Chapter 1
Chapter 1: Transmigrator Jiang Jiang
Jianping, Year Three. First Month. Twenty-Fifth Day.
Windy. Light snow.
Mother dragged my brother out at dawn to shop at the market. Officially, it was so he could help carry things. In reality… she wanted him out of the house, breathing a little, and not chewing himself to pieces with nerves. After all… the results list would be posted in a few days, and whether he became a provincial graduate came down to this one exam.
Honestly, I think Mother worries too much. My brother looks utterly convinced, wearing that sweet, sticky kind of confidence like a winter coat. He doesn’t seem to have even considered the possibility of failing.
He’s sure he’ll pass, just like Gu Yan Qing did seven years ago—rising from a poor home, shooting straight up the ladder.
Heh.
No offense, but next to Gu Yan Qing, he’s just… my brother.
Actually, scratch that. Those two aren’t even comparable, okay?
I already started a betting pool with Dad. I threw in everything I own. My bet: my brother fails.
The diary ended there, cut off mid-thought.
In the capital’s Outer City, on Willow Spring Lane, at the Jiang family home—
Jiang Jiang stood by the window in a thick goose-yellow padded jacket, watching snowflakes drift from a dull, heavy sky. The steady fall made her mind go a little blank.
Was this the first snow she had seen in this world since she transmigrated into the book?
Yes.
Jiang Jiang was a transmigrator. In her old world, she’d worked while studying, grinding her way through college, ready to finally spread her wings after graduation. Then she took one nap and woke up here—turned into a girl with the same name, the same face, the same everything.
This world’s Jiang Jiang was only sixteen. More precisely, she still had more than five months until her birthday—the day of her coming-of-age ceremony.
So if she had to name her biggest gain from transmigrating into a book, it was this: she got younger.
And she hated it.
She was in her prime, thank you very much. She refused to be treated like a child.
She’d been here more than half a month now. The original owner’s memories came in fragments, like torn scraps she kept finding under her pillow. The girl had been born prematurely, sickly since childhood. Before Jiang Jiang arrived, the original owner caught a brutal cold—what people here called cold-damage fever.
She didn’t make it.
The original owner died, and Jiang Jiang had no idea what kind of absurd tug of time and space yanked her over and dropped her into this fragile body.
As she pieced those memories together, Jiang Jiang discovered something even more ridiculous: the world she’d transmigrated into was the world of a novel she’d been following online not long ago.
Fine. If you were going to fall into a book, at least there was a perk—script in hand, she could rule the world.
If she’d landed as a key character—like a vicious female side character or some cannon-fodder villain—she might have pulled off a glorious comeback.
Who even wanted to read about a brainless, sweet-and-innocent heroine these days?
A transmigrated side character going on a rampage—that would be satisfying.
Unfortunately… Jiang Jiang’s current identity was painfully awkward.
She was the Jiang family’s daughter on Willow Spring Lane, Jiang Jiang—so unimportant in the original novel that she didn’t even qualify for a proper introduction. A pure background extra.
If she absolutely had to point to a connection with the main plot, it was this: her third grandaunt’s daughter-in-law’s niece’s husband’s cousin was the daughter of District Official Huang of the Five-City Military Patrol Office—Huang E Er.
And Huang E Er barely mattered in the book, either. She was one of those minor characters who showed up now and then, cheering beside a cannon-fodder female side character like an enthusiastic accessory.
Jiang Jiang wasn’t looking down on minor characters. Really. At least Huang E Er had a name in the original.
As for her?
She was Wu Ming. A nameless passerby. Pure background scenery.