Gu Xue

Huaya Country, the Gu Family.

Early morning.

Gu Rou gently set the miso soup in her hands on the dining table, then went to the second floor and stopped in front of a room whose door was covered in cute stickers. She knocked.

"Xue, breakfast is ready."

No sound came from inside.

Gu Rou sighed and tried the doorknob. As expected, it was locked.

"Xue!" Gu Rou raised her voice a little.

"Leave me alone!" At last, a voice came from inside. Like Gu Rou's, it was melodious and sweet, with the soft, youthful quality of a girl—but its tone was unpleasantly fierce.

Gu Rou spoke softly. "Xue, you've been in your room for three days. What happened? Can you talk to your big sister about it?"

"I said, leave me alone!"

Gu Rou held the doorknob, feeling helpless. She had no idea what was going on with her little sister. By all rights, her rebellious phase should have been over by now...

"Xue, are you having trouble at work? If something's wrong, tell me. If you're really unhappy, it's fine to quit... Though, come to think of it, I told you ages ago that an animation studio with such erratic hours and no security wasn't the right place for a nineteen-year-old girl to work. You don't belong somewhere like that. Ever since you started, you've come home late every night, looking exhausted, and even your skin's gotten worse. But whenever I bring it up, you go on about following your dream..."

Gu Rou racked her brain, thinking it over again and again. No matter how she looked at it, there was only one likely reason for her little sister's sudden change in personality: work. She started trying to talk some sense into her, but the longer she went on, the more it turned into a grumbling tirade of pent-up frustration...

A thud came from inside. The person in the room seemed to have punched the floor to show how annoyed she was.

Gu Rou immediately stopped grumbling and sighed. They had lived together for so many years, and she knew her little sister's personality well. She might look adorable, but she was stubborn. Once she made up her mind, she dug in like a mule, and nothing anyone said could change it—like when she decided not to go to college after graduating from high school.

"Big sister's going to work. Make sure you eat properly after I leave."

Gu Rou knew there was no point trying to talk through the door, so she said no more. She gave her little sister a gentle reminder, then went downstairs.

The sound of footsteps gradually faded.

In the dim room,

a girl in shorts and a T-shirt, her figure gracefully curved, woke her phone's screen again. In its glow, her appearance came into view: her shoulder-length hair was a tangled mess, as if she hadn't brushed it in ages, and her whole body seemed to radiate dejection. Her disheveled state did nothing for her image, but the girl sitting in the corner was so strikingly beautiful that it was impossible to care about how disheveled she looked.

How could one describe her looks? At first glance, the thought that probably came to mind was—Is she a JK (high school girl)?

Strictly speaking, she wasn't a JK, but she had only graduated from high school recently. It had been just a year...

She was in the prime of her youth, her figure only just having matured.

Click.

The loud sound of the front door locking carried into the room. Gu Yu... no, Gu Xue, finally put down her phone, stood up, then flopped onto the bed and buried her face in the blanket, shouting,

"What is this supposed to be?"

Mm.

As you can see,

the soul beneath this JK's outward appearance wasn't the original one... at least, not entirely.

Gu Yu, from Xia Country, was a senior key animator at an animation studio in the island nation. A man!

On his way home from work, he had suddenly felt dizzy and lost consciousness. When he woke up, he found himself in a different body, with a set of extra memories. He had no idea why.

The original owner of this body was also surnamed Gu, but her name was Gu Xue. She was nineteen, had graduated from high school the year before last, and hadn't chosen to continue her education. Instead, in pursuit of her so-called dream, she had forced her big sister to use her connections and contacts to get her a job at an animation studio.

What a damn cursed fate.

As Gu Yu... now Gu Xue, sorted through her memories and thought about that, she nearly cried.

Making animation was a dead end.

That was the lesson Gu Xue had learned most deeply after more than ten years of struggling in another world.

How could anyone want to jump into that fire pit...

While sorting through the original owner's memories, she had studied this world closely. It wasn't the same as the world she used to live in. It was like a parallel world: the planet wasn't called Earth, but Weilan. History had mostly followed a similar course, but there were differences from Earth. The biggest one was the territory of the major countries.

Huaya Country, the largest nation on Weilan, had a landmass a full third larger.

Yinghua Province in Huaya Country was much like a certain place on Earth: packed with shut-ins, famous for animation and manga, and one of the provinces with the strongest cultural industries in Huaya Country.

The animation industry in Yinghua Province had the same strengths as that of a certain island nation on Earth. Even its problems and current state of development were much the same.

Things weren't quite as bad, but people in the industry generally thought it was doomed. There was even a famous director—known as a "supervisor" in the industry—who once said animation only had five years left.

Of course, that was a joke.

But there was no denying that the market was expanding, huge amounts of money were pouring in, and more and more projects were being greenlit, while animation production had hit a bottleneck.

The main problem lay in the production system.

The industry offered rock-bottom pay but demanded brutal workloads. This was especially true of the animation stage, where training new talent was extremely difficult.

With more and more new anime coming out each season, there were also more and more trash shows—either slapped together carelessly or rushed out because the schedule was too tight.

The low pay had eased somewhat in recent years as the industry began to take it seriously, but that was only treating the symptoms, not the cause. For the other problems, nobody could find any good solutions at all.

Why on earth would anyone go into animation under those conditions? You had to be running on love alone.

When she had first sorted through her memories and realized that the original owner had resolutely chosen to skip college and join an animation studio, Gu Xue had wanted to slap herself. Her skills were only average; why do animation at all? Just go to college, for heaven's sake...

The original owner's decision had hit her so hard that even becoming a girl had seemed insignificant by comparison...

On the first day, she hid in her room, dazed and miserable, demanding to know why.

On the second day, she stayed in her room and spent the whole day scrolling through her phone.

By the third day, she had more or less accepted the reality.

As her memories gradually sorted themselves out and blended together, there were even moments when Gu Xue (Gu Yu) forgot she had come from another world. The original owner's memories were still there and inevitably had some influence, so it was no wonder she sometimes forgot.

Of course, that feeling vanished completely when she took a shower...

After all, she had only more or less accepted the fact that she was Gu Xue. She still needed time to get used to it.

Fortunately, she had worked in animation back on Earth and had been deeply immersed in all kinds of ACG culture, so she was quite adaptable. Otherwise, she wouldn't just have failed to accept the fact that she had become a girl—she would've jumped off a building on the very first day.

As for why she still refused to face Gu Rou—her... big sister—even after more or less accepting her transformation and the fact that she was Gu Xue, it was because she was afraid. What she was afraid of, she couldn't figure out.