Warm water closed over Qiu Qi’s head. Her vision blurred amid shattered glints of light, and a muffled hum reverberated through her skull. As the oxygen was torn from her body, overwhelming terror rose within her. In the bone-chilling grip of suffocation, her body sank endlessly downward.
No way—was her bathtub really that deep? She was a young woman in the prime of her life. Fine, if nobody put a bouquet beside her coffin when she died, she could accept that, but did she really have to die this embarrassingly?
#Twenty-Two-Year-Old Qiu Slips and Drowns in the Bathtub While Bathing at Home#
Just imagining that suffocating headline made Qiu want to chug three bottles of soda to de-stress.
A clear, lovely voice reached her ears, gentle in timbre yet icy in tone.
“My lady, is the water too cold? You don’t look well.”
It was like someone lightly tapping a crisp silver bell beside her ear. Then a force like a surging tide poured into Qiu’s heart, savage and violent, utterly heedless of what she could withstand.
The pressure in her chest quickly replaced the agony of drowning, wrenching Qiu’s dazed consciousness out of the darkness.
“Mmph, mmph—ha!”
Qiu burst through the surface. Both hands instinctively flailed in search of the rim of the bathtub she remembered, but her fingers met cool, soft flesh.
A person?
“My lady.”
The same voice sounded again. This time, Qiu was certain she hadn’t heard wrong.
She wiped the water from her face and opened her stinging eyes, searching for the source of the voice.
What she saw left her dumbstruck. Everything around her was completely unfamiliar—she was nowhere near her own bathroom.
This was a huge bathing pool, almost the size of an indoor swimming pool. The water wasn’t warm; it was ice-cold, the kind that pierced to the bone. Yet strangely, despite soaking in it for so long, she wasn’t shivering or stiff, and there wasn’t even a token goose bump on her skin.
Qiu had spent years hunched over her drawing desk, her elbows, shoulders, and lower back aching all day long. Now all those aches had vanished. It was as if she had suddenly been given a body built to take a beating and withstand any abuse. She felt so full of energy that she could jump up on the spot and throw ten full boxing combinations.
Unconsciousness, another world, and a brand-new body… Qiu drew comics for a living, so she knew this trope inside out. Wasn’t this the textbook transmigration plot? And she had even landed the heroine’s role.
This was fantastic! Qiu had fantasized about transmigrating for ages, and now such a wonderful stroke of luck had finally fallen into her lap! As she thought about it, she couldn’t help laughing. Then she quickly noticed the gaze overhead, its presence almost painfully strong.
Right. There was someone else here.
“Hi…”
Qiu put on what she thought was a friendly smile and was just about to greet the other person, but when she saw the woman’s face clearly, she slowly fell silent.
Actually, “utterly dumbstruck” would have been more accurate.
The woman’s expression was detached and cold. Despite the humble title she used for Qiu, her gaze was direct and unyielding, fixed squarely on Qiu’s eyes. Under normal circumstances, Qiu might have glared back and snapped, What are you staring at? But she couldn’t do that now…
That face was simply too much her type.
Her features were so exquisite that they looked as though a master craftsman had spent hundreds of years perfecting them. Beneath her lightly tinted brows was a pair of blue eyes shining with the pure, luminous clarity of the sea. When she looked down at Qiu, her lashes drooped slightly; they were silver-white, the same color as her hair. Paired with her indifferent gaze, they gave her the chill of frost.
A waterfall of silver hair lay lazily over the woman’s shoulders, soft and silky all the way down—more impossibly glossy than anything in a shampoo commercial. Qiu’s gaze followed its length downward, landing on the woman’s smooth skin, still glistening with water.
Her skin was whiter than anything a filter could produce, her figure better than a video-game CG, and even her voice was identical to that of the voice actor Qiu adored. Those few soft calls of “my lady” had nearly turned Qiu’s bones to jelly.
Good heavens.
“Fuck…”
Qiu met the woman’s eyes and couldn’t help blurting out her admiration.
“You’re fucking gorgeous!”
She was the very definition of a breathtaking beauty—and she wasn’t wearing a stitch.
As soon as that thought crossed Qiu’s mind, heat shot to her forehead, and warm liquid began trickling down her nose.
She raised a hand to touch it, then stared blankly at the bright red smear on her fingertip. She was having a nosebleed…
Qiu Qi’s motto: Live in the moment.
Qiu Qi’s hobbies: Good food, beautiful women, and comics.
With such an unparalleled beauty right in front of her, the fact that she wasn’t drooling was already impressive. A nosebleed was, all things considered, still a fairly dignified reaction.
The woman’s brow furrowed almost imperceptibly, but she quickly composed herself again. Qiu’s overly modern vulgarities had probably made her uncomfortable.
“My lady, bathe first.”
The beauty did not look particularly pleased. Her dim eyes held a trace of fatalistic resolve as she bent slightly.
“An unclean body cannot serve you in bed.”
Straight to the endgame right from the start? What a great script! Did Heaven love her that much?
“No, no, you’ve misunderstood. I wasn’t trying to cop a feel…”
Qiu blushed and pulled back the hand she had planted on the woman’s body. Then she remembered that she didn’t even know the woman’s name.
“Gorgeous, what’s your name?”
The woman looked slightly puzzled, but her expression remained as cool and distant as before.
“My lady, are you joking with me?”
Qiu cleared her throat and prepared to open page one of the script with practiced ease.
“Well, here’s what happened. I drowned just now, and when I woke up, I discovered I couldn’t remember anything.”
As she spoke, she pointed at her head.
“Amnesia. Is that a concept in your world?”
“Pei Yuqing.”
This time, the woman answered crisply, as if Qiu’s outlandish explanation hadn’t surprised her at all.
Now it was Qiu’s turn to be surprised.
“Wait. I tell you I’ve lost my memory and you just believe me? Aren’t you going to ask me anything else? If your lover had suddenly been replaced by someone else, wouldn’t you care?”
Pei Yuqing lifted her eyes, and there seemed to be a hint of mockery in them at the word lover.
“How could I question my lady’s words?”
“…Fine.”
The beauty named Pei was remarkably unreserved. When Qiu said nothing else, she turned around and began washing herself as if Qiu weren’t there. Water droplets fell from her raised, jade-white arm, stippling the surface with ripples.
Behind her, Qiu instinctively covered her nose, afraid she would bleed to death in the pool before the night was over. But as soon as she got a clear look at what was on Pei Yuqing’s back, any interest she had in watching the beauty bathe vanished.
At the shoulder-blade area of that slender back, two metal rings were locked tightly in place. Each was a full two fingers thick and had been driven deep into the flesh of Pei Yuqing’s back. Years of chafing had left the skin around their edges an unhealthy, translucent white, like flesh soaked in water.
Qiu couldn’t help frowning. She could almost feel the pain herself.
She tore her gaze from that horrifying back and examined the pair of rings carefully. It did not take long for her to notice the design on them: it closely resembled the mark on the back of her right hand, a complicated beast-head totem.
Had the original owner deliberately put these rings on Pei Yuqing?
At that thought, Qiu’s eyes darkened, and she finally looked genuinely serious. She began analyzing the information she had gathered so far.
Judging from Pei Yuqing’s attitude and those cruel rings, the two of them clearly weren’t a loving, harmonious couple. For all Qiu knew, the original owner really was a sex-crazed brute who had abducted a woman by force.
No—on top of being a lecher, she was probably also a cruel, inhuman monster.
With years of experience writing stories, Qiu quickly deduced that if the original owner truly was as irredeemably evil as she suspected, the days ahead were not going to be pleasant.
Sure enough, Heaven wasn’t about to hand her a perfect script that started with a grand happy ending. 🙂
It seemed that Pei had noticed Qiu had been motionless for a long time. She turned her head and cast a faint sidelong glance—not particularly concerned, with no obvious affection or dislike—as if she weren’t the one whose bones had been cruelly pierced and threaded with metal rings.
Qiu wasn’t foolish enough to ask whether the rings hurt or anything like that. It wouldn’t make Pei feel her concern; it would only raise the hatred meter another notch.
She quickly hid her surprise and the faint panic stirring inside, then smiled at Pei.
“Sorry, gorgeous. You’re so beautiful I got completely mesmerized. Go ahead and finish washing; I’ll wait for you up there.”
Pei nodded. Her tone was neither humble nor overbearing.
“Yes, my lady.”
This fiend certainly was impatient. She couldn’t even wait for the time it took to bathe. At that thought, Pei’s eyes turned cold.
Just as Qiu reached the side of the pool, a sudden shiver ran through her. She hugged her shoulders and shuddered, but she didn’t dare look back as she silently hauled herself out.
She made her way to the clothes rack, but a black-bound book beneath it caught her eye.
*An Illustrated Guide to World Weapons*
Wasn’t this supposed to be in the pile of reference books on her desk? How had it ended up here? Qiu squatted down and opened it. Her full name was written prominently on the first page, and even the bookmark was in exactly the same place as when she had last read it.
Everyone else got a cheat when they transmigrated. How had hers turned into a reference book? Was this script even going to work?
Qiu clicked her tongue, set the book aside for the moment, and stood up. From the clothes rack, she picked the smaller outfit and pulled it on.
Once she had put on the oversized ancient-style robes, Qiu lifted her hands and looked down at the pile of sashes, utterly vexed. She was the kind of person who spent all day in a white T-shirt and loose old-man boxers—how was she supposed to know how to wear this fussy thing?
So Qiu simply tore the ties loose from their intended fastenings, wrapped them around her waist, tied a simple bow, and wore the robe like a bathrobe.
“Splash—”
A rush of water sounded beside her ear, and a slender, pale arm reached straight over Qiu’s shoulder to scoop up the remaining outfit.
Pei Yuqing seemed to have a naturally pleasant scent, a fresh, delicate fragrance that Qiu could never get tired of, no matter how deeply she inhaled.
As Pei reached over, the dampness clinging to her body brushed against Qiu without warning. The muscles in Qiu’s back tensed, and she froze on the spot, standing straighter than a pillar.
What was she going to do? What was she going to do? Although she had once drawn a few explicit comics, in real life she was still a completely inexperienced greenhorn. Once they got into bed, what was she supposed to do? Come to think of it… did this world even have finger cots?
*Alternate setting; same-sex marriage is legal.*
Shen Yuqing is reborn. The soul of a forty-year-old retired veteran actor has ended up in the body of a barely-adult heartthrob. Not only does this young star have a name almost identical to his, but his face is nearly identical too.
Then he discovers that the body he now inhabits already comes with a marriage contract attached. And his spouse-to-be is an old acquaintance from his previous life.
Qi Baimu—the little boy who used to scamper after him, calling him “Uncle Shen”—has grown, before Shen even realized it, into a cold, taciturn, devastatingly handsome man. Taking the place of the retired Shen, he has become the entertainment industry’s new untouchable legend.
One particularly unfortunate day, Shen Yuqing accidentally catches Qi Baimu hunched furtively over a desk. On the computer screen are photos of Shen Yuqing. Qi Baimu’s gaze is locked on the face in the pictures, and the usually taut lines of his handsome face soften with rare tenderness. Then his well-shaped lips move as he murmurs the feelings he has kept buried.
“Uncle Shen… Uncle Shen… I like you so much…”
Overwhelmed by shock, Shen Yuqing turns to stone on the spot.
The real me is dead. If you need anything, burn paper offerings.
#My twenty-year-old self has become a stand-in for my forty-year-old self. What do I do?#
Other idols’ daily lives: living on salad and vegetables to lose weight; staying busy posting updates, livestreaming, and spoiling their fans; spending their free time at the gym.
Shen Yuqing’s wellness routine: steeping goji berries in a thermos, never posting on Weibo, and practicing tai chi at home whenever he has nothing else to do.
Other idols’ award speeches:
“The people who make me happiest are my fans. They gave me everything I have today. I love you all!”
Shen Yuqing:
“You’re still young. Be rational when following celebrities. When you have free time, read more books and newspapers. Don’t spend every day online and stay up late, or it will affect your studies.”
Fans:
“What on earth am I even stanning???”
