“Wait—no, cat ears aren’t this long!
Rabbit?
Donkey?” She pinched one of her little ears.
Nice texture, but that did nothing to calm her nerves.
She’d gone to sleep a human being and woken up as something else entirely.
Who was she supposed to file a complaint with?!
“Hold on—there’s a tail too.”
She’d only just noticed the sleek little tail trailing behind her.
Through the tail, she could start narrowing things down.
“An umamusume?” As an artist—former artist—she had at least a baseline ability to identify animal features.
Though it did occasionally fail her, like the time she’d mistaken a Scottish Fold for a puppy.
But this time she was fairly certain.
She was a horse girl.
“Excellent.
I’m beginning to understand everything.” She nodded slowly.
“Looks like I worked myself to death.”
“Ha ha ha—I always knew my good karma would pay off!
Even if my next life wasn’t going to be rich and powerful, at least I’d come back as a cute girl.
See?
Ha ha… ha ha… ha…” The laughter curdled into something wet and broken.
“Why… why did I just die like that…”
Is transmigration really something to be happy about?
She didn’t know.
She only knew one thing: she would probably never see her family again.
Her father, who was strict but genuinely cared about her.
Her mother, who wasn’t exactly warm but still sent living expenses every month.
Gone.
Just like that.
There is nothing more painful than separation and loss.
In a way, transmigration is the transmigrator’s farewell—and a funeral for everyone left behind.
Dying out of nowhere like this, with no warning, no goodbye—she couldn’t find any excitement or anticipation in it.
Only the anxiety of a new world and the longing for the old one.
She was the kind of person who went with the flow.
The two bravest decisions in her entire life had been choosing animation as her major and moving to Shanghai to make it.
And she hadn’t even made it before the credits rolled.
Honestly, it was devastating.
If she’d known, she would’ve just kept studying.
A top-performing humanities student choosing animation—her teachers had thought she might be having some kind of episode.
One of them had very seriously reminded her that the school counselor was not just there for decoration.
Whether or not the school counselor was decorative was beside the point.
She did have regrets.
On one hand, her luck had been genuinely terrible.
On the other—maybe she’d never been cut out to be an animator.
She loved animation but lacked the luck and connections to make it as a professional.
All she could do was wait for the era to leave her behind.
A city is a machine that never stops.
Waste gets filtered out on schedule, and the filter is simple: the crushing pressure of daily life.
She’d been beaten tender by it long ago and had already prepared herself to be expelled.
She just hadn’t expected the expulsion to be quite this permanent.
“…Crying’s not going to fix anything.” By the time she pulled herself out of the emotional spiral, her go-with-the-flow nature had already kicked in with its unique brand of resilience.
“I’ve transmigrated.
What am I supposed to do about it?
Roll with it, I guess.
First things first—I don’t even know who this girl I’ve taken over actually is.”
She wiped the tears from her eyes and decided to survive in this new world first.
If she ended up living just as miserably after transmigrating, that would be an insult to every isekai protagonist who’d come before her.
Back in the dorm room, she started searching the desk for clues about her predecessor.
“Let me see… Why are all these study guides in Japanese?
Oh—I can read them, though.
Transmigrator perk?” The desk held perfectly ordinary textbooks and half-finished homework.
Elementary-level problems, the kind any grade schooler could breeze through.
She scanned them; even with most of what she’d learned returned to her high school teachers, this was no challenge.
“Japanese education standards…” she mused.
“Talk about a difficulty downgrade.
Compared to China, where the grind starts in elementary school, Japan’s practically playing on Easy Mode.”
That more or less confirmed she was in Japan—or at least some alternate-universe equivalent.
The Japanese was unmistakable, and her current fluency plus her voice?
She could pass for a top-tier voice actress.
Sounded a bit like Taneda Risa, actually.
Please don’t let this be Blue Archive.
Or Girls’ Frontline.
Arknights would also be bad.
Seriously, is there a single gacha game out there with a setting that isn’t a dystopian nightmare?
She mentally scrolled through every game on her phone.
Every setting had major problems.
None of them were suitable for an ordinary person trying to live a quiet life.
If it’s a miHoYo game, I might as well hit the reset button right now.
Those people don’t treat characters like human beings.
God forbid a gacha game write a story without twisting the knife.
“Animal ears, animal ears… basically every gacha game has them.
Can’t use that as a diagnostic.” She scratched her head and finally unearthed something that looked like a notebook from the pile of clutter.
“Toujou Kaisoku.”
“Present!” She’d found her name in the diary.
Toujou Kaisoku.
It didn’t even sound like a proper name.
She much preferred her old one—though that pronunciation didn’t exactly fit here.
It might be rude to the original owner of this body, but she really, really wanted to roast this name.
Toujou Kaisoku was an umamusume.
Born in Hokkaido.
No family.
No friends.
A ghost at school with virtually zero social connections.
She hadn’t even bothered talking to her own roommate—her introversion bordered on pathological.
This girl was a hardcore shut-in, huh—
As an umamusume, it turned out this world had a convenient support system.
That was how an orphan like Toujou Kaisoku had managed to stay in school through student loans.
Starting life in debt wasn’t ideal, but after studying the terms of the umamusume student loan program, she discovered the interest rate was practically a miracle—barely above the bank’s base rate.
This society treats umamusume pretty well, huh—
She couldn’t help but feel envious.
The repayment schedule was generous too.
Extensions were available for special circumstances, and if needed, payments could even be deferred until she officially entered racing.
What kind of saintly lending institution was this?!
If her past self had access to loans like these, there was no way she’d have gone under in Shanghai.
Schooling wasn’t a problem.
At most she’d need to watch her food budget, but eating three meals a day at the cafeteria wouldn’t cost much.
There was even a monthly stipend—not a fortune, but against the low cost of living, it was more than enough.
All she could say was—
Being an umamusume was actually pretty great.
As long as she wasn’t being conscripted to fight on the front lines like some ship girl, she had nothing to worry about.
And this world seemed peaceful.
The most popular thing here was… umamusume racing.
Competitive sprinting events of all kinds—not just Honkaku-ka races for fully awakened umamusume, but also legendary exhibition matches.
Stable society.
Nothing alarming.
Plus financial aid.
No downsides in sight.
Thank you, Goddess of Transmigration, for sparing my life!
She pressed her palms together, bought some fruit and incense, and started performing what could generously be called a ritual right there in the dormitory.
She had no idea which deity she was praying to, but landing in a world like this was genuinely a blessing.
With her level of street smarts, a cultivation world would’ve seen her used as a human furnace and resold a dozen times over.
Any other gacha world and dying in a ditch would’ve been the optimistic outcome.
Only a slice-of-life setting like this could keep her alive.