If someone were to ask Ana what exactly happened on that rainy September night, she would pause. Her brows would furrow. Her eyes would squint as if trying to peer through the fog of a memory better left forgotten. She'd scrunch up her face, exhale like something inside her had fractured just a little more, and murmur with lips tight and voice low, "I'm not sure."
Because the truth is—remembering made her sick.
Physically. Spiritually. Elementally.
Thinking back to that night was like dragging her hands through shattered glass and expecting to come out whole. It made her stomach churn, her breath shallow, her mind buzz with static, and her vision glaze over as if someone had drawn a velvet curtain across her eyes—soft and suffocating.
Perhaps that was precisely what had happened.
Perhaps the universe, in its twisted theater of fate, had decided that Anastasia Summers—quiet, clever, not-quite-special-enough Ana—was the perfect vessel. The perfect scapegoat. The perfect sacrifice. So it handed her over on a silver platter to a megalomaniacal, psychopathic, time-traveling bodysnatcher with too many lives and not enough soul. And when it was done with the offering, it wrapped her in a shroud of helplessness so thick she forgot how to scream.
Ana had fought. Oh, she had fought.
Not with fists—she had never been made for those.
But she'd fought in the quiet, intelligent way only girls like her know how.
She'd resisted in the cracks between reality and possession, where her will flickered like a dying candle and her thoughts still had edges.
But she had always been more numbers than knives, more stories than scars.
That didn't mean she was weak—Ana had a spine forged of something older than iron, a kind of stubborn resilience that refused to shatter no matter how many times she was fractured.
But the truth was: she had never been built for war.
Not the kind that demanded soulfire and blood.
And that night? That night was a war she couldn't win.
Somewhere deep inside, in the marrow of her bones, she'd known that resisting would come at a cost too high. That if she fought harder—really fought—the woman would consume her completely. Not just the body. Not just the memories. But the last flickering piece of selfhood Ana had managed to shelter in the dark.
So she did what survivors do.
She retreated.
Let the invader walk her skin. Let her speak with Ana's mouth and touch the world with Ana's fingers.
Let her smile with Ana's teeth and cry with Ana's eyes.
And all the while, Ana sat curled somewhere unseen, fists clenched, fury simmering beneath the surface like a buried volcano—boiling, but not yet erupting.
She watched.
Watched as the bitch—the interloper, the transmigrator, the system's golden girl—rewrote her life into something unrecognizable.
Maybe, in the beginning, Ana was too soft. Too human. Some broken shard of her still believed in the fiction—that this girl had come from another world to make things better. That she would be different. Noble. Heroic.
After all, hadn't Ana read those stories once?
Transmigration novels where the girl always fixed everything?
Where justice was served and villains redeemed and destinies rewritten with love?
But this girl was no savior.
Heroes don't poison innocent girls who get in their way.
Heroes don't rapes and call it strategy.
Heroes don't look you in the eye while wearing your face and say, "She deserved it."
That was the first time Ana's voice sliced through the veil. Rage, it turned out, was a language powerful enough to bleed through dimensions.
The second time came after her parents were murdered—slaughtered like side characters by someone the transmigrator had crossed, a loose thread in the web of chaos she'd spun. They didn't even mean to kill them.
They just wanted to hurt her.
But the puppeteer didn't flinch. Didn't break. Didn't weep.
She shrugged, muttered "Good riddance. Finally," and booked a flight out of the country before the bodies were cold.
Ana's soul shattered in that moment—like glass dropped from the heavens.
She cried in silence, like wind howling through a hollow house.
What followed was a blur.
A chase. A man. A memory that curdled in Ana's chest whenever it surfaced.
She refused to remember him, not properly. Because remembering meant guilt, and guilt meant drowning.
The bitch had chased him for years, used Ana's charm and false kindness, took pills from her system shop. From the ethereal shop, she purchased a batch of bitter pills—empty and hollow-tasting, yet inexplicably vile, as though someone had ground up a soul and packaged it.The pills altered her appearance: more beautiful, more radiant, taller—but so utterly, irrevocably fake.
Prettier. Taller. Radiant.
But inside?
She was a marionette stitched together with ambition and cruelty.
A walking lie.
Like a boxed cake mix slathered in the most exquisite frosting.
She seduced him—then killed him.
On their one-month anniversary.
While he lay beside her, spent and trusting, naked and open and unaware.
She drove the knife in with laughter on her lips. Said he deserved it for saving the world.
Ana wanted to vomit. Wanted to scream. Wanted to gouge out her own heart just to feel something clean again.
But she couldn't.
She could only watch.
And so she hated.
Hated everything.
The system. The transmigrator. The golden finger. The grotesque farce of a plotline.
The greed.
The bloodlust.
The fucking audacity.
And then—one day—Ana woke up.
Five years later.
Five years too late.
And she screamed.
A scream pulled from the depths of her soul—a lungful of rage, desperation, and guilt that had been bottled up for half a decade.
It was not a sound fit for mortals. It ripped out of her chest like the shriek of a forgotten god clawing its way back into the world. A lungful of rage and grief and betrayal, sharpened into a weapon.
She roared toward the heavens. And the heavens answered.
Thunder cracked like bones breaking open. Lightning tore the sky apart, jagged and furious.
And rain—dear gods, the rain—fell like judgment.
As if the rivers of the underworld had burst free, flooding the earth in penance.
As if the world itself had heard Ana's scream and whispered, Finally.