"It hurts so bad..."

Come on, seriously? She’d only stayed up all night reading a novel, and that was enough to kill her?

Would the insurance company at least pay her parents something?

And that mortgage... she probably wouldn’t have to keep paying it now, right?

She was just about to relax when it hit her all at once—

Hold on. Wasn’t she already dead?

Then why did her whole body still ache this much?

Dominic Ashford heard the person in his arms say it hurt, and his heart tightened. It was his first time too. He was running on pure instinct, barely keeping enough sense to lower his voice and murmur a few words to soothe her...

"Mmh..."

Lily Mercer felt like a leaf tossed around on rough water, rising and dropping with the waves. She wanted to get away, but every time, she was pulled back... then slammed down again.

Her eyes cracked open through the haze.

This... who was the man on top of her?

His abdomen was sharply defined,

his shoulders broad, his waist lean and tight.

So even in the underworld, something this good could happen? A man, delivered right to her?

Didn’t get a chance like this every day.

Her head was still spinning, but her hands had already moved on their own, winding around the man’s neck.

"Keep going."

Lily Mercer decided she was going to make up for thirty years of being single and enjoy this properly for once.

She had no idea how much time passed.

Maybe it was an hour. Maybe longer.

At last, the man on top of her stopped moving.

When Lily Mercer came to, the first thing she felt was pain all over, like every bone in her body was crying out. Worst of all was the ache between her legs, that raw, tearing soreness no one could say out loud. It snapped her fully awake in an instant.

Her eyes flew open.

"What... what is this place?"

Lily tried to sit up, but the second she moved, a muffled groan slipped from her throat. Right after that, a flood of memories crashed into her mind—

But none of them were hers.

They belonged to another girl called "Jiang Lanlan."

Autumn, 1978. Jiangjia Village, Wuxing Commune. Third daughter of Gerald Mercer, the village party secretary. Nineteen years old this year.

Her eldest sister-in-law, Winifred Mercer, had suddenly started bleeding at eight months pregnant. The barefoot doctor said they needed ginseng to keep her alive, so she took it upon herself to go into the mountains and look for medicine.

In the end, halfway up the slope, Fiona Langdon from the same village "accidentally" bumped into her, and she went rolling straight down the hillside.

That was where the memory cut off.

But Lily Mercer—no, now she ought to be called Lana Mercer—suddenly had another wave of memories surging through her head.

They were from the novel she'd secretly stayed up reading last night while slacking off.

The title was Reborn Lucky Koi of the Seventies: The Happy Life of the Female Lead, one of those period stories.

There was a "Jiang Lanlan" in that book too. Same sound as her name, and her ending was beyond miserable.

Fiona Langdon, the reborn heroine, tricked her out of the family's inherited luck-bringing bracelet, and after that the whole family was destroyed:

Her pregnant sister-in-law died with the baby. Her eldest brother went to prison trying to get revenge and was beaten to death inside. Her second brother took the blame for someone else and got shot. Her father, the village secretary, was reported and stripped of his position. And she herself was drugged and sent off to an old bachelor living in the mountains, then later fell from a cliff and died.

And Fiona Langdon? She took that stolen bracelet space and the memories from her second life, married an officer, started doing business, and lived high and easy. The author even wrote her up as some "kind-hearted, strong-willed heroine who stayed good through hard times."

Lana had been so furious reading it that she went straight into the comments and started cursing:

["Has the author lost every last shred of conscience? You call Fiona Langdon kind? This is theft. This is ruining lives! What did Lily Mercer and her family ever do to deserve being used as stepping-stones for the heroine?"]

Right after cursing the book out... everything went black in front of her eyes.

When she opened them again, she had become the very same Lily Mercer from the novel.

"I... I crossed into a book?"