Aria Chen's POV
The heart monitor flatlined at 3:07 AM.
Nobody noticed for eleven minutes.
That was the cruelest part—not the dying. The dying came slowly, quietly, like a computer shutting down tab by tab. First her fingers went numb. Then her chest stopped hurting. Then the ceiling of Room 4B at Shanghai General blurred into soft white nothing.
What cut deepest was the silence.
No frantic nurses. No crying family. No one grabbing her hand and begging her to hold on. Just the hum of machines, the glow of her laptop screen, and a half-finished quarterly report that her boss needed by 6 AM.
At least the report is almost done, she thought. And then she hated herself for thinking it.
Aria Chen. Twenty-eight years old. Senior strategist at Longwei Corporation. Employee of the Year three times in a row. She had worked herself into the ground for a company that wouldn't even pause its morning meeting to announce her death. She had no husband, no children, no best friend on speed dial. She had a performance bonus from last March and a drawer full of unopened vitamin supplements she always meant to start taking.
I built everything for them, she thought as the darkness pressed in. And I have nothing. I am nothing.
The last thing she saw was her own reflection in the black laptop screen—hollow cheeks, dark circles carved deep under her eyes, hair pulled into a sloppy knot she hadn't bothered to fix in three days.
She looked like a ghost before she even died.
What a waste, was her final thought.
Then everything went black.
Pain hit her like a wall.
Not hospital pain—dull and medicated. This was raw, screaming pain. Her whole body felt wrong, like wearing a coat two sizes too small. Her lungs heaved. Her spine arched. And then she was sitting upright, screaming at the top of someone else's lungs, inside a violently shaking carriage.
What—where—
Memories crashed into her skull like waves.
They weren't her memories. But they felt real—vivid and sharp and soaked in grief. A palace with golden towers. A cold-eyed Emperor on a throne who looked at his daughter the way a man looks at a broken tool. A beautiful older sister with a smile like a blade. A handsome fiancé who turned away without a single backward glance as palace gates swallowed her whole.
And a name.
Princess Seraphina Asterian.
Aria pressed both hands against her temples. The memories kept pouring in—she was in someone else's body. A girl, nineteen years old, who had just been exiled to die in a monster-filled wasteland called the Crimson Borderlands. Because her father needed a political sacrifice. Because her sister whispered the right words in the right ears. Because nobody powerful enough had ever loved her enough to say no.
The carriage hit a rut and Aria slammed sideways into the wooden wall. Pain exploded through her shoulder. She grabbed the seat to steady herself and looked at her hands.
Small hands. Pale. Trembling.
These are her hands. I'm her.
Outside the tiny carriage window, the sky was wrong—too red, threaded with dark clouds that moved like they were alive. The trees were twisted black shapes. The air smelled like iron and ash. And somewhere beyond the tree line, something enormous was moving.
Something that was not human.
Aria's stomach dropped.
She forced herself to think. Okay. Okay. Corporate mind. Assess the situation. She was in a body with no combat training, no survival skills, no food, no weapons. She was being driven toward certain death. The girl whose body she'd taken was dead—she could feel it, that hollow space where Seraphina's soul used to be, still echoing with despair.
Nobody was coming to save her.
The Emperor had signed her death warrant. The sister had gift-wrapped it. The fiancé had held the door open.
Aria had spent her first life making herself small. Useful. Easy to discard.
She pressed a fist against her chest, breathing hard. Never again, she thought. The words came out of nowhere, fierce and hot. Never again, never again, never again.
The carriage jerked to a sudden stop.
Aria grabbed the seat as momentum threw her forward. Outside, she heard horses snorting. Boots hitting the ground. Two male voices, laughing about something.
Then the door flew open.
Cold air rushed in. A guard stood framed in the opening—thick arms, lazy sneer, the look of a man who had done this before and felt nothing about it. Behind him, a second guard leaned against the carriage door, picking his teeth.
The first guard looked her over the way you look at a piece of trash before tossing it.
"End of the line, Princess." He grabbed her arm, fingers digging in hard. "Welcome to hell." He yanked her forward, and she stumbled out of the carriage, feet hitting dirt. "Try not to die too fast."
The other guard laughed. "Give her two hours. Three if she's lucky."
Aria straightened up. She was smaller in this body—petite, fragile-looking, silver-blonde hair whipping across her face in the wind. She probably looked exactly like what they expected. A scared little girl about to cry.
She didn't cry.
She looked past the guards and saw it for the first time—the border barrier. A shimmering wall of pale magic, stretching across the landscape as far as she could see in both directions. Beyond it, the Deadlands waited. Red fog rolled against the barrier from the other side. Shapes moved inside that fog. Big shapes.
One guard shoved her toward the barrier, jamming the jade pendant at her throat—her only possession, her mother's last gift—against some kind of activation stone. The barrier rippled, creating a narrow opening.
"Move," he said, shoving her again.
Aria stumbled forward and crossed the threshold.
The magic snapped shut at her back like a door slamming.
She turned. Both guards were already walking back to the carriage, not even watching to see what happened to her. One was counting coins. The other was yawning.
That was how little her life was worth to them.
Aria turned back to face the Deadlands.
The red fog pressed close. The shapes inside it were circling, like they could sense her. The air tasted like lightning and old blood. And somewhere deep in that terrifying darkness, something let out a sound—
Not a howl. Not a roar.
A shriek. High and cold and so close that the hairs on her arms stood straight up.
Aria's hand flew to the jade pendant at her throat. It was warm—much too warm, almost burning. Pulsing in a steady rhythm, like a second heartbeat that wasn't hers.
What are you? she thought.
The pendant pulsed harder.
And then—beneath the shrieking and the fog and the thunder of her own blood—she heard something else.
A whisper.
Thin as smoke, ancient as stone, coming from inside the jade itself.
They think they have killed you, child.
Aria's blood went cold.
They have no idea what they have just set free.