I Pretended to Be Dead and They All Panicked Chapter 01

I Pretended to Be Dead and They All Panicked Chapter 01

Because I had been born with almost no energy, I had spent my entire childhood treating myself like a corpse.

While other kids were learning how to talk and walk, I was learning how to keep my body temperature low and slow my heart rate to thirty beats per minute.

When I was in kindergarten, we played hide-and-seek. One of my classmates thought it would be funny to lock me inside a cabinet.

For me, living and dying were both perfectly acceptable options.

So I held my breath and waited to die.

I even arranged myself in the exact position you would expect to see in a morgue.

When he finally opened the cabinet and found me lying there like a dead body, he burst into tears and wet himself in terror.

“I killed her!”

Years later, I was walking down the street when a human trafficker noticed me.

The moment he covered my mouth, I slipped into a near-death state. I couldn’t even be bothered to focus my eyes.

The man picked me up and ran all the way to the emergency room. By the time he got there, he’d practically run three pairs of shoes into the ground.

He collapsed at the ER doors and screamed,

“None of this was my fault! She was already dead!”

When I turned eighteen, my biological parents finally came to take me home.

They were the richest family in the country.

I couldn’t be bothered to move at first. But then I heard that if I went home with my biological parents, I’d have people to turn me over in bed whenever I got tired.

That was enough to convince me.

Reluctantly, I nodded.

Unfortunately, the moment I stepped through the front door, the adopted daughter, Evangeline Sinclair, suddenly slipped.

The bowl of soup in her hands flew straight toward my face.

She had clearly intended to embarrass me.

Dodging would have required too much effort, especially on my lower back.

So I simply let her dump the entire bowl over my head.

Then I went stiff and collapsed onto the floor.

The entire room fell silent.

My older brother, Julian Sinclair, rushed over and checked for my breathing.

His face went deathly pale before he dropped to his knees.

“She’s… she’s not breathing!”

……

“What are you waiting for? Call the family doctor!”

Mom screamed so loudly that she nearly ran out of breath herself.

She stumbled over to me, scooped me into her arms, and burst into hysterical sobs.

“Cordelia, my poor baby. You just came home. You haven’t even had the chance to enjoy a single day with us. Please, please don’t let anything happen to you!”

Her voice was painfully loud.

I couldn’t help admiring her stamina.

People like me, with naturally low energy, considered saying one extra word exhausting.

Screaming at the top of our lungs with that much emotion?

Absolutely unimaginable.

Evangeline finally snapped out of her shock.

She picked up the empty bowl from the floor and stammered,

“I didn’t know this would happen. I just thought Cordelia might be hungry, so I wanted her to have some soup first…”

She didn’t even finish before Julian arrived with the family doctor and shoved her aside.

“Hurry! Check my sister!”

I’d been pretending to be dead for more than ten years.

By now, I’d perfected the art.

But when the family doctor frantically lifted my eyelids and saw that my pupils had completely lost focus, his voice started shaking.

“Miss Cordelia is in critical condition. We need to get her to the hospital immediately!”

The moment those words came out, the entire family erupted again.

I considered opening my eyes and telling them I was fine.

Then I thought about how much explaining that would require.

Never mind.

I’d just keep pretending to be dead.

Julian carried me into the car.

After being bounced and jostled around the entire ride, I finally arrived at the hospital.

A doctor rushed over with a portable monitor and said they needed to run an ECG first.

He stared at the slowly moving waveform on the screen, his brows knitting together.

“The patient’s heart rate is only thirty beats per minute. This is extremely dangerous.”

Actually, I’d learned how to keep my heart rate at thirty beats per minute when I was five.

Breathing itself had always felt exhausting to me.

After all these years, though, I suddenly wanted to see if I could slow my heart down even further.

So I gradually slowed my breathing.

“Beep…”

The waveform on the monitor grew flatter and flatter, almost turning into a straight line.

Julian let out a shrill cry.

“Cordelia is actually dying!”

The doctor panicked.

He grabbed the defibrillator and started moving toward my chest.

I had no choice.

I finally opened my eyes.

“Don’t. That hurts.”

As my heart rate gradually returned to normal, the doctor let out a long breath of relief.

He wiped the sweat from his forehead and warned my parents,

“Her heart rate is naturally much slower than normal. You absolutely cannot put her through severe emotional stress.”

“Of course. We’ll take good care of her.”

Mom pulled me tightly against her chest, looking utterly heartbroken.

Dad fussed over me from the other side, treating me like the most precious thing in the world.

Julian was even beating his own thigh in regret.

“Look at me. Cordelia just came home, and she hasn’t eaten anything all day. I should have told the butler to prepare a meal for her right away.”

Everyone’s attention was focused entirely on me.

Evangeline had been pushed into a corner and was practically invisible.

A flash of resentment crossed her eyes.

Then she quickly put on a pitiful expression.

“I’m sorry, Cordelia. I really didn’t mean for this to happen. I’m actually so jealous of you. You just got here, and Mom and Dad already love you so much. It’s not like that for me. I’ve always felt like an outsider in this family.”

Normally, I should have said something to comfort her.

But the moment I thought about having to come up with the right words, I felt exhausted.

So I simply closed my eyes and lay back down.

As I slipped back into standby mode, my heart rate began dropping again.

Mom immediately turned and glared at Evangeline.

“The doctor just said Cordelia can’t handle stress. Why are you dumping all your family drama on her? Are you trying to make her feel worse?”

Evangeline’s face turned bright red.

She was left speechless, and in the end, all she could do was force a smile that looked even worse than crying.

When we finally returned home, she watched as I continued to be treated like the center of the universe.

Jealousy nearly drove her insane.

When no one was looking in the kitchen, Evangeline secretly dumped a lethal amount of salt into my bowl of soup.

As she poured, she muttered under her breath,

“Let’s see you survive this.”

The Sinclair family cared deeply about proper table manners.

If I got a mouthful of salt and immediately spit it all over the table, Mom and Dad would surely think I was crude and uncivilized.

They might even start to hate me.

Just imagining the scene made Evangeline practically giddy with anticipation.

I picked up the bowl.

Without changing my expression, I took a sip.

I paused for half a second.

Then I swallowed without even wrinkling my brow.