"Am… Am I dead?" Yuki's voice was barely a whisper as she strained to open her eyes. But all she could see was white—an endless, suffocating void of white. She tried to move, but her body felt like it had been turned into a mannequin: stiff, unresponsive, and eerily hollow.
Then the memories came rushing back like a bad movie she hadn't asked to star in.
She remembered the knife. The pain. The man in the delivery uniform who had stabbed her like she was just another item to be signed off. In her final breath, she'd tried to ask him why. Why her? Why now? But the man didn't say a word. He just shoved the blade deeper, like her confusion was an inconvenience.
"Bastard didn't even give me a last word. What kind of customer service is that?" she muttered bitterly into the whiteness.
Yuki spent what felt like forever stuck in limbo, arguing with herself about whether she was actually dead. But then—something changed. Slowly, sensation returned.
She felt the breeze brushing against her skin, the soft whisper of wind playing with her hair. A translucent screen floated in front of her, blinking softly.
She could finally feel it now. The air brushing against her skin, lifting strands of her hair like a gentle, invisible hand. And of course, floating in front of her, a semi-transparent window flickered into view like a pop up.
[Status Window Detected]
"Of course," she muttered. "What's a traumatic death without a posthumous game interface? Next, you'll tell me I can collect daily login rewards."
That's what she said, but in her head, the gears were thinkering. Usually, Yuki wasn't the type to jump to conclusions unless they were backed by logic or gacha addiction.
"Ahem…spending money on gacha games can't be defined by logic, it's a sacred job to support the developers..ahem" Yuki coughed silently.
Except for that one weakness, Yuki knew that she had always been bright. If not, she wouldn't have fought tooth and nail to land a place in the nation's top university, majoring in computer engineering. A major with an acceptance rate so low, it probably crushed more dreams than heartbreak ever could.
Then again, she'd also spent far too many nights bingeing isekai anime and leveling her knowledge of fictional systems to absurd heights. The classic signs were all here. The 3 main factors, dead in previous life, floating interface, and an unfamiliar place.
There are no hallucinations either. Her health checkup last week confirmed it. Perfectly sane. Well, until a stranger turned her into a human shish kebab.
In less than a minute, Yuki accepted her new reality with the calm efficiency of someone too tired to be shocked anymore. Reincarnation, transmigration, regression, wait.. no… well —whatever this was, she was here now. Her mind began spinning through hypotheses and probabilities when the screen flickered again.
[Inheriting Memories in… 3… 2… 1]
Yuki stared curiously "Oh finally, but I'm actually curious how the system trans…"
"Ack"
A brutal wave of information surged into her skull. Yuki gritted her teeth, fighting the urge to vomit. It felt like being force-fed raw garlic and tomato paste by a blindfolded chef while another chef was pounding my head like fresh meat.
After what felt like hours, the nausea eased. Then, Yuki collapsed to her knees, gasping for air.
"Huff… puff… What the hell was that? Was I just stuffed with someone else's trauma file?"
She looked up at the unfamiliar night sky, letting the data sort itself out in her mind like broken puzzle pieces clicking together.
And then, tears start flowing down.
Not because she was overwhelmed by pain, but because she now understood who this body once belonged to.
Yin Fei.
A ten-year-old girl, born from a drunken one-night mistake during her mother's time at a martial university. Her father refused to acknowledge her—too busy saving face to accept the life he helped create. In fact, he'd even tried to kill her as a newborn to save his reputation. Reputation, after all, is more sacred than a heartbeat.
Thankfully her mother was a lioness. A fierce, stubborn woman who stood between her daughter and the father. After some long fights and negotiation, she fled with her baby to her parents' home in a rural village.
However, things didn't get any better. Because of her background, Yin Fei grew up as the village's living shame. Her grandparents resented her, the villagers stared like she carried a plague, and other children threw insults at her like she was some cursed creature in a folk tale.
Unfortunately, the heavens had no eye, when she was just nine, things started to change from bad to worse. Her mother, her solitary source of warmth and love, caught a fever. It started with an ordinary cold, but somehow, by the end of the year, it ended with a funeral.
With her mother gone, the thread holding her fragile existence together snapped. Her grandparents, clearly tired of the inconvenience of having a reminder of past mistakes around, kicked her out without hesitation. No money. No food. Just a bottle of water and some threadbare clothes as if they were doing her a favor by not throwing her out naked.
And so, little Fei became the village children's favorite chew toy. Without her mother's protection, the children stopped pretending to be innocent. They tied her upside down from a tree like a human wind chime, shoved her into the river for laughs, and—because apparently no act was too low—forced her to eat cow dung. All in the name of childish "fun."
Hiding didn't work either. Once, she ran off near the woods hoping to disappear. But the kids, bored and vindictive, turned it into a game. They rallied the entire village to look for her—parents abandoning chores, elders grumbling, all to locate the "missing disgrace." When they finally found her, they beat her.
"You made us waste our time," they said.
Because apparently, surviving was a bigger crime than bullying.
From then on, Yin Fei didn't resist. What was the point? She took every slap, every kick, every cruel word with the silence of someone who had forgotten how to hope. She scavenged for scraps, drank rainwater, and during winter, she even dug through trash just to survive another freezing night.
No one cared.
No one helped.
And in the end, she died as quietly as she lived. Alone, cold, hungry—and running a fever so high it blurred the line between dreams and death. She lay curled on the side of a dirty street while the village walked past her body like it was just another piece of trash they didn't feel like picking up.
"Damn, this makes me feel so bad," Yuki sneered in annoyance.
The night sky above her was quiet, still, almost cruel in how peacefully it shimmered while her mind burned with grief that wasn't hers… but now was.
Her hands trembled. Barely.
Just a flicker—like a glitch in the system. She clenched them into fists immediately, forcing the trembling to stop. Her face? Blank. Perfectly still, as always. But inside, something cracked.
Yin Fei's memories weren't just information—they were pain. Raw, unfiltered pain carved into every nerve of a little girl who was hated for simply being born.
Because of her disability, Yuki can't easily express her emotions, or even experience those emotions. However, her chest ached.
She remembered the way Yin Fei was thrown away like garbage. The image of a child dying alone in the cold… It made something old and buried stir inside her. A flicker of memory from her own past—hospital lights, an empty apartment, that same suffocating coldness.
She didn't cry. She wouldn't
But a single tear did slip down her smooth cheek, uninvited and quiet. It annoyed her. She wiped it away as swiftly as it fell.
"Stupid," she muttered. "Getting emotional over a dead girl in a reincarnated body. Real professional, Yuki."
She took a breath, held it and let it go.
Even if no one had mourned Yin Fei, someone would now.
Even if the villagers didn't care, Yuki would.
Even if her face stayed blank… inside, she made a quiet, terrifying promise. "I'm going to make them remember her name".