Endless, pitch-black abyss, dead and stifling to the point of suffocation.
No light, no wind, no trace of time flowing.
A woman in white floated quietly in the center of the nothingness, her limbs hanging limp, her brows devoid of life. The vibrant aura around her had been completely hollowed out, leaving her like an empty shell abandoned by the world, long stripped of all emotion and obsession.
She had drifted here for far too long.
So long that her memories had weathered away, so long that love and hate had cleared to zero, so long that she had almost forgotten who she was, forgotten all the scorching and festering past of the mortal world.
Faint, chaotic human voices penetrated layer upon layer through the heavy darkness, fragmented, clear, and painfully familiar.
“Yuexi, I know you must have come to Tianhai Academy because of me. I understand your feelings now! I’ve waited for you for so long, and finally, I’ve waited for you!”
“Jiang Haohan, you’ve misunderstood.”
The noisy, greasy, paranoid confession kept echoing in her ears like a worn-out tape playing on repeat.
Su Yuhan’s chaotic consciousness trembled slowly.
So noisy.
Really too noisy.
Trapped in boundless darkness for who knows how long, her soul silent and barren, yet she was being dragged back firmly by this deeply engraved old time.
Her heavy eyelids twitched slightly, and the nerves that had been taut for countless ages relaxed bit by bit.
The next second.
Blinding white light suddenly burst open, stabbing fiercely into her long-sealed vision.
Su Yuhan instinctively frowned and closed her eyes, raising a hand to cover them, her fingertips trembling slightly. As the sharp brightness faded, the empty scene gradually solidified and fell into place.
The familiar corner of the playground, the verdant old trees, the lazy afternoon breeze, the confronting figures of a young man and woman.
It was Tianhai Academy.
It was the day her nightmare began.
It was the exact moment when Chu Yuexi, in front of everyone, forcibly kissed her, entangled with her, and completely disrupted the trajectory of her entire life.
Su Yuhan froze in place, her brain experiencing a total system crash.
The piercing pain, despair, suffocation, and utter hopelessness of jumping from a building to her death in her previous life still lingered deep within her soul, yet in the blink of an eye, she had actually returned to the starting point where everything had yet to collapse.
Not far away, Jiang Hao, the young master of Haoyu Group, holding a bouquet of flowers with self-righteous deep affection in his eyes, pressed step by step toward the cold, stunningly beautiful woman before him.
Chu Yuexi stood beneath the tree, her posture upright, her brows and eyes extremely cold.
That breathtakingly cold and aloof face didn’t show a trace of emotion; deep within her eyes even lurked a trace of extremely faint, almost biting coldness and murderous intent, filled with extreme disgust toward the man entangling her.
However, when her gaze quietly drifted toward behind the tree,
In a moment when no one noticed, the cold corners of her mouth curved in an extremely subtle way.
Extremely faint, extremely light, carrying a hint of premeditated, hidden excitement.
High heels tapped lightly against the ground, the crisp sound drawing closer from afar.
Chu Yuexi walked step by step toward behind the tree, her stunning face right up close, exquisite to the point of sharpness.
Even after experiencing a lifetime of bone-deep hatred, facing this face that could captivate all living beings once more, Su Yuhan’s breath still inevitably hitched for a split second.
The scenes of her previous life surged frantically.
It was also on this day that she was cornered and robbed by hoodlums outside the school, looking utterly wretched, when Chu Yuexi suddenly appeared and saved her.
Ignorant and young, she fell head over heels at a single glance, plunging from then on into this inescapable debt of fate, obsessed with her, humble for her, covered in scars for her, and ultimately ending up with a destroyed body and shattered soul.
And herself at this moment, hiding behind the tree, originally secretly admiring and watching from afar, was about to become Chu Yuexi’s shield to reject her pursuer.
A wave of absurd sourness and grievance welled up in Su Yuhan’s heart.
So, she had been reborn?
Reborn back to the exact second this absurd entangling relationship began?
Before she could pull herself out of the massive shock, a cool, soft breath suddenly descended.
Their lips touched.
Icy, soft, delicate.
The sensation, carved deep into the marrow of her soul, instantly swept over all her senses.
Su Yuhan’s entire body trembled violently.
In her memory, it was clearly just a hasty, brief kiss, stopping at a shallow touch, used merely to brush off Jiang Hao.
Yet this time was different.
Chu Yuexi’s kiss carried a forceful aggressiveness. Before she could react, the damp and warm tip of her tongue pried open her lips and teeth, sweeping in tyrannically yet tenderly, lingering to an excessive degree, deep and scorching.
The air heated up, and her heartbeat fell entirely out of order.
Su Yuhan’s pupils dilated, her entire mind thoroughly stunned.
No!
It wasn’t like this in her past life!
This was fundamentally not that kiss from her memory!
The intense sense of suffocation, the ambiguous shiver, the oncoming uniquely cold aura belonging to Chu Yuexi, it was terrifyingly real and painfully vivid.
Pain, itchiness, numbness, chaos.
All her emotions exploded in an instant.
‘Slap,’
A crisp, resounding slap suddenly shattered the peaceful afternoon.
The force was immense, shaking Su Yuhan’s own palm until it felt numb and ached.
Chu Yuexi was caught off guard and had her face knocked to the side, a clear red mark instantly blooming on her fair cheek.
That pair of eyes, usually detached and cold, were for the first time stained with genuine astonishment and blankness, staring straight at the flustered, breathing heavily, teary-eyed girl before her.
Su Yuhan’s heart beat wildly, shocked, furious, and in utter disbelief.
She abruptly turned her hand over and pinched the flesh on her back hard.
The sharp, direct pain instantly crushed her last trace of wishful thinking.
It wasn’t a dream.
It was real.
She had truly returned, reborn from the abyss of death.
Back to the very moment when her ill-fated entanglement with Chu Yuexi began.
In her previous life, she had fallen humbly, been manipulated, entangled, and consumed, until she had nothing left and jumped to her death in despair.
In this lifetime, she would never repeat the same mistakes.
“Yuexi!”
Jiang Hao, who had been in a daze for a long time nearby, snapped back to reality, his pupils shattering as he rushed forward like a madman to shield Chu Yuexi behind him.
He was completely dumbfounded.
The cold goddess he crazily adored and couldn’t attain had publicly kissed an unknown student.
The most absurd part was,
She had also been slapped fiercely across the face by the other person.
Jiang Hao’s mind descended into total chaos, furious and shocked, his worldview collapsing directly.
Yet, seeing Chu Yuexi struck, he was instantly consumed by blinding rage, grabbing Su Yuhan’s wrist with fierce strength.
“What class are you in?! How dare you hit someone?!”
The hostility in his eyes was enough to devour someone whole.
Su Yuhan calmed down instantly, a flash of cold, biting mockery passing through her eyes.
Returned through rebirth, she remembered every single instance of bullying, scheming, and plotting from her previous life with crystal clarity.
Jiang Hao, this self-righteous, narrow-minded scumbag, because of his jealousy over Chu Yuexi treating her specially, had secretly tripped her up countless times in her past life, destroying countless opportunities for her.
And there was also that arrogant, domineering noble Class C Zhang Qiaoqiao, who repeatedly used her name to stir up trouble and ultimately made her take the blame.
In her past life, she suffered all kinds of grievances; in this life, she would exact revenge for every single one of them!
Su Yuhan immediately put on an arrogant front, raised her eyes, and rebuked coldly: “I am Zhang Qiaoqiao from noble Class C! You dare lay a hand on me? Believe it or not, I’ll make sure you can’t stay at Tianhai Academy another day!”
As soon as these words came out, Jiang Hao’s fury flared even higher.
As a specially hired tutor at an elite school and the young master of the Jiang family, when had he ever been talked back to and threatened like this by a mere student from Class C?
“Good! A fine Zhang Qiaoqiao! I’d like to see how you make me scram today! You’ll regret what you’ve done sooner or later!”
Watching Jiang Hao’s flustered, exasperated appearance on the verge of total rage, Su Yuhan felt nothing left in her heart save for a cold, mocking sense of exhilaration.
Awesome.
Really, truly awesome.
The pent-up gloom of an entire lifetime finally had an outlet to vent at this moment.
For now, she couldn’t touch or provoke Chu Yuexi.
But these sycophantic, bullying-the-weak-and-fearing-the-strong ants, she would settle accounts with them one by one!
A flash of cunning and resoluteness crossed Su Yuhan’s eyes. Facing the furious Jiang Hao, she crisply and decisively made a mocking gesture.
“Stupid simp, *********.”
With that, before Jiang Hao could completely erupt, she yanked her hand away from his grip, turned around, and bolted at a full sprint, escaping the scene cleanly.
“Zhang, Qiao, qiao!!!”
Jiang Hao’s furious roar echoed across the entire playground, startling the birds in the treetops into scattering in all directions.
The commotion lingered long after.
Only Chu Yuexi beneath the tree stood quietly in place.
The slap mark on her cheek was clear and burning, yet she felt not a shred of anger.
All shock and astonishment had completely faded.
She watched the girl’s flustered yet vibrant and spirited retreating figure, while deep, immensely tender amusement slowly bloomed within her cold, detached eyes.
Hidden, paranoid, and determined to win.
The corners of her mouth curved uncontrollably high.