"Mother, my sister fell into the water last night and still hasn’t woken up. She’s not dead, is she?!"
"What are you panicking for? She’s still breathing. I’ll help her up now. You, hurry up and give her the medicine."
Ugh—
A large amount of liquid was poured into her mouth. It was icy cold and had a fishy taste as it went down her throat. The shock of it jolted Feng Si from her dazed, half-conscious state, and her eyes snapped open.
She saw a porcelain bowl being moved away from her face. Her gaze followed the hand holding it upward to a red-haired young woman in a white, waist-cinching long dress. The girl was staring at her with wide eyes, and a moment later, a surprised voice called out.
"You’re finally awake! You scared me to death." Feng Lian looked at her sister, forgetting to even set down the porcelain bowl in her hands. Her face was pale with lingering shock.
’Who is she?’
Feng Si’s mind was a complete blur. She couldn’t find a single memory of the young woman in front of her.
She lifted her head, about to ask, when she belatedly realized someone was holding her up. She turned to look.
A middle-aged, red-haired woman was holding her by the shoulders. When their eyes met, the woman let go, pushing her to lie back down on the stone bed. Her voice was tinged with complaint when she spoke:
"Feng Si, as a female, you can’t just run around wherever you please. If your brother hadn’t been watching you this time, you would have drowned."
’Drowned?’
’What’s going on?!’
Feng Si only remembered being home for summer vacation. She’d been helping her great-uncle with farm work for several days straight. Then, at high noon, she’d drunk a glass of ice water. The heirloom Jade Ring on her chest had suddenly turned cold, and her vision went black before she passed out.
Now, she had been woken up by having cold liquid forced down her throat, and the rush of memories made her head throb with intense pain.
She instinctively raised a hand to her temple. For the moment, she had no energy to figure out who these two red-haired women were. Her eyes were glazed over with pain.
In the eyes of the other two, her silent, head-bowed posture looked like docile obedience.
Seeing this, the middle-aged, red-haired Feng Huan sat on the edge of the stone bed. She looked at Feng Si and said, "You may be a low-level female with low fertility, but your life is still precious to the Beast God. The forest is dangerous, so don’t go sneaking off again."
Her eyes were reproachful and her voice turned stern. "Your beast-father may be dead, but you’re not a child anymore. Stop making me worry. You should learn from your sister. I’m not expecting you to find a powerful Beastman and bear strong offspring to support your seven brothers, but you could at least be more sensible."
Here, the males of the Beast Clan had evolved to become the planet’s highly intelligent dominant species.
They could switch freely between their human and beast forms. Because of their innately violent bloodline, the stronger their combat prowess, the more aggressive they became.
They spent so much time consumed by violent, bloodthirsty emotions that their rationality would gradually fray, causing their minds to regress toward a primal, bestial nature that knew only slaughter.
Only bonding with a female’s pheromones could soothe them. Coupled with the fact that only females could bear powerful bloodlines, their social status was extremely high.
In a world with far more males than females, Feng Huan, as a rare female, had taken four male beasts as mates, but had unfortunately only borne nine children in her lifetime.
Five were sub-females and two were Beastmen, all with mediocre combat abilities.
Thankfully, she had also borne two females. Although her younger daughter was identified as a low-level female at the Sacrificial Hall after coming of age, her elder daughter was an Advanced one.
Female fertility was classified into four levels. So even though none of her sons were powerful, their family could still live in the forest after she grew old, all thanks to her elder daughter’s status.
Feng Si: "..."
’Wait!’
A sudden jolt went through Feng Si. ’Beastmen? Females? What is all this?’
’Don’t tell me I’ve been transmigrated into a Beastman World!’
’The kind of Beastman World where all sorts of modern animals can transform into people? The kind from those novels where you can live a life of luxury just by having babies?’
’I must be dreaming...’
She lowered the hand from her head and lay back on the rock-hard stone slab. As if to escape reality, she pulled a brownish fur blanket over herself and serenely closed her eyes again.
Seeing her silence, Feng Lian placed the porcelain bowl on the side of the stone bed. She walked over to stand by Feng Huan and looked at Feng Si, her voice soft and delicate. "Mother, my sister’s fertility is already lower than mine. Don’t put any more pressure on her."
"I was just trying to..." Feng Huan started, but halfway through her sentence, she glanced at Feng Si on the stone bed, her eyes wide, and swallowed the rest of her words.
The uneven stone slab was digging painfully into Feng Si’s back. Any attempt to pretend this was all a dream was shattered by the sharp pain, and her heart felt like it was breaking too.
She really wasn’t in the mood to deal with these two.
She opened her eyes again and turned her head, her expression blank. "Both of you, get out... I need some time."
Seeing the ghastly pale look on Feng Si’s face, the two of them didn’t say anything more and left.
Bright white sunlight filtered through the thick cloth curtain hanging over the window, casting a patch of light on the dark wood floor.
The small, dimly lit room could be taken in at a glance. A stone bed that took up half the space was piled with two soft, brown fur blankets. A low wooden cabinet sat at the foot of the bed. Besides that, there was no other furniture, and the entire place exuded an air of poverty.
Feng Si surveyed the bare room, propping herself up with an annoyed grunt. She moved her limbs, which had gone numb from lying down for so long. After a moment, she raised a hand to her chest, feeling for where the Jade Ring had been.
She didn’t feel the Jade Ring. Instead, a space the size of a watermelon suddenly appeared in her mind. At the same time, she understood why she was here.
She had died from drinking ice water while she was sweating profusely, trying to cool down.
The Jade Ring on her chest had been created by one of her ancestors, who possessed a Space Ability, and was left for their descendants. Sensing her life fading, it had initiated a spatial transfer at the critical moment, bringing her to this Beast World.
"...So I’m really dead?!"
"No way! All I did was drink a glass of ice water! AHHHH! This is so unfair!"
"I don’t want this stupid space, I want to go back! I want my world with the internet! Jade Ring, send me back!!"
Feng Si, who had just started to enjoy the wonders of college, was on the verge of a breakdown. As she spread her arms and prayed to the heavens, she caught a startling glimpse of a figure peeking in through the doorway of the cave.
It was Feng Lun, her sister who was only a year older. A pair of twitching gray wolf ears sat atop her short red hair. The young woman’s round, almond-shaped brown eyes were filled with deep confusion. "Is your chest bothering you from the water?"
"No." Feng Si quickly lowered her hands.
Hearing Feng Si’s reply, Feng Lun grumbled, "Then what were you yelling about? We’re too poor to have any sub-female slaves to order around. You’re a female, so you don’t have to work, but I still have to grind grain to make our meals. Mother told me to keep an eye on you, and she said if anything else happens to you, she’ll have my hide."
The sorrow Feng Si felt over her transmigration quickly turned to horror at the world she now faced.
’This is a slave society!’
’They treat their own kind like property? Where life and death depend on the master’s whim?’