“Mom… um…”
The voice crawling out of her throat was barely recognizable anymore.
The girl who’d gradually stopped wasting money on cosmetics, who’d once been that bright-eyed small-town overachiever—claiming that title now would probably get her laughed at.
Not that she needed to keep up the pretense anymore.
“Things are a little tight this month.
Could you… lend me two thousand?
No—fifteen hundred would be fine.
I swear I’ll pay you back next month.”
“No, really, nothing’s wrong.
Just a cash flow hiccup.
I promise, Mom—my career’s going great.
I’ll have the money back soon.
Real soon.”
Her gaze drifted to the utility bills spread across her desk.
The hollow look in her eyes had nothing to do with the reassuring tone of her voice.
She’d come to Shanghai alone to make it, and even with a decent degree, finding satisfying work here was brutal.
Especially since she’d majored in animation—and before she’d even landed her first real job, AI art generation had its breakthrough moment.
Practically overnight, it made most artists without a distinctive personal style obsolete.
And why wouldn’t it?
AI drew faster, drew better, never missed a deadline, never needed to be treated with respect.
For any client who just needed quick, serviceable illustrations, choosing AI over a human artist was a no-brainer.
The result: her entire graduating class and a whole generation of artists who’d been scraping by on commissions lost their livelihood in one stroke.
What she was doing now was technically a “new profession” that had emerged in AI art’s wake.
In practice, it meant fixing the details AI got wrong—six-fingered hands, four ears, anatomy that twisted like a funhouse mirror.
Each image took only a few minutes, but the job demanded speed and precision.
She could push through nearly a few hundred images a day.
Fast, efficient—but the commission per image was pathetic.
Anyone with a functioning pair of eyes could do this work.
It was glorified manual labor with a stylus.
Why would anyone pay well for it?
Of course, there was theoretically room to move up.
If she could build a following, get noticed by mobile game studios or indie developers—that’s where the real money was.
But that kind of thinking wasn’t for someone with barely a hundred followers on Pixiv.
When it came down to it, she’d almost stopped drawing her own stuff entirely.
Living in Shanghai meant apartment rent that bled her dry and grocery prices that changed by the day.
If she didn’t grind through the assembly line, the city would slowly push her out like waste through a filtration system.
She’d slink away with nothing to show for it.
On her laptop screen sat a stunningly rendered anime girl—almost perfect, except for the hand, which had contorted into something out of a body-horror film.
She glanced at it and knew instantly the entire figure’s anatomy was off.
Fixing it properly would take about twenty minutes.
She checked the time.
If she only corrected the hand, that was four or five minutes.
The time she saved could go toward more images.
Right now, efficiency was survival.
I could draw something at this level myself, you know.
A few pieces a day, at least, at this quality…
The thought surfaced with a bitter edge, but she knew the math.
AI could generate images at this quality in under a minute.
Hundreds a day, without breaking a sweat.
No human artist could compete on volume.
If your standards weren’t sky-high, there was no reason to hire a person.
She poured herself a cup of hot water and went back to fighting for tomorrow.
At some point—she didn’t know when—she raised her head again and the clock told her she’d been awake for three days straight.
Her last cup of coffee was long gone, and the only thing keeping her upright had been the caffeine already in her bloodstream.
But now the caffeine was gone too, and her body was filing a formal complaint.
Sleep now, or the body’s going to solve the problem the way immune systems do—burn everything down, virus and host alike.
I admit there was an element of gambling, but one of you has to die, and the body’s traditional approach to these things is scorched earth.
She set her alarm.
Three hours of sleep, then she’d knock out the last fifty images.
That would net her about a thousand yuan in commissions.
Dreaming of adding sausage and a fried egg to tomorrow’s instant noodles, she burrowed into her blankets and surrendered her brain—along with her exhaustion—to the mercy of sleep.
Beep-beep-beep—beep-beep-beep—
The old-fashioned alarm clock had no fancy features, but the ones it had were reliable as hell.
The sound was engineered to be obnoxious enough to wake the dead, which was the entire point.
She’d once considered using a favorite song as her ringtone, but after one attempt she discovered that no matter how much she loved a song, the moment it became an alarm sound she’d develop full-blown PTSD toward it within days.
So she’d abandoned that idea.
She dragged herself upright and yawned—a long, resentful yawn soaked in defiance.
Still half-blind with sleep, she followed the path her body knew by rote: sit up, stare blankly for a few seconds, swing legs off the bed, slide into slippers, stumble toward the bathroom.
This path she’d walked a thousand times.
She could do it with her eyes closed.
Except this time, something went wrong.
It happened fast.
Her foot caught on something, her center of gravity lurched forward, and she was falling.
In a rare burst of competence, her cerebellum actually fired—she tried to catch herself with her hands, but her limbs responded with a strange, unfamiliar lag.
She failed.
THUD.
Face-first into the floor.
That woke her up.
“What the—who leaves junk in front of the bathroom?!” She rubbed her nose and peeled herself off the ground, too irritated to process anything else.
The floor was carpeted, oddly—soft enough that she hadn’t earned a nosebleed—and it was around this point that she started noticing things were off.
“…Why are my hands so small?”
She stared at the hand rubbing her nose.
It was definitely smaller than before.
And then it hit her—the world had gotten bigger.
No.
She’d gotten smaller.
This room, which looked vaguely like a school dormitory, was absolutely not her rented studio apartment.
The room was way bigger than her place.
In Shanghai, an apartment this size would run at least four thousand a month.
And it was a double—there was a second bed against the opposite wall, unoccupied, the wall behind it covered in doodles.
“Okay, stay calm.
Maybe I haven’t transmigrated—maybe I just rewound to fifteen.” She pinched her cheek.
Not dreaming.
Then she got up and headed straight for the bathroom, because transmigration or not, the pressure in her bladder had never once shown mercy.
After relieving that particular burden, she finally had time to examine the face in the mirror.
White hair.
Weakness for white-haired characters—certified.
As a gacha character she’d be worth three or four ten-pulls, easy.
Cute.
Hadn’t fully grown into her features yet, but definitely future-beautiful material.
The face?
She was satisfied.
Though it looked nothing like her old self, which meant this probably wasn’t a life-restart success story.
Shame—she’d occasionally memorized market trends just in case.
At least not picking animation as a major would’ve been her one act of defiance.
Just way too young.
Don’t tell me I’ve landed in the Blue Archive universe?
Because that would be terrifying.
If I see anyone with a scribbled-out face, I’m running.
Then she looked up.
And noticed two strange little ears perched on top of her head.
She stared for a very long time.
Then she let out a scream that was not entirely human.
“WHAT THE—CAT EARS?!”