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 8
Kiana pretended to brush the dirt off her clothes, ignoring the ache in her arms from the climb out of the crevice. Inside her mind, she was staring at a glowing, translucent blue interface.
The system's mechanical voice spoke directly into her consciousness.
[Host current permission is Lv.1. Basic Radar Scan and one cubic meter of Spatial Storage unlocked. ]
Kiana's heart leaped. Spatial storage. In the apocalypse, or in this brutal wasteland, carrying capacity was the difference between life and death. This was a god-tier ability.
Then, a flashing red warning box popped up on the blue screen.
[WARNING: System upgrades require the collection of 'Emotional Thresholds' from your Consorts. Sustained physical contact and intimate interaction are mandatory. ]
Kiana's brow furrowed deeply. A wave of intense disgust washed over her. She hated the idea of being forced into physical intimacy by a piece of software.
I don't need an upgrade right now, Kiana thought coldly, projecting her voice at the system. Turn off the notifications.
The blue interface flickered once, then obediently vanished into the back of her mind.
Kiana refocused on the real world.
Gunner was crouching next to the dead mutated lynx. He was using his bone knife to saw at the thick muscle of the beast's hind leg. In the Wilderlands, meat was meat. You didn't waste a kill.
Kiana walked over and looked down at the exposed flesh.
The muscle fibers weren't red. They were a sickly, dark purple. A sharp, chemical smell of rot drifted up from the blood.
"Stop cutting," Kiana ordered sharply. "We can't eat that."
Gunner paused. He looked up at her, his brow furrowed in confusion. "Everyone in the tribe eats this. It keeps us alive."
Kiana crouched down. She picked up a small twig and poked the purple meat.
"The flesh of this beast is saturated with an invisible, chronic poison-I call it corruption rot," Kiana said, her tone clinical and absolute. "Eating this over time will cause your Aetheric energy to violently twist and mutate. It rots your body from the very roots of your bloodline. It's probably what made the original owner of my body go completely insane."
Gunner stared at her. He didn't understand the words "corruption rot" or "bloodline," but the absolute certainty in her voice sent a chill down his spine. His gut told him she was right.
He looked down at the meat, letting out a heavy, frustrated sigh. "If we leave this, we starve tonight."
Kiana stood up and dusted off her hands. A confident smirk touched her lips. "Don't worry. I won't let you starve."
She silently activated the Lv.1 Basic Radar Scan in her mind.
An invisible blue pulse shot out from her body, scanning the earth in a fifty-meter radius.
Three seconds later, a cluster of bright green dots lit up on her mental map, located slightly northeast of their position. The system tagged them as: [Edible High-Carb Plant Life. ]
Kiana's eyes brightened. She pointed toward the northeast. "Follow me. There's something good over there."
Gunner didn't ask questions. He gripped his bone knife and followed her lead.
They pushed through a thick wall of thorny bushes and stepped into a small, sunlit clearing on a gentle slope.
The ground was covered in broad, green leaves and thick vines that hugged the dirt.
Gunner looked around the empty clearing. He frowned. "There's nothing here. Just weeds."
Kiana walked right into the center of the vines. She crouched down and grabbed a thick green stem.
She looked back at Gunner over her shoulder, her eyes sparkling with anticipation. "The good stuff is underground."
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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."