2: Chapter 1: To Become an Umamusume, First You Must…
2: Chapter 1: To Become an Umamusume, First You Must…
“Wait, no!
Cat ears aren’t this long!
Is it a rabbit?
A donkey?” She pinched her ears.
They felt nice and soft, but it didn’t calm her down.
She woke up and wasn’t even human anymore!
Who could she even complain to?
“Wait, I think I have a tail too.” She noticed a soft tail behind her.
Seeing the tail helped her figure out what she was.
“An Umamusume?” As an artist, she was good at identifying visual details—though she did make mistakes sometimes, like mistaking a Scottish Fold for a dog.
But she was pretty sure she got it right this time.
She was definitely an Umamusume.
“Great, I understand everything now.” She nodded to herself.
“Looks like I worked myself to death…” “Hahaha!
I knew doing good deeds in my past life would pay off.
Even if I’m not rich, at least I’m a cute girl.
I knew it…
Haha…
Hahaha…” Her laughter slowly turned into crying.
“But why…
why did I have to die like that…” Is getting isekai actually fun?
She didn’t know.
All she knew was that she would never see her family again.
Her strict but caring father, and her blunt mother who still sent her allowance—they were gone forever.
The worst pain in life is being separated from loved ones.
In a way, being isekai’d is a living separation for the traveler, and a permanent death to the family left behind.
Dying so suddenly didn’t make her excited.
She only felt anxious about this new world and deeply missed the life she lost.
She was someone who went with the flow.
The two bravest things she ever did were studying animation and moving to Shanghai to work.
Failing and dying before making it was incredibly frustrating.
If she had known, she would have gone to grad school instead.
Back then, her teachers thought she had lost her mind when an excellent humanities student liked her chose animation.
They even warned her that the school counselor was there for a reason.
Whether the counselor was useless or not, she did regret her choices.
Her luck was terrible, and maybe she just wasn’t cut out to be an animator.
She loved anime, but she lacked the luck and connections to survive in the industry.
In the end, she was just left behind by the times.
The city was like a machine that never stopped, filtering out the weak.
The filtering process was simple: cost of living.
She had been beaten down by life so much that she was ready to be cast aside.
She just didn’t expect to be discarded completely.
“Well…
crying won’t help.” As she calmed down, her easygoing personality took over.
“I’m already here, so I might as well make the best of it.
But I don’t even know who this girl is…” She wiped her tears and decided to focus on surviving.
If she messed up after getting isekai, she would embarrass all the other transmigrators.
Returning to the dorm room, she started searching the desk for clues about her new identity.
“Let’s see…
Huh, why are all these study guides in Japanese?
Wait, I can read them.
Is this some kind of cheating skill?” The desk was filled with ordinary textbooks and half-finished homework.
The questions were simple enough for elementary schoolers.
Even though she had forgotten most of what she learned in high school, she could solve these easily.
“Japanese schools…” she muttered.
“This is way too easy.
Compared to the crazy academic competition back in China starting from primary school, Japanese kids have it easy.” But this pretty much confirmed she was in Japan, or some alternate version of it.
Japanese was easy to recognize, after all.
With her current fluent Japanese and voice, she could easily be a top-tier voice actress.
Her voice actually sounded a lot like Risa Taneda.
“Please don’t let it be the Blue Archive…
Or Girls’ Frontline.
Arknights is a no-go too.
Damn it, are there any mobile games with a peaceful world?” She thought through all the games on her phone.
Every single one of them had a terrible setting that was completely unfit for an ordinary person trying to live a quiet life.
If it was one of Hoyo’s games, she might as well restart her life right now.
Those games were brutal.
Apparently, mobile game writers couldn’t write a story without throwing in depressing tragedies.
“Animal ears, animal ears…
Almost every mobile game has them.
I can’t use that to figure it out.” She scratched her head and finally pulled a notebook out from a pile of junk.
“Tojo Keiko.” “Here!” She learned her new name from the diary.
Tojo Keiko.
It didn’t sound like a normal name.
She still preferred her old name, but its pronunciation didn’t fit here.
Although it felt a bit rude to the body’s original owner, she really wanted to complain about this name.
Tojo Keiko was an Umamusume born in Hokkaido.
She had no family and no friends.
She was a complete nobody at school and had almost no social life.
She didn’t even talk to her roommate, being introverted to a terrifying degree.
She couldn’t help but sigh.
This girl was a severe case of socially anxious.
As an Umamusume, there seemed to be a very helpful support system in this world.
That was how this poor, parentless girl could go to school on a loan, even if it meant starting her new life in debt.
But after looking into the Umamusume student loan, she realized it was incredibly generous.
The interest rate was so low it was practically free.
“This society is actually pretty nice to Umamusume.” She couldn’t help but feel envious.
On top of that, the repayment terms were very relaxed.
She could delay payments for months, and with a good reason, she could even wait until she officially started racing.
What a lifesaver!
If her past self could have gotten a loan like this, there was no way she would have failed to survive in Shanghai.
Anyway, going to school wasn’t a problem.
She only had to worry a bit about food.
But eating at the cafeteria wouldn’t cost much, and she would get a monthly allowance.
It wasn’t a lot, but since living expenses were low, it was more than enough.
All she could say was— Being an Umamusume was actually great.
As long as she wasn’t forced onto a battlefield like shipgirls, she had nothing to worry about.
Besides, this world seemed very peaceful.
The most popular event was Umamusume racing.
In other words, horse racing.
There were races for mature Umamusume, as well as legend races.
The society was stable, there were no threats, and she had a scholarship.
It seemed she had no worries at all.
“Thank you, Goddess of Reincarnation, for sparing my life!” She clasped her hands together.
She bought some fruit and incense, and began praying right in her dorm room.
She didn’t even know which god she was praying to, but landing in a world like this was a blessing.
With her simple mind, if she had ended up in a cultivation world, she would have been used as a human cauldron and traded a dozen times.
In other game worlds, she would be lucky not to die on the streets.
Only a peaceful daily-life world like this could keep her alive.