moment he hit it big and went solo, not only did he turn around and announce his relationship, but he also slapped a massive accusation on your head on his way out!”
“‘What do you mean you’re not an Omega? Just because he can’t smell your pheromones doesn’t mean you aren’t one! Maybe his own damn dog nose is defective! Even I can smell it right now, and I’m a Beta—'”
Mid-sentence, Hao Jia whipped his head around, terror written all over his face. “Wait, what the hell is that smell on you?!”
Baffled, Nan Zhou looked down and sniffed himself. “What smell?”
“You can’t smell it yourself?! Fuck!” Hao Jia was on the verge of a mental breakdown. “That’s an Alpha’s scent!”
He had been too busy badmouthing Lu Zhou to notice earlier, but now Hao Jia finally registered it—a heavy, suffocating Alpha pheromone rolling off Nan Zhou, reeking of raw possessiveness.
It was so pungent and domineering that even as a Beta, he felt an instinctive jolt of fear.
“Oh,” Nan Zhou said casually. “I slept with an Alpha.”
Hao Jia’s brain short-circuited. His hands jerked on the steering wheel, nearly sending the car up onto the curb.
Slept. With. An. Alpha?!
Slapping on the hazard lights, he pulled over to the side of the road and asked with deadly seriousness, “Did you go through a heat?”
Besides being his manager, Hao Jia was also Nan Zhou’s best friend from high school, so he knew all about his condition.
A few years ago, Nan Zhou had been in a catastrophic car crash that severely damaged his scent gland. Not only did he lose his distinct Omega scent, but even his heat cycles had been completely disrupted.
“Probably,” Nan Zhou replied, recalling his state two days ago, and gave a nod.
The fragments of memory he inherited from the original host were incomplete, leaving him with only a vague grasp of the host’s background and this world’s mechanics.
Hao Jia couldn’t help asking, “Was it temporary… or permanent?”
“Huh?”
“Never mind, let me put it differently. Did you use protection?”
“…No impression.” Nan Zhou tried to think back.
He had been in a daze for the past two days.
All his senses had shut down, leaving pure instinct in the driver’s seat.
In his memory, the air had been thick with a warm, dry, sweet scent—so comforting that he couldn’t help losing himself in it.
The man’s embrace had been warm, his voice dripping with sex appeal.
Especially those dark, deep eyes, which looked even more breathtaking when glistening with sweat.
His low, raspy chuckle and the gentle, doting tone he used when speaking sounded like commands that every living thing in the world would obey without question.
‘Do you like it?’
‘Say it.’
Nan Zhou’s throat felt dry. He cleared it self-consciously. “It shouldn’t be that big of a deal, right?”
“What do you mean ‘not that big of a deal’?!” Hao Jia practically leapt out of his seat. “You were marked during your heat! Do you know what that means? It means you could very likely…”
With every word, the panic on Hao Jia’s face grew more intense. As the sentence dropped off, his gaze snapped straight toward Nan Zhou’s lower abdomen.
…Likely what?
Nan Zhou followed his gaze down to his own stomach. Don’t tell me…
The implication hit him like a freight train, causing his brain to temporarily blue-screen.
“No way, we have to get you to the hospital for an exam right now.” Hao Jia slammed the car back into gear. “We need to plan ahead. If it comes down to it, we’ll just forfeit that dating show even if we have to pay the astronomical penalty. Your health comes first!”
“Wait a second—the guy who marked you, who was it?”
The guy who marked him?
Just an SSR draw handed to him by fate. How the hell was he supposed to know?
Seeing Nan Zhou’s silence, Hao Jia had a sinking realization. He roared, “Fuck! You got taken advantage of by some random, wild Alpha out on the street?!”
Nan Zhou didn’t like the sound of that.
He corrected him, “Let’s be accurate here. I’m the one who took advantage of him.”
“Cut the crap!” Hao Jia choked, nearly passing out from sheer exasperation.
“Don’t panic yet,” Nan Zhou murmured, completely unfazed.
Hao Jia felt a tiny bit reassured by his composure. He was just about to open his mouth to offer some mutual encouragement when Nan Zhou leisurely added:
“You’ll have plenty of time to panic later.”
Hao Jia: “…”
The Washed-Up Star Went Unfiltered and Became a Sensation on a Dating Reality Show
