"Li Na, you have to wake up and tell me what that old hag said to you. You're my only hope to escape this endless cycle."
***
'Where am I?' Li Na thought to herself as she opened her eyes. She looked around and was shocked by her surroundings. She was in a classroom. 'The last thing I remember is looking back to find that old woman gone. Why am I suddenly in a classroom?' She glanced at the other people in the classroom who were all looking at her awkwardly.
"Li Na!" A shout came from the front of the room. Li Na shifted her gaze to the front of the room to see a middle-aged woman glaring at her. Li Na returned her gaze and the room stilled as others saw the sharp glint in her eyes that was only partially covered by her hair draped in front of her face. "I I asked..." the middle-aged woman stuttered before pausing. She took a deep breath and collected herself. "I asked you to come to the front and solve this problem."
Li Na casually glanced at the board to see a math problem. Everything about this moment felt familiar to Li Na, if she remembered correctly this was the time the math teacher singled her out for falling asleep in class. 'How did I end up back here again?' If she remembered correctly, she was too timid to go up to the front of the room to answer this question.
"Miss Fei, she probably doesn't know the answer," a haughty girl gloated. Li Na recognized this girl, she was the ringleader of the bullies that used to torment her in school. She came from a wealthy family so she felt it was only right to torment those she deemed less than her.
"If you don't know the answer why didn't you just say you don't know? Stop wasting everyone's time," Miss Fei berated. Now that Li Na's eyes left her she regained some of her confidence.
"Who says I don't know the answer?" Li Na's voice reminded the others in the room of a cold winter breeze. 'Did I really reincarnate? She remembered the old lady's words from before. 'What if you had the chance to start again? Would you change nothing? Would you still choose to isolate yourself and avoid those that want to be your friend?' The words were still fresh in her mind because it was the last conversation she had before she found herself here. 'Hah, who would want to be friends with someone who can barely afford to eat? What's the point of starting over, I won't have the means to change anything until much later anyways. I still won't be able to save my mother.'
"Well if you know the answer, why are you still sitting there?" Miss Fei yelled again.
"Such a nuisance," Li Na muttered. She rose from her desk and walked to the board. She casually wrote '42' at the end of the equation and went back to her seat. She didn't feel like she did anything unusual but she forgot to take into account that she was used to being one of the wealthiest CEOs in the country and her attitude and bearing had become second nature to her.
The others in the class immediately noticed though. All they could think was 'why does this penniless beggar have the aura of a queen?'
Miss Fei on the otherhand was shocked. She had intentionally wrote out a problem that was way beyond the level that high school students could comprehend to teach Li Na a lesson for falling asleep in her class. She never expected Li Na to write the answer so easily without having to work out the problem first. She was well aware that Li Na was the top student in the school, but even still she herself wouldn't have been able to solve this problem so easily if she hadn't been handed the answer with the problem by someone who was trying to cause Li Na problems. "That is correct. Please pay more attention in class."
It wasn't til this moment that Li Na realized her mistake. 'How could I be so foolish as to forget this was a trap? I should have atleast wrote some nonesense up there to stay low key.' After only a few seconds of reflection the bell for lunch period rang and everyone headed out. Li Na hated lunch period the most. Since her and her mother were so poor, she usually had to skip lunch. She decided to go to her normal seclusion spot outside in the grass in a little alcove created by bushes. Little did she know that the people who had tried to trap her to make a mockery of her were following behind.
Near the bushes the haughty voice called out. "Li Na, just who were you trying to show off for? No one is going to pay any more attention to you just because you happened to be able to solve that problem. Remember, the nail that sticks up gets hammered down."
Li Na stared cooly at the foolish children before her. In the past she would have been scared of these girls, but now she just thought they were idiots. The one who spoke, Jiang Mei, was the daughter of her first stepping stone in the past. She infiltrated Jiang Corp just after university for revenge. She collected all the dirty deeds of the company as she quickly rose in rank. Then she blackmailed CEO Jiang with all the evidence she had collected to sign the company over to her. Of course after she got what she wanted, she still released all the evidence, bringing about the downfall of the Jiangs. Did they think she was foolish enough to leave them a way out? She then restructured the company from the ground up and named it Li Corp. Unfortunately just as she had the money to give her mother a better life, her mother passed away.
"Sis Mei is talking to you Li Na, who do you think you are?" The impudent girl slapped Li Na making her fall over. It's not that Li Na didn't want to stop the slap, but her body wasn't very strong due to being malnurished.
Right at this moment, a dashing youth stepped into the alcove. "What's going on here?"