[Novel for a female readership. Signed the contract too quickly, and now I can't change it. Note: the first few dozen chapters were polished. For example, 4,500 words got polished into 5,000.]
Some dumb★ whose ancestral grave must have been on fire had casually tossed an uneaten, rotten banana into the corner of the stairwell.
Passing students had trodden it into mush. Yellowish-white pulp clung to the concrete steps like a lump of melting ice cream, giving off a sickly-sweet, rotten stench.
The unlucky Yan Si was looking down at a math formula when his left foot landed on it. A sickeningly slippery sensation shot through his sole.
"Oh, fuck..."
He instinctively reached for the railing, but his fingertips brushed nothing but cold air.
Like a pitiful ribbonfish with its bones pulled out (those are delicious, though. I really like ribbonfish. Oil-braised ribbonfish is amazing~), he first slammed the back of his head against the edge of a step with a thunk, then lost all control of his body.
Clatter-clatter-clatter-clatter-
The dull thuds of bone hitting concrete echoed through the narrow stairwell, painful and deafening.
Yan Si tumbled all the way from the sixth floor to the fourth-floor landing in a blaze of sparks and lightning. As the world spun around him, he distinctly heard a teeth-grating crack from his ribs. His left arm twisted at an unnatural angle as it slammed into the metal fire-hose cabinet.
He hadn't died from the fall. He was still breathing.
He lay on his back on the cold floor, his purple eyes staring at the ceiling. What he saw didn't seem to be the ceiling, but swaying darkness and a faint glimmer of light.
"It hurts..."
It really hurt.
His lungs felt unfamiliar, as though an invisible hand had clenched around them. Every breath dragged a shattering agony through him.
But the real disaster had only just begun-the, ahem, benign tumor (his heart) that had lurked in the left side of his chest for eighteen years finally buckled under the strain inside his body, which was acutely sensitive to pain.
Tears welled in his eyes, slowly pooling there. They were physiological tears, of course, though he did rather want to cry himself, because it hurt so much.
Under the stimulus of that excruciating pain, the nerves around that tumor fired wildly. Yan Si felt the hand gripping his heart slowly tighten-
A beat, a pause, a tremor, another pause.
Yan Si departed for a better place.
Haha. How lucky you were, Yan Si.
The world had lost a mathematical genius forever.
But the world of Jujutsu was about to welcome its very own sun~
Background music: You came from Shandong...
Hehehe (Voldemort laughter).
March 7, 2005, morning.
Sunlight fell on the ancient, lavishly imposing building, filtering through the lattice of its old wooden windows to cast dappled patches of light and shadow across the floor.
Those patches were diamond-shaped, their edges softened into fuzz by the age-yellowed window paper. Like lazy orange cats, the light and shadows sprawled on the floor, dozing.
The distinctive scent of century-old, decaying wood drifted through the air, mingled with mothballs and old books-the smell unique to the Yan family's ancestral home. Yan Si had breathed it in for more than a decade in his previous life. Even death couldn't make him forget it.
The person lying on the floor looked forlorn, like a skinned toad.
He moved his fingers.
He opened his eyes again.
A familiar ceiling came into view-wooden beams carved with intricate patterns crisscrossed overhead, and cobwebs hung in the corners. This was the old house where he had poked those webs with a bamboo pole countless times as a child.
He could even make out the legs of the orb-weaver on its web, trembling gently at some fixed frequency.
That spider was still alive!
Ah... the cleaner slacked off and didn't clean properly. Dock their pay.
He moved his fingers again, reaching downward for a quilt or bedsheet. He was a little cold.
The sensation was real. The lines on his palms and the curves of his knuckles carried an unfamiliar familiarity.
This wasn't a dream.
A dream wouldn't have air this distinct, tinged with the raw smell of wood. It wouldn't have the dull ache of something digging into his tailbone.
"Hm?"
Something was wrong.
He distinctly remembered performing a free fall in the stairwell of his university dorm. How had he opened his eyes to find himself carried back to this feudal old mansion in a southern canal town?
And this body felt... far too light. In his previous life, he had been 185 centimeters tall. Whenever he lay on this bed, its boards would groan under the strain. Now the bed beneath him was dead silent.
Wasn't this a bit ridiculous?
[Hello, you've transmigrated~]
A jaunty mechanical voice rang out in his head, maliciously cutesy and nauseatingly coy. It seemed to roll every word around in its mouth before speaking, so disgusting it made his fists itch.
*?*
I hadn't even been hit by a Dayun truck.
"Ah... the gift my parents left me has arrived."
Yan Si got up from the floor.
Yes, he discovered he was actually lying on the floor, not the bed.
He swore reflexively.
"Fuck."
No wonder the bed had felt so hard. No wonder it hadn't creaked. He hadn't been on the bed at all!
Both his parents had mental illnesses that had developed in their twenties. He was eighteen this year-although his onset seemed to have come a few years early, that wasn't impossible to accept. After all, mental illness was all about family inheritance and a random "awakening."
The gift his parents had left him was, naturally, mental illness.
He staggered toward the full-length mirror in the corner of the room, unsteady on his feet. He didn't seem injured, but the agony of falling to his death seemed to linger in his body. It hurt so, so much.
Something like phantom limb pain?
He raised his eyes to the person in the mirror, and the reflection stunned him.
Long black hair cascaded to his waist, its ends curling slightly and tracing soft arcs through the air as he turned his head.
His eyes were a rare deep purple, beautiful and glowing faintly in the dim room.
A spot of red adorned the exact center of his brow. It wasn't a mole, though it resembled one, and its vivid color was almost uncanny.
I'm so pretty.
That face was so beautiful it blurred the line between male and female, like a spirit stepping out of a meticulous classical painting, or some kind of inhuman being-provided one ignored the merriment of a seasoned chaos-loving spectator and the interest in something shining through those eyes.
The face was his.
It was just... too young. Unbelievably young.
Yan Si raised a hand above his head to gauge his height, and his reflection did the same.
Around 173 centimeters. Broad shoulders, a narrow waist, a little thin-a perfectly ordinary teenage frame. His wrists were so pale that he could see faint bluish veins winding beneath the skin.
"Hm?"
At eighteen, Yan Si had definitely been 185 centimeters tall. Broad shoulders, a narrow waist, poor health, but still an incredibly handsome guy standing 185 centimeters tall (a beauty worked too. Either way, he was gorgeous~).
Yan Si was a little narcissistic.
Yan Si: "That's a fact, okay?"
This body looked as though someone had chopped a section off it.
"Hmm... getting shorter as I grow older isn't completely unacceptable..."
So he'd died. So what?
So he'd transmigrated back into the past. So what?
It even came with a rejuvenation service? Turn eighteen, get three years off?
He'd come out ahead!
[Nope~ You've transmigrated into the world of Jujutsu~]
The voice returned, this time complete with bizarre tildes, as though some cutesy character from a bargain-bin anime were speaking into his ear in a deliberately squeaky voice.
Disgusting.
I want to strangle it.
Yan Si narrowed his eyes, his deep-purple pupils dilating slightly in the mirror.
Auditory hallucinations. Visual hallucinations.
It seemed this mental illness was a little worse than he had expected. Or perhaps that fall had snapped some wire inside his brain?
He fell into thought, his gaze sweeping the room. A fruit knife lay on the table, its stainless-steel blade gleaming coldly in the sunlight. There was a tiny nick in its edge-he had left it there at nine years old, when he used too much force while peeling an apple and struck the edge of the table.
The damaged table had been thrown away, but the damaged knife remained.
He had no idea what he'd been thinking at the time.
He walked over, picked up the knife, and sliced open his palm without hesitation.
The knife was a little blunt.
Cutting flesh with a blunt knife... well, how should he put it?
"Hiss-"
Intense pain shot through his nerve endings like an electric current. Blood welled up and dripped onto the old wooden floor, spreading.
The pain was sharp, distinct, and undiminished. It was comparable to countless red-hot needles plunging through the wound in his palm and into his nerve bundles.
Yan Si shed two crocodile tears and stared thoughtfully at the bloody cut.
The hallucinations were false, but the pain was real. If this was a psychotic episode, the simulated pain was far too convincing-so convincing that he could feel the slight coolness as blood left his veins, and the faint trembling of the flesh around the wound.
This was the real world.
Before you continue