I Became the Villainess in My Daughter’s Fairy Tale

For Irene, a exhausted single mother fighting to keep her daughter alive, collapsing beside a hospital bed should have been just another breaking point. Instead, she wakes up trapped inside her little girl's favorite fairy tale—crowned as the Wicked Queen, the villain destined to torment the Princess, lose the King's favor, and die in public disgrace. The rules are absolute: play the part, survive the plot, and she might find a way home. But the twist is cruel and undeniable—the Princess looks exactly like the daughter she left behind in the real world. Desperate to return to reality, Irene clings to the story's script, yet every forced act of cruelty feels like a betrayal of the child she loves, even if this one is made of ink and paper. So she begins a dangerous double life: snarling vicious lines to appease the story's magic, while secretly rewriting every fatal beat—saving a condemned servant, exposing a neighboring kingdom's conspiracy, and inadvertently catching the suspicious King's attention, who sees through her performance and becomes drawn to the woman beneath the mask. But nothing in this kingdom is as the bedtime tale promised; the "pure" first love is a political viper, and the Princess is no passive victim but the ultimate pawn in a brutal war for the throne. Just as Irene deciphers the spell that could send her home, her real daughter's heart monitor flatlines across the void, forcing her to choose: abandon the fictional child who has come to feel like her own, or stay and finish a story that was always written to destroy women like her. In the end, Irene understands that the so-called "evil stepmother" was never a villain—she was a sacrifice crafted by those who wrote the tale. And a mother who has rewritten her own fate in one world will not let another daughter die in either.