Chapter 1: Reincarnation

Deep within the Bai family estate, the covered corridors wound back and forth.

A middle-aged man in a brocade robe stood beneath the eaves, absently rubbing the jade thumb ring on his finger.

Before him, an old woman bent with age stood hunched over, clutching at the corners of her clothes with both hands, her breathing quick and uneven.

“Well?”

The man kept his voice very low.

The old woman lowered her head even further, a muffled whimper catching in her throat. She did not dare meet his eyes. Her withered fingers twisted together until her knuckles turned white.

“Speak!”

The man’s voice suddenly rose, startling the birds beneath the eaves into flight.

The old woman trembled from head to toe, her knees nearly giving way. “Master! Madam... Madam has given birth. It is a girl.”

She paused, her voice growing weaker and weaker. “Madam... her breath is thin as a thread. I fear... I fear she may not last the day...”

Before she had even finished speaking, the man’s face changed drastically.

He shoved the old woman aside and strode toward the side chamber.

His boots struck the bluestone paving, sending chaotic echoes through the silent courtyard.

“Madam!”

The door curtain was ripped aside with brutal force, and the heavy stench of blood rushed straight at him. He charged to the bedside and saw his wife’s face, pale as paper.

Her disheveled hair clung to her sweat-damp temples. Her eye sockets were sunken, and her lips had turned an ashen gray.

“Master...”

Hearing his voice, the beautiful woman struggled to raise her eyelids a fraction. Her clouded pupils slowly found focus, reflecting her husband’s anxious face.

Her lips moved as she fought to say something.

The man clasped her icy hand tightly.

“Do not speak. Rest well.” His voice trembled.

But the woman shook her head. Strength appeared from nowhere, and she actually managed to lift her neck slightly. Her gaze passed over her husband’s shoulder and turned toward the corner of the room, where the faint whimper of an infant drifted over, thin as a mosquito’s hum.

“My daughter...”

Her voice was terribly hoarse, every word sounding as though it had been scraped across sandpaper.

The woman’s gaze was already beginning to scatter, yet she stubbornly tightened her grip on her husband’s hand.

Tears slipped from the corners of her eyes and disappeared into her hair.

“I beg you... take good care of her...”

The last word was as light as a sigh.

Her hand suddenly slackened and fell limply over the edge of the bed.

Her eyes were still half-open, but the light within them had completely faded, leaving them hollow as they stared up at the bed canopy.

The man froze where he stood.

He remained bent over in that posture, utterly motionless.

The last trace of warmth from his wife’s fingers still lingered in his palm, but it was fading fast, turning cold and stiff. A loud buzzing filled his ears, and he could hear nothing clearly.

In the corner, the baby’s crying came in broken, intermittent bursts.

The midwife stood in the shadows with the swaddled infant in her arms, helpless and at a loss. She looked at the woman on the bed, already gone, then at the master standing there in a daze. Her mouth parted, but in the end, she did not dare make a sound.

Time itself seemed to have stopped.

No one knew how long passed before the man slowly straightened.

He did not turn around. He did not look at the child. He did not even look at his wife again. He merely stood with his back to the corner, his voice as dry as gravel in a dead well.

“Take her away.”

The midwife hesitated. “Master, the young miss—”

“Take her away.”

The man repeated himself, his tone utterly flat.

“I do not want to see this child.” He closed his eyes, his Adam’s apple bobbing. “She is not worthy of bearing the Bai name.”

The midwife fell silent. She lowered her head and looked at the frail baby girl in her arms, a flicker of pity crossing her aged face. In the end, she silently withdrew from the room.

The curtain fell, cutting off the inside from the outside.

Only then did the man turn around.

He walked to the bedside, then slowly and stiffly sat down. Reaching out, he gently closed his wife’s unshut eyes.

The moment his fingertips touched her cold eyelids, his whole body shuddered violently. And with the woman’s death, even his tenderness began to warp into something faintly obsessive.

Outside the window, the sky grew dark as dusk swallowed the last strand of light.

---

Seven years slipped by in the blink of an eye.

Outside the Bai family’s side gate, the open space paved with bluestone was packed with people. Men and women in coarse cloth stood in a long line, most of them sallow-faced, their eyes filled with a mixture of hope and fear. The air smelled of sweat and dust.

In the middle of the line stood a small, thin figure in silence.

Qingyun wore a plain dress so faded from washing that it had nearly turned white. The fabric was rough, and the cuffs were frayed.

Her head was slightly lowered, exposing part of her slender neck.

The morning light slanted across her face, revealing a few pale brown freckles on her cheeks.

“Haa...”

She covered her mouth and let out a small yawn, her eyes misting over.

She had not slept well last night. Her parents had whispered in the next room for half the night, and bits and pieces of their conversation had drifted into her ears—

“The Bai family is hiring. At least they will give her something to eat.”

“A girl is nothing but a burden if we keep her. Better to send her in. That way, at least our son can survive.”

“I heard they are paying more than a dozen strings of cash...”

Qingyun listened without much feeling.

Truthfully, she did not resent being sold all that much. This world was far too different from the one in her memories. It was agrarian, rigidly hierarchical, and people starving to death by the roadside was nothing unusual.

If she could enter a great household like the Bai family and work there, then at least she would not have to worry about food and clothing.

She raised a hand and rubbed her stinging eyes.

These hands were very small, the skin rough, with thin calluses on the knuckles left behind by years of labor. Qingyun stared at the crossing lines in her palm, feeling slightly dazed.

She had come to this world fourteen years ago.

To be precise, this body had lived for fourteen years.

As for the memories that belonged to “her”—or rather, had once belonged to “him”—they had suddenly awakened on an ordinary morning when she was ten, without the slightest warning.

It was like a dust-sealed door being smashed open, and a flood of images came surging in.

In her previous life, she had been a man in his early thirties, writing code at an internet company.

The last image in those memories was the blinding glare of headlights as he crossed the street after working overtime until the middle of the night, followed by the terrifying weightlessness of his body being hurled away.

When he opened his eyes again, he had become a swaddled infant.

During those first few years, she had lived in a muddled daze. When her memories awakened at the age of ten, she sat by the river in silence for an entire afternoon.

She looked at that unfamiliar little face reflected in the water—light brows, round black eyes, a low nose bridge, lips with little color in them. She was not ugly, but she certainly was not stunning either. At best, she was merely delicate and pleasant-looking.

A girl.

That realization took her a long time to digest.

It was not that she resisted it. It was more a kind of bewildered detachment.

As though she were watching someone else’s life from the sidelines, only happening to borrow this body.

Gender, appearance, birth... all of those things seemed to become irrelevant in this utterly unfamiliar world.

Surviving was the only real question.

“Martial training...”

Qingyun moved her lips soundlessly.

After her memories returned, she had secretly asked around to see whether this world possessed any kind of supernatural power.

Was that not how novels always went? If someone transmigrated, surely some heaven-sent advantage ought to come with it.

This seemed to be a world of martial practice tinged with a hint of the fantastical, and overall it was much like the ancient ages she had known from her previous life.

There were dynasties, officials, landlords, and tenant farmers. Beyond them, there were also martial artists who could soar through the skies, tunnel through the earth, and overturn mountains and seas.

She had once wanted to practice martial arts herself. But martial training was not something one could achieve simply by throwing a few punches. With no path open to her, that impractical fantasy had eventually been ground flat by reality.

“Qingyun!”

A shout suddenly came from the front.

An old man in a short gray cloth jacket sat behind a table, a registry in his hand, its wrinkled pages spread across the wooden surface.

He lifted his head and swept his gaze across the line, then called out again, “Qingyun! Are you here or not?”

Qingyun snapped back to herself and hurried out of the line.

“I’m here.”

She walked to the table and stood there with lowered hands.

The old man looked her over a few times. His gaze lingered on the faded front of her clothes, then flicked to her thin arms.

“How old are you?”

“Fourteen.”

“Can you read?”

“I know a few characters,” Qingyun replied softly. It was the truth. Most of what she had known in her previous life was useless here, but she still remembered the common characters.