Ugh, what the hell? Why is my head pounding like this? It feels like someone's using a sledgehammer on my brain.
A sudden realization hits. Oh, yeah... I drank way too much last night.
It all comes back in flashes—last night after a grueling day at work, that insufferable boss of mine insisted I join him for a so-called "
After party." He wouldn't take no for an answer, and before I knew it, drink after drink kept coming my way.
Groaning, I rub my forehead, but the pain doesn't let up. It's not just a regular hangover—this feels worse, like my head's about to split open. Did I drink something expired? Or maybe someone spiked it? Ugh...
"Fourth Brother! I obviously like you so much! Why do you treat me like this? Why do you help her?"
The voice was shrill and laced with desperation—so much so that Divya felt her soul tremble at its intensity.
What the hell? Who on earth would spout something like this while digging for wild vegetables?
Then it hit her.
It's me.
Divya froze. The sound of her voice, unfamiliar yet undeniably her own, echoed in her ears.
I sat up, blinking hard to focus. Instead of my apartment, or even a gutter somewhere—classic drunk person territory—I was surrounded by... trees. A lot of trees. Way too many trees.
I frowned, squinting around. "Wait a damn minute. A forest? Where the hell did a forest come from? I live in the middle of the city!"
I scrambled to my feet, the world tilting slightly as I wobbled like a drunk flamingo. The air was crisp, fresh, and smelled like nature—something I hadn't encountered since my disastrous camping trip in sixth grade.
And then I saw it.
At first, I thought it was a hill. A normal, boring hill. But then the hill started... moving.
"What the—" I squinted harder. The hill wasn't just moving. It was floating. Like, defying-gravity-floating. Like, shouldn't-this-be-illegal floating.
I stared, slack-jawed, as it hovered higher and higher, revealing other floating islands just hanging in the air like some kind of magical landscape straight out of a video game.
I laughed nervously, slapping my own cheek. "Okay, okay, this is fine. I'm just still drunk. This is, like, a hallucination or something. Right?"
Wrong.
Before I could come up with a rational explanation, a loud rustling came from behind me. Not the gentle rustle of leaves in the breeze, no. This was the sound of something big. Something very big.
I turned around slowly, every nerve in my body screaming don't look, don't look, don't look. But of course, I looked.
And there it was.
A massive, hulking creature burst through the trees, its glowing eyes locked on me like I was an all-you-can-eat buffet.
I threw my hands in the air. "Oh, come ON! I just wanted a hangover cure, not a death sentence!"
The creature growled, and I immediately regretted everything.
"Roar!"
A deafening growl snapped her out of her thoughts. Divya whirled around just in time to see the leopard demon lunge at her, its claws gleaming like daggers. Her instincts kicked in, and she dove to the side, rolling clumsily across the dirt.
Pain shot through her shoulder, but she scrambled to her feet, her eyes narrowing.
Why the hell is it chasing me?
As soon as the thought formed, a torrent of memories flooded her mind. Her breathing hitched, and she gripped the ground to steady herself.
She had crossed into another world.
No, not just any world. A book.
The realization slammed into her like a rogue wave. Divya had been reading this very story—a trashy cultivation novel she picked up while procrastinating on coding projects. She never finished it, finding the plot cliché and the heroine insufferable. Yet here she was, dumped into the life of Xiaopang, a cannon-fodder side character .
Worse, Divya knew exactly where she was in the timeline. The scene playing out now was one of the most critical moments in the novel.
The leopard demon attack.
In the original book, this was the event that catapulted the heroine, Xiaopang, to fame. Xiaoyu—her sister in this world—was a quintessential Mary Sue: blessed with unparalleled beauty, divine talent, and a knack for making every male character her devoted lapdog. She was destined to slay the leopard demon and secure her place as a core disciple.
And Xiaopang? She was destined to fail spectacularly.
The original Xiaopang had been nothing more than a scapegoat, her death serving as a plot device to highlight Xiaoyu's virtues. She was weak, vain, and painfully ordinary, with her only "talent" being brute strength—a skill completely devalued in the cultivation world.
In other words, Xiaopang was just some cosmic garbage bag tossed into this world to make the female lead look good. Because, obviously, no one appreciates light without some poor schmuck drowning in darkness. Great. Fantastic. She was that schmuck.
As she stood there, mentally cursing the universe and contemplating whether she'd somehow offended the gods by skipping a temple visit or something, a low growl echoed through the air.
If not, then why would God send her into a novel based on the Chinese ancient world type? Cultivation? She does not even know what the damn cultivation is. For her, cultivation means the plant growing and dying. After all, where the place she comes from, there is only one type of cultivation when she thinks about it. And that is going into the mountain and then sitting there praying. Or just be in the prayer so long that day does not come down. So how would she know what the hell is the cultivation? And secondly, she is not even a Chinese. So does it make sense to send her in a world where that was based on a Chinese novel? Okay, yeah, she read it. Okay, it's her fault to read a Chinese novel.
But it was damn translated in English. If the author has the guts to translated in English, then why does not God throw her in a world based on some English thing?