Reborn And Remade: The Exiled Matriarch
A jagged spike of agony woke Kiana up in a filthy stone room.
She had transmigrated into the body of a notorious, exiled matriarch in a brutal wasteland.
Before she could even process her new reality, she saw a massive, bloodied man huddled in the corner, trembling in absolute terror.
Foreign memories detonated in her brain: the original Kiana swinging a spiked whip, laughing as she tore his flesh open.
He was her husband, and she was a monster who tortured her own consorts.
The situation was a complete death trap.
Another husband stormed in, throwing down a marriage contract and demanding to sever their ties, which would leave her to be eaten by mutated beasts.
Outside, her third husband lay dying from a toxic wound while the rest of the tribe mocked her, eagerly waiting for her downfall.
Scanning her own body, Kiana discovered her face was covered in ugly purple bruises.
The original host hadn't just been naturally insane; she had been secretly fed a chronic poison by political enemies, destroying her beauty and driving her mad until she was exiled.
As a survivor from a modern apocalypse, the sight of broken, enslaved men made her skin crawl.
She refused to die in this savage wasteland as a pawn in someone else's twisted game.
Kiana tossed the contract back to the furious man.
"Give me three months. I will save him, and I swear I won't touch you."
With her apocalyptic healing powers and a newly awakened Spatial System, she was going to rewrite the rules of this primitive world.
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Chapter 7
The deeper they walked into the forest, the thicker the trunks became. The canopy overhead wove together into a solid roof of dark green leaves, suffocating the light.
Kiana tilted her head back, scanning the high branches for any signs of edible fruit or bird nests.
Suddenly, a microscopic rustle of leaves echoed from the branch directly above her head.
Gunner's snake-like pupils contracted into pinpricks. The muscles in his thighs bunched.
"Watch out!" Gunner roared.
He threw his entire body weight forward and shoved Kiana hard in the chest.
In the exact fraction of a second that Kiana stumbled backward, a mutated lynx the size of a full-grown leopard dropped from the canopy. Thick, razor-sharp bone spikes protruded from its spine.
Its massive claws slammed into the dirt exactly where Kiana had been standing, ripping deep trenches into the soil.
Kiana hit the trunk of a massive tree back-first. The air rushed out of her lungs in a painful grunt.
The mutated lynx missed its prey. It let out an ear-piercing shriek, spun around on its hind legs, and lunged straight at Gunner's throat.
Gunner didn't step back. He stepped in.
His bone knife flashed in the dim light. He twisted his torso, letting the lynx's claws slice through the air inches from his chest. With brutal precision, he drove the bone knife deep into the soft flesh behind the beast's ribs.
The lynx screamed in agony. It thrashed wildly, whipping its spiked tail toward Gunner's head.
Gunner ripped the knife out, pivoted on his heel, and delivered a devastating kick to the side of the lynx's skull.
The heavy thud of bone cracking echoed through the trees. The beast flew through the air, crashed into the dirt, and twitched violently before going completely still.
The entire fight lasted less than four seconds.
Kiana leaned against the tree, her chest heaving. She stared at Gunner's broad back, genuinely impressed by his lethal efficiency.
Kiana pushed herself off the massive tree trunk, taking a step toward the dead carcass to inspect the kill. However, the dim lighting of the canopy obscured a deep, sinkhole-like crevice hidden beneath a thick layer of rotting leaves and vines. As her boot came down, the ground gave way entirely.
She lost her balance entirely. Her body pitched sideways, falling fast toward a cluster of jagged, sharp rocks protruding from the bottom of the hidden pit.
Gunner saw her falling out of the corner of his eye. His heart slammed against his ribs.
He exploded off his back foot, moving faster than humanly possible.
A split second before Kiana's skull hit the rocks, Gunner's thick, muscular arms wrapped securely around her waist and shoulders.
He took the brunt of the momentum, pulling her hard against his chest.
Kiana slammed into his warm, solid body. Their chests pressed tightly together. She could feel his heart hammering wildly against her own.
Gunner's breathing was ragged. He looked down at her face, his eyes dark with a sudden, intense fear of losing her.
In that exact moment of intense physical contact, a sharp, synthetic chime rang out inside Kiana's brain.
[BEEP—Deep physical contact with eligible Consort detected.]
[System Note: Prior contact failed to meet full bio-resonance calibration threshold. Current neural-hormonal signature now exceeds activation parameters.]
[The Oracle System is activating... 10%... 50%... 100%!]
[System Activation Successful. Welcome, Host Kiana.]
Kiana's breath hitched. Her eyes widened in absolute shock as the mechanical voice echoed in her skull.
Gunner felt her body stiffen. He thought she was terrified from the near-death experience. His large hand awkwardly patted the middle of her back. "Are you hurt?" he asked, his voice rough.
Kiana snapped back to reality. Her gaze dropped to the jagged rocks jutting inches from her boots—a single wrong step would snap bone. She stilled her hands against his chest, not shoving him away. "Get us out of this pit first," she said, her voice tight. "Then I'll tell you if I'm hurt."
Gunner's serpentine eyes swept the crevice wall, calculating every handhold in the near-darkness, and pulled her toward the safest ascent.
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8.5
Everyone knew Caroline loved Jacob, the frail man in a wheelchair, even giving up her chance at marrying into wealth for him.
She devoted everything to his recovery, enduring hardship and humiliation to help him stand again.
When he finally recovered, they were praised as perfect together-until danger came.
Faced with saving her or her sister, Jacob chose the latter without hesitation. Only in her final moments did Caroline realize his heart was never hers.
Reborn, she made a different choice, choosing power over love.
When Jacob later begged, she looked down coldly. "I have no interest in men who can't stand on their own."
7.2
Genevieve woke up choking on her own blood, a fatal gash tearing through her abdomen. The memories of a primitive world crashed into her mind—she had transmigrated into the body of a sadistic beastman Mistress.
But the five powerful beastmen "mates" standing over her hadn't come to her rescue. They had come to watch their tormentor die.
"We should just leave her," Kameron sneered coldly. "The scavengers will clean up the mess."
Gilberto spat in disgust, while Angelo, a silver-scaled snake-man, trembled in pure terror at the sight of her. The original owner had whipped them, humiliated them, and driven another mate to suicide. Now, they were letting her bleed out in the mud, their eyes filled with undisguised loathing and satisfaction.
She was a top-tier apocalyptic survival expert, yet here she was, paying the ultimate price for a stranger's monstrous sins. It was a bitter, unacceptable irony to die helplessly in the dirt while her supposed protectors waited for her corpse to rot.
She refused to accept this ending.
Forcing a chaotic surge of energy through their shared Biological Link, she brought all five men to their knees in agonizing pain, commanding them to carry her back. In the dark cave, without a single scream, she plunged her bare hands into a fire and brutally cauterized her own gaping wound with searing ash. As the beastmen stared in horrified awe at the unbreakable soul now occupying the tyrant's body, Genevieve wiped the blood from her face and began to rewrite her fate.
8.1
She thought patience would earn her love.
She was wrong.
After years of waiting for her best friend to finally see her, she meets the one man she should never want-his older brother. Dark, forbidden, and dangerously perceptive, he sees through every excuse she's ever made for being overlooked.
Now she must choose between a safe fantasy that keeps breaking her heart and a dangerous truth that offers no escape once it begins.
Because the brother who looks at her like that?
He doesn't believe in halfway love.
9.2
I woke up suffocating in the dark, only to find my mind trapped inside a tiny, plump, and entirely uncoordinated body.
A cold, mechanical voice echoed in my brain, announcing that I was dead in my original world and had transmigrated into a corporate revenge novel as the six-month-old illegitimate daughter of Edward McClure, the story's ruthless villain.
The system mercilessly outlined my doomed fate. Tonight, my cold-blooded father would abandon me to a state orphanage. By age two, he would officially sign my rights away, leaving me to die miserably at the hands of human traffickers. Outside my nursery, I could hear his terrifying footsteps approaching, his voice devoid of any human warmth as he debated throwing me out like garbage. I was completely helpless, trapped in a baby's body, staring up at a man who looked at me with pure, visceral disgust.
Why did I have to be reborn as the tragic cannon fodder of a tyrant destined to put a bullet in his own head? How was I supposed to win over a severe germaphobe when my unequipped infant reflexes made me literally pee and vomit all over his pristine Tom Ford suits?
"Your ultimate mission is to prevent Edward McClure's self-destruction. Step one: Survive tonight's abandonment crisis."
Hearing the system's terrifying ultimatum, I swallowed my adult panic, forced a pool of pitiful tears into my large eyes, and reached my chubby little hands toward the monster.
7.4
The house was a living inferno, the heat devouring the air in my lungs as I clutched my five-year-old daughter to my chest. Emily was dead weight, her skin already cooling even as the room turned into a furnace of orange and black.
Through the stinging smoke, I saw my husband, Kenney, crawling toward the door with a wet handkerchief pressed to his face. He didn't look back at the crib, and he didn't call my name; he was simply leaving us to burn.
I lunged forward and grabbed his ankle, my nightgown catching fire, but he didn't reach down to save me. He recoiled in horror at the sight of my burning hair and our dead child, kicking me back with a panicked shriek.
"Let go!" he shrieked.
I died as a massive, flaming timber snapped from the ceiling and crushed us both into silence. I couldn't believe that the man I loved would leave his family to die just to save his own skin, but the rage I felt was colder than the death that followed.
But then the burning stopped instantly, replaced by a cold so sharp it made my teeth ache. I gasped, jerking upright in my bed to find the velvet duvet cool under my palms and the nursery quiet, with Emily still breathing softly in her crib.
I had returned to the winter morning two years before the fire, the exact day Kenney finalized the deal to sell me to the King for a promotion. As Kenney stepped into the room with a practiced mask of concern, I realized I was no longer the victim of this story.
"A nightmare, my love?" he asked, reaching out to touch my shoulder.
I flinched away, my eyes burning with a hatred he couldn't yet understand. Tonight was the Winter Masquerade, the night he planned to offer me to the King as a prize, but this time, I was going to turn his social ladder into a gallows.
8.0
Eloise Ferguson was the legitimate daughter of a powerful Senator, yet she was treated like a hysterical burden by her own family.
In her past life, her parents forced her to marry a sadistic billionaire for political funding.
When she resisted, they locked her in a psychiatric facility, drugged her, and left her to die in restraints while her "fragile" cousin Jaylene stole her life.
She never understood why her mother hated her so fiercely.
Why did her mother treat her brother Cortez and her cousin Jaylene like absolute royalty, while throwing her own flesh and blood to the wolves?
Opening her eyes again, Eloise found herself back at age twenty-two, trapped in a restroom at a charity gala.
Escaping her abuser, she used her awakened mystic abilities to look at her family's life forces.
What she saw made her blood run cold.
Thick, red biological cords connected her mother directly to both Cortez and Jaylene, intertwining in a perfect symbiotic bond.
They weren't cousins. They were illegitimate twins born from her mother's secret affair.
Eloise was the only true outsider in her own home.
The realization hit her like a physical blow. Her entire life of abuse was just a cover-up for a nest of parasites stealing her father's name and her inheritance.
But this time, she refused to be their victim.
Armed with an unchallengeable executive order she blackmailed out of the United States President, Eloise crushed the hidden microphone in her bedroom.
"Game on, Mother."