At 2:17 a.m., Lin Wanwan finished this year's ninety-ninth transmigration novel.
The final line sat quietly in the center of the screen.
—The imperial couple ascended the imperial palace together. The common people knelt and hailed the emperor.
She didn't close the webpage right away.
The world outside had long since gone quiet. The only sound left in the entire apartment was the low hum of the air conditioner. The iced Americano on her desk was only half-finished, the ice long melted, and the cup's outer wall no longer beaded with condensation. Several opened bags of snacks were scattered beside the bed, and a paperback novel lay half-read beneath her pillow.
Lin Wanwan stared at the ending for a few seconds before scrolling down.
In the extras, the emperor did indeed disband the inner palace.
The three thousand beauties ceased to exist, the consort selection was canceled, and the court officials who had once watched him like tigers were all cowed by a single look from the emperor.
The stepmother who had bullied the female lead died, the half-sister went mad, and the former fiancé knelt outside the palace gates, regretting everything. Even the several noble ladies who had once mocked the female lead could do nothing in the end but respectfully bow to her at the palace banquet.
And the female lead, who had transmigrated from the modern era, stood beside the man she had personally helped onto the throne, dressed in the Empress's court robes and accepting the kneeling homage of the entire realm.
One heart, one lifetime.
She had gained the empire, love, and power—all of it.
It was standard, and it was perfect.
After finishing the last extra, Lin Wanwan even graciously left a comment: “Great read. The emperor is ridiculously doting.”
But after hitting Send, she didn't move the novel into her usual “Completed” folder, nor did she immediately open the next recommended book.
Instead, she dragged the page back to Chapter One.
The chapter was titled—Awakening as the Legitimate Daughter of a Marquis's Estate.
The story began with the female lead falling asleep at her desk after working overtime for seven straight days. When she opened her eyes again, she was already lying on a carved canopy bed.
A sobbing maidservant knelt beside the bed, calling her Miss.
Outside the door stood an expressionless matron holding a bowl of medicinal decoction containing who knew what.
The original owner had just fallen into the water. Everyone in the estate had assumed she was certain to die, but not only had she survived—she had also acquired a different soul.
Lin Wanwan slowly scrolled downward.
The female lead didn't know what dynasty she had transmigrated into.
She didn't know her own name.
She didn't know whether the maidservant kneeling beside the bed was trustworthy.
And she didn't know whether the medicine the matron had brought was meant to cure her or send her to her grave.
Yet less than fifteen minutes after waking, she calmly said, “Help me sit up first.”
Two pages later, she had quickly analyzed the marquis's estate's power structure from the maidservant's halting sobs, determined that her stepmother was harboring ulterior motives and her half-sister was two-faced, and successfully avoided the poisoned decoction.
Lin Wanwan's finger stopped on the screen.
The first time she'd read this part, she had thought it was incredibly satisfying.
The female lead was calm and clever enough. She had successfully dodged the first crisis the moment she transmigrated, and even intimidated several snobbish servants in the courtyard along the way.
But now that she had scrolled back and read it again, something suddenly felt off.
She scrolled through a few more chapters.
After three days, the female lead could already skillfully address every master in the marquis's estate.
After seven days, she could wear elaborate ancient clothing and perform formal bows at a banquet without stepping on her hem or bowing in the wrong direction.
After half a month, she casually recited a famous classical poem at a poetry gathering, dazzling the entire room and successfully attracting the attention of the icy prince.
After one month, she began using modern management methods to reorganize the estate.
After two months, she made soap.
After three months, she improved farming tools, developed commerce, and casually rescued a prince being hunted by assassins.
Lin Wanwan stared silently at the lines of text.
This female lead, who would eventually become Empress and assist the emperor in creating a golden age, had been nothing more than an ordinary administrative employee before transmigrating.
Her résumé said she knew how to make presentations, organize spreadsheets, and book conference rooms.
Yet the moment she arrived in ancient times, she suddenly knew how to do everything.
Lin Wanwan sat up a little straighter.
She scrolled back through the novel and stopped again at the chapter where the female lead had just awakened.
A crying maidservant.
Suspicious medicinal decoction.
An unfamiliar room.
An era she didn't recognize at all.
A body that wasn't even hers.
Lin Wanwan stared at the page for a long time.
She suddenly realized that the female lead who would eventually ascend to the empress's throne actually knew nothing at the beginning of the story.
The reason she had survived didn't seem to be that she had prepared particularly well.
It was that all the truly deadly dangers had, by sheer luck, not landed on her.
Lin Wanwan's gaze moved from the screen to the novels she had already finished in the room.
A row of paperbacks filled the bookcase, several more not yet put away were stacked by the head of the bed, and her phone and tablet held even more e-books.
She opened her reading history.
Ninety-nine books.
Exactly ninety-nine books.
Lin Wanwan started looking down the list from the first one.
The female lead in the first was hit by a car on her way home from work.
The female lead in the second stayed up late for several nights in a row and eventually died suddenly from overwork in front of her computer.
The third involved drowning.
The fourth, falling off a cliff.
The fifth didn't even have an accident. She simply slept in bed, and when she opened her eyes again, she was already in ancient times.
The rest were much the same.
Someone slipped while taking a bath. Someone encountered a malfunctioning elevator. Someone was hit and sent flying by a car while trying to save another person. Someone else was halfway through reading a novel when, for no apparent reason, she transmigrated into the book.
Their methods of arriving in ancient times varied, and there was no pattern to the identities they woke up with.
Some became the legitimate daughters of marquises, some became discarded consorts in the Cold Palace, some entered wealthy merchant families, and some opened their eyes to find themselves lying in leaky shacks, surrounded by several children with hollow, starving faces.
Some had noble identities. Others were penniless.
Some started out with servants at their beck and call, while others didn't even know where their next meal would come from.
But no matter whom they transmigrated as, none of them had prepared for this day.
No one knew in advance that she would transmigrate.
Naturally, no one had thought ahead about how to survive after arriving in ancient times.
They didn't know which dynasty they would land in, what kind of person they would become, or whether the first person they faced after waking could be trusted.
Some hadn't even figured out why the original owner had died before they had already begun matching wits with the people in the estate.
Yet strangely enough, nearly all of them survived in the end.
Not only did they survive, but each one lived more gloriously than the last.
The one born into a marquis's estate became Empress. The one who entered a farming family led the whole village to prosperity. The one who fell into a pleasure house became the realm's foremost poetess. Even the female lead who was hated by her entire family at the beginning and couldn't get enough to eat always managed to open a shop, buy farmland, and conveniently marry a man of distinguished status in the end.
Lin Wanwan's finger stopped in the middle of the list.
One book like this could perhaps be explained as the author skipping an unimportant process.
Ten books like this could still be called a common convention of transmigration novels.
But in ninety-nine books, nearly every female lead entered a completely unfamiliar world utterly unprepared, yet always managed to turn disaster into good fortune and survive all the way to the ending.
That was no longer just a coincidence.
Looking at the long string of titles, a remarkably clear thought suddenly surfaced in Lin Wanwan's mind.
This was probably the biggest loophole in transmigration novels.
But Lin Wanwan had never seriously considered just how big that loophole was.
Transmigration novels always loved putting the most exciting events right at the beginning.
If you transmigrated as a young lady from a marquis's estate, you had to deal first with a cruel and ruthless stepmother and half-sister.
If you transmigrated as a discarded consort in the Cold Palace, you had to find a way to regain the emperor's attention.
If you transmigrated as a farming girl, the first thing you did was start a business, earn silver, and lead your whole family into a better life.
It was as though, once a modern person arrived in ancient times, her most urgent problem wasn't staying alive but figuring out how to rise from the ashes.
But if transmigration really happened, things probably wouldn't be that simple at all.
Lin Wanwan tried putting herself into those stories.
If she opened her eyes and the people beside her spoke in words completely foreign to her, what would she do?
Transmigration novels seemed to take it for granted that the ancients spoke Chinese too, so the female lead could converse with the people around her without the slightest difficulty the moment she opened her eyes.
But there had been so many dynasties in ancient times, and so many different regions.
The pronunciation, vocabulary, and forms of address could all vary between periods. Even if she could understand every character individually, she might not know what the other person was saying once they were strung into a sentence.
And understanding speech didn't mean understanding writing.
When the female lead in a novel received letters, account books, or contracts, she could always pick them up and read them immediately. Sometimes, just days after transmigrating, she could audit the original owner's accounts and find evidence of a steward's embezzlement in a sea of densely written financial records.
But if the characters were even slightly messy, Lin Wanwan couldn't recognize them all, to say nothing of genuine cursive script.
If someone really put an ancient contract in front of her, she probably couldn't even tell whether it was a property deed, a marriage certificate, or a deed of servitude.
By the time someone told her to press a fingerprint, she would probably still be trying to figure out what it said—and would already have been sold.
Language and writing could at least be learned gradually.
The truly troublesome things were those that left no time to adapt.
Take eating, for example.
Ancient food in novels was either bland and tasteless or so exquisite it made one's mouth water. When the female lead couldn't get used to it, she personally went into the kitchen and casually made a few modern dishes, immediately winning over everyone in the estate.
But if she really arrived in an unfamiliar era, her first concern probably wouldn't be whether the food tasted good.
It would be whether the water was clean.
Whether the meat had spoiled.
Whether the wild greens picked by the roadside were actually safe to eat.
If eating something bad upset her stomach, a modern person could still go to a hospital, get an IV, and take medicine.
Ancient times might not have any of those things.
An apparently ordinary bout of diarrhea could be enough to cost someone their life.
Injuries were the same.
People in transmigration novels were forever being shot with arrows or slashed with knives. Once their wounds were bandaged, they would run a fever for a few days, drink a few bowls of medicine, and get right back out of bed.
But Lin Wanwan knew that the truly frightening thing had never been the wound itself.
It was infection.
There would be no disinfectant, no antibiotics, and perhaps not even a piece of clean cloth to be found. If the wound festered and the fever wouldn't break, even the most formidable protagonist couldn't simply tough it out through sheer willpower.
And all of that assumed she transmigrated into circumstances that weren't too bad.
If she transmigrated as a young lady from a marquis's estate, at least she would temporarily have a roof over her head and food to eat. Even if everyone in the estate harbored ulterior motives, she would still have time to slowly figure out her situation.
But what if she became a poor person?
There would be no stored grain at home, no silver in her pockets, and perhaps a mountain of debt outside.
The female leads in novels could always make soap, produce salt, or sell food and earn their first fortune.
But a truly poor person might not even have enough capital to buy a pot, oil, or raw materials.
Not to mention that in certain dynasties, salt wasn't something one could simply produce or sell whenever one pleased.
If she didn't even know where her next meal would come from, how could she talk about building a fortune?
Becoming a servant would be even worse.
No freedom, no silver, and not even the right to decide what she would do the next day.
If her master ordered her to keep watch at night, she couldn't sleep.
If the steward ordered her to work, she couldn't leave.
Even if she had a hundred ways to make money in her head, she would first need the chance to step outside that door.
She couldn't exactly be assigned to wash dishes in the kitchen one day and then ask the matron in charge for leave the next, saying she planned to open a soap shop.
At that thought, Lin Wanwan couldn't help frowning.
Besides, who could guarantee that the era she transmigrated into would be a golden age of peace?
What if she arrived in the middle of war, with a city under siege and civilians fleeing in all directions? How much use would all her modern knowledge really be?
Was she supposed to stand in front of a crowd of people starving with only one breath left in them and recite, “Who knows that every grain in the bowl comes from hard work,” hoping they would be so moved that they forgot they were hungry?
Impossible.
The real ancient world wouldn't automatically lower the difficulty for her just because she came from modern times.
Nor would it guarantee that she would live to see the perfect ending simply because she was a transmigrator.
Part One | End