Three days later, Yun Chuji emerged from under a mountain of clothes.
Her rut was finally over. For three days, Yun Chuji felt as if she had been crawling alone in the darkness, with the fortress built from Tang Jianxi’s scent as her only sanctuary.
She let out a long sigh. She owed Miss Tang more and more. She didn’t even know if this life of hers, already lost once before, would be enough to repay the debt.
In the world Yun Chuji had been raised in, a person’s value was derived from their contribution. A monarch must protect the state, a minister must bring peace to the realm, a gentleman must manage his family and serve his country, a woman must diligently manage the household and bear children, and children must bring honor to their family and be filial to their parents. A person’s foundation in the world was not their intrinsic worth, but the value they could provide. If someone failed to provide their expected value, dying to prove their integrity was a respectable alternative. In this way, everyone fit neatly into the same net, and society remained stable.
As a lonely soul from another world, Yun Chuji stood alone in this one. She had no sovereign, no father, no brother, no son. Everything she had learned in her past life was utterly useless here. At the same time, her new gender completely pulled her out of her old framework, and she had yet to understand what this new framework even meant.
After carefully packing all of Tang Jianxi’s clothes into a suitcase, Yun Chuji picked it up and, for the first time in days, stepped out of the suite and truly into this new world.
But this new world was not very friendly to her.
After a difficult descent in a suspended glass elevator, relying on memory and imitation, Yun Chuji hadn’t even had a chance to soothe her frightened, fragile heart when a man in tight-fitting clothes (a three-piece suit) approached her with a smile and said, “Miss Yun, please settle your bill for your stay.”
To be honest, in the sixteen dull years of Miss Yun’s past life, she had never bought anything herself. On the rare occasions she went out for festivals, a handmaiden handled everything for her.
So, Yun Chuji was stunned.
Her first thought was, Do I have money?
She subconsciously reached up to pull a golden hairpin from her hair to pay the debt, but her hand only met a plain head of hair, without so much as a ribbon.
Calm down, Chuniang. Think carefully. Think about how the original owner paid for things.
As the lobby manager’s smile grew increasingly stiff, Yun Chuji rummaged through her bag twice but couldn’t find anything resembling money.
“Um, your optical computer?” the lobby manager reminded her in a low voice.
Although Miss Tang had specifically instructed him to charge this alpha young lady, the manager, having witnessed Assistant He deliver the clothes, relied on his years of experience to judge that this alpha was definitely not some disposable character to be trifled with. Who knew, she might even become the Tang family’s son-in-law one day.
—Ah, the optical computer.
The memory finally surfaced.
Yun Chuji tapped the electronic watch on her wrist a few times. With the manager’s help, she fumbled through the payment process like a seventy-year-old grandmother from the countryside. A quick glance at her balance revealed she had almost nothing left but loose change.
At first, Yun Chuji didn’t pay it much mind. In her view, she didn’t have many days left to live anyway, so having money or not made little difference.
But the moment she stepped out of the hotel, a hovercar descended from the sky and stopped abruptly in front of her. A woman in strange clothes (a tank top and trousers) got out, gave her an odd look, and muttered, “What’s with this person? Don’t they know this is a parking spot?”
So this was… the new world.
Yun Chuji took a step back. At that moment, she desperately wished she had a lot of money so she could stay in that suite and await death’s gentle summons.
It was too terrifying.
So thought Miss Yun, a product of the age of animal-powered agriculture.
But she had to leave eventually. She, the great Miss Yun, would rather die than end up homeless on the streets.
The original owner’s memories were too unreliable. She hadn’t paid special attention to many everyday things, making them extremely difficult to recall now. Only memories tied to strong emotions were easier to access.
And how to get home, naturally, was not an emotionally charged memory.
Combining all the information she could currently grasp, Yun Chuji clenched her fists and solemnly opened her optical computer. After a voice search for “how to get home,” she successfully found a tutorial video.
Thanks to modern technology, the content displayed on the optical computer was only visible through a specifically paired ocular chip, and the sound was transmitted directly to the owner’s auditory ossicles. Otherwise, everyone coming and going in the hotel would have stared in astonishment at an adult alpha with a serious expression, muttering along to an early education video.
“Method one: Contact your parents.”
“Hmm, no. I’m not the original Yun Chuji.”
“Method two: Book a self-driving hovercar.”
“Hmm, if it’s charged by distance, it’s too expensive. I don’t have parents at home to pay for me, and I don’t know if I have enough money.”
“Method three: Take the public maglev train. But be careful not to talk to strangers or accept snacks from them.”
“Hmm, this one works. It seems this world also values propriety between men and women and a respectful distance. I can’t judge it solely based on the original owner’s memories.”
After giving her full approval to the ABO world’s standard of etiquette for young children, Miss Yun, an elite of propriety, set off, cautiously following the child-friendly navigation to the maglev station.
“Keep to the right, sweetie! A hovercar will be approaching from the left in three minutes.”
“Don’t touch the plants by the roadside, sweetie! They have lots of yucky germs on them.”
“Just five hundred more meters to your destination, sweetie! I’ve never seen such an amazing kid like you!”
…
With the kind assistance of the child-friendly guide, Yun Chuji successfully boarded the train home. Her heart, wounded by Tang Jianxi’s continuous cold sarcasm, was gradually soothed by the sweet calls of “sweetie.”
Ah, in this world, people aren’t as cold as the original owner thought!
The original owner must have had a personality problem!
With this thought in mind, Yun Chuji stepped into her home—nominally, at least.
The original Yun Chuji was a fourth-year university student. Since her family was well-off, she chose not to live in the dorms and instead bought a small apartment off-campus. She was quiet and reserved at school, with few friends, giving off the impression of a shy top student. This was why Tang Jianxi had sought her out. Because she was so quiet and shy, almost no one had visited her apartment in four years, allowing her to maintain her timid facade.
But underneath, she was a fervent alpha supremacist.
This was evident from her messy apartment and the various propaganda posters plastered all over the walls.
“Omegas should go back home!”
“Every omega must bear at least five children for the Empire!”
“I’m an alpha, I support the marriage allocation system!”
…
In short, these were proposals that even Yun Chuji, born in a feudal era, found excessive. At the very least, she believed that bearing more than five children was an extremely painful affair. In her memory, women who had many children did not live long. Her own cousin had died in childbirth. As a result, although her mother and books all vigorously praised the importance of continuing the family line, Yun Chuji privately held a primal fear of childbirth.
As for the proposals to keep omegas from public life and confine them through marriage, she couldn’t judge them objectively, as she had once faced such a life herself. What made it particularly difficult for her to be objective was the question: besides being able to bear children, were omegas the same as women?
However, Yun Chuji knew from her memories that male omegas also existed in this world.
So, did that mean men also had to be confined at home, bearing children and managing household affairs?
And Yun Chuji hadn’t forgotten that the original owner, besides being an alpha, was biologically a woman. So the situation was: a woman was advocating for a gender group that included men to live the life that women had lived in the past?
Yun Chuji rubbed her temples. Even after several days, she was still as dizzy about this world’s genders as when she first arrived.
Calming herself, Yun Chuji surveyed the messy and particularly ugly room, made so by the various slogans. She sighed and once again picked up her cleaning tools to begin her labor.
It took a full six hours of cleaning before the apartment barely met Yun Chuji’s aesthetic standards. Aside from lacking a few calligraphy scrolls, a curio cabinet, and some vases, it was basically livable.
In the ABO era, due to their special constitutions, AOs would stock up on large quantities of nutrient solutions and food at home for emergencies. This was convenient for Yun Chuji. She decided to stay holed up in this apartment until Tang Jianxi, the emissary of the underworld, came for her.
Exploring the new world and completing the original owner’s studies were not concerns for Yun Chuji.
As someone with not long to live, the only thing she needed to do now was what she wanted to do most.
And that was to find out if the Yun family still existed.
It was difficult.
Yun Chuji had thought she could find out using the omniscient optical computer, but it could only collect information left behind by humans. Anything not recorded would fall into the same void, a void named history.
Only Yun Chuji’s renowned grandfather, Yun Linjiang, had left a few words in the annals of history. He was included by later historians in the biographies of loyal ministers, occupying 327 characters in a text of 11,375 characters.
As for the rest of the Yun family, including her second uncle who had reached the sixth rank in the Ministry of Rites, there was no trace of them in history.
Regarding Qingling County, there was only a short line: Barbarian soldiers broke through the pass and sacked the city. All able-bodied men in the city were put to the sword, and less than one in ten of the women and children survived.
But this was a full 350 years after Yun Chuji’s time. In 350 years of drastic change, Yun Chuji couldn’t even be sure if the Yun family had already moved away. After all, even when she was alive, although the Yun clan considered Qingling County their ancestral home, they had only been established there for just under seventy years.
Merely one-fifth of 350 years.
But even if the Yun family had moved and escaped the city’s fall, 1,800 years had now passed since Yun Chuji’s era. In such a long time, countless wars, disasters, revolutions, and famines had occurred. Whether the Yun family could have survived, and whether the surviving family was still the same Yun family, was all shrouded in a pessimistic fog that one dared not peer into.
Yun Chuji leaned stiffly against the soft back of the chair, realizing for the first time, in such a concrete way, just how new this so-called new world truly was.
