Chapter Text
Non Canon accurate
The silence of the classroom had been replaced by the persistent, rhythmic chirping of birds and the rustle of unfamiliar trees. Xinxin blinked, expecting the dull gray of the lecture hall, but instead, her eyes met a sky so blue it felt aggressive.
She tried to push herself up, but her limbs felt heavy, uncoordinated, and significantly longer than they should have been. She looked down. Her clothes were coarse, ill-fitting, and hung off a frame that was undeniably, disturbingly, masculine.
*What is this?* she tried to scream, but the sound that left her throat was deeper, rougher—a stranger's voice.
She wasn't in the classroom. She wasn't in her bed. She was lying in the dirt of a bustling, filthy alleyway in a city that looked like it had been pulled straight from a period drama. The smell of rot and expensive perfume mingled in the air, a sickening cocktail of poverty and opulence.
She scrambled to a nearby rain barrel, ignoring the stinging ache in her new muscles, and peered into the murky reflection. The face staring back wasn't hers. It was a man’s face—sharp-featured, perhaps once handsome, now gaunt and hollowed by exhaustion. A ghost of a person. A character who didn't exist.
"Focus," she muttered to herself, the unfamiliar vocal cords vibrating in her chest. "Xinxin, breathe. You died. You fell asleep in Economics and you didn't wake up. This is… where?"
She pushed herself to her feet, her center of gravity feeling completely off. As she stumbled toward the edge of the alley, a flash of white hair caught her eye.
There, standing near a bakery, surrounded by a small crowd of jeering merchants and cold-eyed nobles, was a woman. She looked fragile, her eyes wide with a mixture of terror and confusion.
*Rashta.*
The name hit Xinxin like a physical blow. The webcomic—the novel—the tragedy. The runaway slave who would be chewed up and spat out by the very people currently laughing at her.
Xinxin felt a familiar, burning heat trace the lines of her palm. Her magic. It hadn't died with her body. It was thrumming under her skin, ancient and temperamental, a tether to the life she had just lost and the school she used to attend.
One of the nobles, a man with a sneer so practiced it looked like a permanent deformity, reached out to shove the girl.
"Filthy commoner," the man spat. "Know your place."
The old, righteous fury that Xinxin had spent a lifetime trying to temper flared, but this time, it was fueled by the raw, untamed mana of this world. She looked at her hands—the hands of a stranger—and realized she didn't have to be a spectator anymore.
She didn't care about the plot. She didn't care about the Empire. But she hated bullies, and she really, really hated the nobility.
Xinxin took her first step out of the alley, her jaw set, her mind racing. *If this world is going to make me a man, I’m going to make sure these men regret ever thinking they owned the ground they walked on.*