Seraphine Voss had tried to ascend four times.
Every single time, she had gritted her teeth and powered through the lightning tribulation, only for the guiding light from the upper realm to never show up. End result? Total failure, every time.
At last, after another long seclusion and bitter cultivation, she faced her fifth ascension.
Three hundred and sixty-six heavenly lightning strikes. Seriously. This time, the bolts didn’t just hit her.
They erased her on the spot.
...
Stellar Year 3919.
Planet C875. Ore worksite.
"Hey... she’s dead, right?"
"Probably. She hasn’t moved in forever. Looks like she didn’t survive the mental energy frenzy."
"Without a mental stabilizer or suppressant, trying to tough out a mental energy meltdown head-on has, what, a seventy percent death rate."
"Tsk. She looks so young too. What a waste."
Amid the low chatter around her, two service robots rolled over, clearly getting ready to haul the body off for disposal.
And then the woman who had been lying there stiff as a corpse suddenly sat upright.
Seraphine pressed a hand to her forehead, head pounding, while she sorted through the flood of unfamiliar memories crashing into her mind.
A second later, she cursed in her heart with an obscenely filthy swear word.
Damn it.
She had transmigrated and reincarnated again.
And this time she had jumped straight from the cultivation world into the interstellar age.
The original owner of this body was also named Seraphine Voss, a girl who had only just turned nineteen, with a life story so tragic and messy it was honestly ridiculous.
She had originally been the daughter of a noble family on an A-rank planet. When she was three, she went out with her mother, got separated by accident, and ended up stranded far from home. At fifteen, the family finally found her and brought her back to the Voss family, but nobody there really liked her.
This was an era where mental power aptitude and awakened talent meant everything.
Mental power ranks, from highest to lowest, were: 4S, 3S, SS, S, A, B, C, D, E, and F.
Among them, anyone whose mental power could reach A-rank or above was basically heaven’s favorite. Their future was pretty much guaranteed to be bright.
But people like that were still a minority. Most people’s mental power sat around B, C, or D rank. C and D were the most common, while B was already relatively rare.
As for E and F?
Those were basically trash-tier.
The original Seraphine Voss, though, had B-rank mental power. Honestly, that was already pretty decent.
Too bad decent meant nothing in her situation.
After her mother died, her father remarried his old first love. Then came a younger half-sister, born just three months after her.
That little sister, Vivienne Ashford, had A-rank mental power.
Not only that, she had also awakened a talent and got specially admitted into the talent academy on the capital star.
And getting into the capital star’s talent academy?
That was the kind of thing that made a whole family walk around with their heads held high. Straight-up glory.
So yeah, once the two sisters were put side by side, the original Seraphine didn’t even stand a chance. Not even close.
To begin with, her father had never really liked her much. He thought growing up on a C-rank planet had made her small-minded, cheap, and lacking polish, like she could never be presented properly in high society. If she hadn’t been his biological daughter, he probably wouldn’t have spared her a second glance.
And now, compared to Vivienne, she looked even more embarrassing.
Anyway, after being taken back into the Ashford family, the original Seraphine was basically like some random outsider who had barged into their home by mistake. She even kept the name Seraphine Voss. No one bothered changing it. In that house, her presence was so faint it was practically zero.
So she swallowed her anger and endured it all in the Ashford family for three whole years.
Then, on her grandfather’s seventieth birthday banquet, everything blew up.
She was accused of stealing Vivienne Ashford’s mecha energy core.
The thing was found in her bag.
But the original Seraphine had no idea how it had gotten there. She didn’t steal it. She kept explaining, over and over, voice shaking, trying to defend herself, but not a single person believed her.
No one.