Within two weeks, Zhang Yue had done something she never thought possible.
She had adapted.
Not accepted, well she wasn't nearly that optimistic, but but somehow adapted.
She no longer startled at the sight of servants bowing every time she stepped into a room. She had stopped instinctively reaching for the light switch after sunset, only to remember that lanterns had replaced electricity centuries ago. Even living without a cellphone and internet every day no longer felt like a challenge.
Life had become... strangely ordinary.
At least, as ordinary as life could be after waking up hundreds of years in the past.
The only thing she still couldn't get used to was how little she was expected to do.
The Zhang family treated her like fragile porcelain.
She woke when she pleased, shared meals with her grandfather and uncle whenever they were home, took leisurely walks through the gardens, and spent the rest of the day with Lianhua hovering anxiously a few steps behind her. No one asked her to work. No one handed her responsibilities. No one even expected her to train.
It felt absurd.
In her previous life, idleness had been a luxury she couldn't afford. There was always another shift to cover, another supplier to call, another batch of dough to knead before sunrise. Even after opening her café, every single day had been a race against time.
Now...
Her greatest responsibility was remembering to finish breakfast.
"I think I'm becoming unemployed professionally," she muttered one afternoon, earning a thoroughly confused look from Lianhua.
The maid, naturally, had no idea what that meant.
The Zhang family, she soon realized, was a household built around warriors.
From dawn until dusk, the training grounds echoed with the clash of wooden spears and steel. Servants hurried about carrying practice weapons and medicinal herbs, while instructors barked commands loud enough to shake the sparrows from the trees. Even the younger disciples trained until their robes clung to them with sweat.
Everyone had somewhere to be.
Everyone except Zhang Yue.
Her uncle, Zhang Yanjun, disappeared before sunrise each morning to oversee military drills or attend council meetings. By the time he returned, dusk had already swallowed the estate.
Left with more free time than she knew what to do with, Zhang Yue wandered aimlessly through the manor for several days before an elderly steward casually mentioned the family library.
"If Young Miss finds herself bored," he had said with a smile, "the library has been waiting much longer than any of us."
Books.
Now that sounded useful.
The library occupied an entire eastern wing of the estate.
The moment Zhang Yue stepped inside, the familiar scent of old paper, ink, and sandalwood wrapped around her like an old friend.
Towering wooden shelves stretched from floor to ceiling, crowded with stitched manuscripts, bamboo slips, and leather-bound volumes so ancient their titles had almost faded away. Afternoon sunlight filtered through latticed windows, illuminating tiny flecks of dust that drifted lazily through the still air.
She couldn't help smiling.
"So this is where everyone hides the answers."
No one disturbed her.
Hour after hour, she wandered from shelf to shelf, pulling out anything that resembled a history book.
At first, she searched for familiar names.
Dynasties. Cities. Kings.
Anything that connected this world to the history she knew.
Instead, she found stories she had always dismissed as myths.
The Great Heavenly Dragon.
The Celestial Wars.
The founding of the Five Veils.
The rise of the first sorcerers.
The fall of kingdoms swallowed by spirit beasts.
She frowned.
None of it made sense.
She reached for another volume.
Then another.
And another.
By the time the evening bells echoed through the manor, a frightening realization had begun to take shape.
She wasn't merely in the past.
She had travelled twelve generations back into the era her own world remembered only as legend.
The Age of Sword and Sorcery.
The age mothers turned into bedtime stories.
The age wandering storytellers exaggerated around campfires.
The age scholars argued had never truly existed.
Except...
To the people living here, it wasn't mythology.
It was simply history.
History still being written.
A slow chill crawled down Zhang Yue's spine.
Outside, dragons were not symbols carved into temple walls.
They had once flown across these skies.
Demigods were not fictional heroes.
They had walked these very lands.
Spirit beasts weren't illustrations decorating ancient scrolls.
They had hunted forests that still stood beyond the Zhang estate.
History hadn't been romanticized.
If anything...
It had been watered down.
Yet beneath its beauty lay an uglier truth.
Every page she turned spoke of the same obsession.
Power.
Kingdoms rose for it.
Families slaughtered one another for it.
Entire sects vanished chasing it.
Immortality wasn't merely a legend.
It was the ambition that drove civilization itself.
According to the oldest cultivation texts, every awakened individual eventually chose one of three great Paths.
The White Path pursued harmony. Sorcerers, spiritual mediums, healers, and enchanters cultivated Spiritual Essence in accordance with nature, refining medicines, formations, contracts, and elemental arts.
The Grey Path rejected absolutes. Its practitioners borrowed from both virtue and vice, believing strength mattered more than rigid ideals. They walked a dangerous line between restraint and ambition.
Then there was the Black Path.
The path every manuscript described differently, but all agreed upon one thing.
It demanded sacrifice.
Blood rituals.
Forbidden sorcery.
Soul manipulation.
The pursuit of power at any cost.
Most who walked it never returned.
Those who did...
Returned as monsters.
"Yeah," Zhang Yue muttered, closing that particular book halfway.
"I'm staying very far away from that."
She opened another collection of records described the hierarchy of awakened cultivators.
Every awakened individual, whether sorcerer or warrior, advanced through the Five Veils.
Seeker of the First Veil.
Bearer of the Second Veil.
Warden of the Third Veil.
Keeper of the Fourth Veil.
Master of the Fifth Veil.
The titles sounded poetic.
The explanations beneath them were anything but.
The deeper one crossed into the Veils, the greater one's Spiritual Essence became.
But every text repeated the same warning.
The Third Veil was where most people stopped.
Crossing into the Fourth required not only immense Spiritual Essence, but extraordinary talent, relentless will, and opportunities that ordinary cultivators would never encounter.
According to Zhang Yanjun, the strongest members of the Zhang family, including himself, stood at the mid level of the Third Veil. As the Crimson Order's current General, Elder Zhang represented the highest level most warriors could realistically attain.
Only legends reached the Fourth.
The Fifth...
Those were beings people worshipped rather than challenged.
Her mother had been one of the rare prodigies who had stood at the threshold of the Third Veil, even above grandpa Zhang.
She had been preparing for her breakthrough when death claimed her first.
As Zhang Yue closed one heavy volume after another, a chill ran down her spine. She realized she had not merely traveled into the past. But she had landed in the heart of an era where legends were born,and where ambition, more often than not, ended in bloodshed.
But where does she stand? From everything Zhang Yue had gathered from others, she was powerless in this world, at least for now. That made her no different from an ordinary layman. Not Zhang. Not Qing. Just a girl, stranded in a world she didn't belong to, desperately in need of protection in a place filled with shadows.
"Seriously Wu Jun Qian? This is where you sent me?" Zhang Yue nearly spat, eyes narrowed as she glared up at the heavens.
"You stupid..." She bit back a curse, realizing too late that venting her frustration on her family's deity wouldn't make things better. Why does everything go wrong for me?
She sighed deeply, frustration pooling in her chest.
"I'm just a chef… no, not even that. A cafe owner?" Her voice was tinged with disbelief.
"Actually... unemployed."
She let her forehead fall against the table.
"How exactly am I supposed to survive here?"
She glanced at the orange sky through the window, the evening light casting long shadows over the sprawling estate. She'd been holed up in the mansion's library all day, poring over texts she could hardly understand, while her maid Lianhua,who usually shadowed her like a hawk,had disappeared.
Or she'd simply given up trying to stop her.
Zhang Yue stretched until her back cracked.
Enough reading.
If anyone owed her an explanation, it wasn't another dusty scroll.
It was a certain self-righteous guardian deity.
She pushed herself to her feet and left the library.
The Ironwood manor was vast, sprawling across acres of land. Gardens, fruit trees, and annexes spread out like an endless maze. The grandeur of the Zhang family's estate here dwarfed even her memories of their old mansion, which now seemed like a distant shadow.
She made her way through the halls and stepped out into the garden. Her feet found the grass with a familiar softness, though the weight of the silence hung heavy in the air. The sun was dipping lower, casting everything in a soft, muted glow, but Zhang Yue had more important things to worry about than the quiet beauty surrounding her.
She needed to find the family shrine. Find that stupid deity who got no sense of space and time.
Even if she has to fight with him or beg him, she will do it and make him resolve this timeslip.