The first thing Lin Shuyao felt was pain. Her limbs were heavy, and her head felt like it had been pierced with a hundred needles. She slowly opened her eyes, adjusting them to the bright sunrays.
Just as she began to take in her surroundings, the pain in her temples suddenly became excruciating, and her mind exploded with fragmented memories.
— a family of three in a dirt house...
— people...cursing them..
— the child standing with her head down....crying
— harsh voices of the villagers....
— tiny hands picking up a rotten fruit from the ground..
'Those memories....they are someone else's....I uh— I was going to school in the bus, and then its brakes failed and we crashed... so... I died... and my soul transmigrated?'
Lin Shuyao was having a hard time taking it all in. She looked around the cottage... uh... more like a stable. There was nothing in it... not even a wooden plank to sleep on. The walls were filled with big and small holes. She looked down at herself and, not shockingly, her arms and legs were sickly thin. Her clothes seemed to have gone through a war. The coarse material of her clothes uncomfortably rubbed against her skin.
She let out a big sigh. To say that the original host of this body was pitiful would be an understatement.
Her gaze drifted to the crumbling wall, the hay sticking out in tufts.
"Criminals' daughter," she remembered someone whispering once — loud enough for a child to hear.
Her parents had been exiled here, outcasts who only made things worse by stealing from the very people they lived among.
One day, while they were going to town, her parents met with bandits and got killed... She became an orphan at the age of ten. She remembered the cold stares, the murmurs of "good riddance" after her parents died. They wanted to toss her out, but, the village chief was able to convince them to let her stay and gave her this cottage in the most distant part of the village. Since then, she's been on her own. The village and a few families who took pity on her would give her food and rundown clothes occasionally, while the rest of the village ignored her. She was too ashamed to take their help and would decline their things unless absolutely necessary.
'How were her parents' deeds related to her? Why did she suffer because of their misdeeds?!' Lin Shuyao felt anger rising within her as she punched the wall made of hay... well... she just made one of the holes in the cottage bigger.
The original host had been starving for days. She couldn't find any animals to hunt, nor was she able to. She didn't have much luck picking fruits from the trees either, as they were on higher branches.
One day, while searching, she found some mushrooms growing out of the ground. Desperate — she ate them.
The mushrooms turned out to be poisonous, and she fell sick soon after. Her already weakened body couldn't hold on, and she passed away alone.
Pitiful...so pitiful..
She pitied the original host.
Was it really a coincidence that they shared the same name?
The original Lin Shuyao had been a clean soul — a girl who bore the weight of her parents' sins and died unfairly.
She hadn't deserved that kind of ending.
Lin Shuyao clenched her fists, eyes glinting with resolve.
"Don't worry," she murmured into the silence. "This life won't be wasted."