Summary 1

This page contains an original arc analysis written for readers of the English translation.

Arc One: The Real and Fake Heiress — When Blood Finally Speaks Louder Than Pride

The first arc of I Am the Villain’s Father does not ease you in gently. It grabs you by the collar and asks a very uncomfortable question right away: what happens when a family discovers the truth, and everyone chooses the wrong thing anyway?

Ji Xiu enters this world as a successful, restrained businessman with a seemingly perfect family. A gentle wife. A talented daughter. A handsome son. Then a routine medical check blows the illusion apart. Blood types don’t lie, and suddenly the daughter he raised for fifteen years isn’t his. Somewhere out there is a real daughter who was switched at birth and quietly erased from this life of wealth and care.

In most stories, this is where drama explodes loudly. In this one, the real horror is how quietly everyone chooses convenience.

Ji Xiu’s wife, Song Ruyue, knows exactly what the truth means. Accepting the real daughter means admitting loss. It means admitting that her pride, her social image, and her years of maternal devotion were built on a lie. Worse, it means trading a polished, award-winning child for a girl raised in poverty, someone who might embarrass her in public. So she refuses. Calmly. Firmly. Without shame.

Her son follows her lead, clinging to the “sister” he grew up with and ignoring the one who shares his blood. The fake daughter remains protected, while the real daughter, Zhou Qingqing, continues living a life that grinds her down piece by piece. She works. She obeys. She is beaten, threatened, and treated like a disposable servant in her own home. No one comes for her.

This is the first and most brutal theme of the arc: neglect is not neutral. Doing nothing is a choice, and it destroys people.

Ji Xiu is sent here by the Space-Time Bureau with a simple mission—eliminate the future villain before she collapses the world. Zhou Qingqing, in the original timeline, eventually poisons the Ji family after discovering the truth far too late. From the system’s perspective, she is the problem.

Ji Xiu reads the full story and makes a different judgment.

He sees a girl who was stolen at birth, abandoned by her biological family when she could still be saved, and only “welcomed back” once she was broken enough to be controlled. He sees a family that expects gratitude for crumbs and obedience in exchange for stolen years. And he refuses to play along.

The moment Ji Xiu decides to act, the arc becomes something else entirely. It stops being about identity swaps and starts being about accountability.

When he goes to Zhou Qingqing’s home, the contrast is devastating. The house is small, dirty, suffocating. Zhou Qingqing sleeps behind a curtain. Her younger brother terrorizes her freely, knowing their parents will always side with him. She flinches at raised voices. She apologizes for things that aren’t her fault. She doesn’t even dare believe Ji Xiu at first—not because she’s foolish, but because hope has punished her before.

And when she finally accepts that this man is her father, the emotional impact is quiet but crushing. No screaming. No dramatic collapse. Just tears she doesn’t quite know how to cry properly, because no one has ever caught them before.

Ji Xiu does not promise to “make things better someday.” He removes her immediately. He confronts the Zhou parents without mercy. He does not moralize or lecture. He uses power, because power is the only language they understand. This matters. The novel does not romanticize endurance. It does not suggest that suffering builds character. It makes it very clear that abusers deserve consequences, not sympathy.

The second half of the arc shifts to the Ji household imploding.

Song Ruyue expects compromise. She expects Ji Xiu to fold, as he always has. Instead, he does something radical: he chooses the real daughter completely. Not halfway. Not symbolically. Completely.

He demands that the fake daughter leave. When his wife refuses, he doesn’t negotiate his child’s worth. He files for divorce.

This is one of the most important moments in the arc, because it reframes parenthood entirely. Ji Xiu is not punishing his wife. He is drawing a line. He understands that raising both girls under one roof would only recreate the same cruelty in a more polite form. Favoritism doesn’t disappear just because adults pretend harder.

By divorcing Song Ruyue, Ji Xiu breaks the illusion that love excuses harm. He also shatters the idea that a mother’s feelings are automatically righteous. Song Ruyue is not written as a cartoon villain. She is selfish, prideful, emotionally weak, and deeply human. That makes her refusal to protect her real child more horrifying, not less.

Zhou Qingqing, now renamed Ji Mingzhu, begins to change—not because she is suddenly confident or healed, but because someone finally stands firmly on her side. Ji Xiu doesn’t demand gratitude. He doesn’t force closeness. He gives her safety, education, and time. Slowly, she starts to believe that she is allowed to exist without earning it.

Meanwhile, the “perfect family” left behind rots quietly. The fake daughter loses her halo. The son begins to see manipulation where he once saw innocence. Song Ruyue’s health collapses, not from villainy, but from the realization that her choices have consequences she cannot control.

This arc matters because it sets the moral law of the entire novel.

Villains are not born evil here. They are created by neglect, hypocrisy, and selective love. Parents are not forgiven just because they feel sad later. And justice is not about restoring appearances—it is about protecting the person who was hurt first.

By the end of Arc One, the world is saved not by killing the “villain,” but by loving her properly before she becomes one. That is the story’s thesis, stated clearly and without apology.

And it only works because Ji Xiu refuses to be a gentle man when gentleness would mean cruelty by omission.