Outside a weathered, dust-colored city gate, Elara Waters stood frozen for quite a while.
The main thing was, even now, she still couldn’t quite take in what was in front of her.
Just a moment ago—well, what felt like a moment ago—she had still been in a modern city packed with high-rises. So how was it that after getting swept up into the sky by a violent gust of wind, she had dropped straight in front of this ancient city gate, where people were coming and going, yet not a single one of them was dressed like a modern person?
There were no cameras. No crew members. Obviously this wasn’t some filming lot for a period drama.
Poor Elara rubbed her eyes, then pinched her thigh, hard. Nothing in front of her vanished. The sharp sting only proved one thing—she was fully awake. This was not a dream.
So... had that wild wind really thrown her through some crack in time and space and dumped her in the ancient past?
Elara had read plenty of novels, so the word transmigration wasn’t exactly new to her. But in those stories, wasn’t it usually just the soul that crossed over? Why had it happened differently for her? Why had her whole body come along too?
Then again... forget it. Since being hurled into the sky by that wind hadn’t killed her, that meant her fate wasn’t over yet. If she had to transmigrate, then so be it. Being alive, in one piece, was better than anything else.
After forcing herself to accept reality, Elara lifted her foot and started toward the city gate.
Her hair was tied in a ponytail. She wore a mid-sleeved floral chiffon blouse, black gauze-like skirt pants, and peep-toe mid-heeled sandals.
Compared with the old-fashioned clothes on the people streaming in and out, she looked completely out of place. Still, it wasn’t so bizarre that it shocked anyone senseless. People who passed her did sneak a few extra glances, but no one looked too startled.
There were no guards at the gate collecting any entrance fee. No one was checking the people going in or out. Elara stepped through carefully.
Inside, the road was broad and paved with blue-gray stone. The shops lining both sides were brick-and-tile buildings or wooden structures; there wasn’t a thatched hut in sight. Just from the houses alone, she could tell the people living here were probably not poor.
The street was crowded and lively. Some people walked, some carried shoulder poles, some rode donkeys, some sat in sedan chairs, and some traveled by carriage.
But what surprised Elara was this: not a single person walked down the middle. Everyone, without exception, left the center of the road open, a strip about five feet wide.
It was strange, sure, but this was not the time to study that. Because Elara had already noticed a much worse problem.
She couldn’t understand a word people on the street were saying. And the characters on the shop signs and hanging banners—she couldn’t read a single one.
At that moment, Elara’s heart felt like it had been plunged into icy water. Cold. So cold it made her scalp tingle.
If she couldn’t understand the language, and she couldn’t read the writing, then how was she supposed to survive in this completely unfamiliar world?
She wandered aimlessly through two streets. Then the hunger twisting in her stomach made panic rise even harder in her chest. No way... had heaven tossed her into another world just so she could end up begging for food?
Right, and all those transmigration leads in novels? Don’t they always get some cheat like a storage space or a system?
The moment that thought hit her, Elara Waters perked up at once. She slipped into a narrow alley where hardly anyone passed by, then lowered her voice and muttered over and over, "System, system, come out already."
Sadly, nothing happened.
Well, nothing except the dog behind the courtyard wall next to her, which started barking at her like mad.
Elara hurried forward a few steps, putting some distance between herself and that yard with the dog, then began whispering again, "Space, space, let me in. Hurry."
But no matter how she called, the space never appeared either.
Elara stood there and thought it through carefully. In those stories, a storage space usually needed some kind of medium, didn’t it?
She immediately patted herself down from head to toe.
In the end, aside from a key to the factory dormitory, she had nothing at all.
Before this, she had been working at a small garment factory. They had been rushing an order, and even with a typhoon coming, the boss refused to let anyone get off work. Only when the wind became too fierce did he finally allow them to return to the dorms.
Elara had nearly reached the dormitory when she realized she had left her phone behind in the workshop, so she turned back to get it.
Who could have guessed that when she passed an empty lot where a house had just been torn down, a violent gust would suddenly sweep in and lift her straight into the air.
By the time she crashed down, dizzy and half-dead, she had somehow landed in the grass ditch outside the gates of this ancient city in a completely different world.
Elara never cared for jewelry in the first place, so apart from this key, she truly did not have even a cheap trinket on her.
She turned the key over and over in her hand, studying it several times, her mind racing. Since it was the only thing that had come with her into this ancient world, maybe the hidden space was inside it.
Wasn’t that how it always worked in novels? A drop of blood on some object, and the space would open.
The more she thought about it, the more reasonable it sounded. Elara decided to try it herself.
She looked around and soon spotted a broken shard of rough pottery in the corner by the wall.
She picked it up and smashed it hard against the wall. The piece shattered again into several smaller fragments.
After choosing one with a sharp edge, Elara gritted her teeth, steeled herself, and sliced it across one of the fingers on her left hand.
"Hiss—"
The pain made her suck in a sharp breath, and a bead of blood welled up at once.
Elara quickly pressed the key against the cut, letting the blood run onto its surface.
But even after she smeared the entire key with blood, the hidden space she had imagined still didn’t appear.
Elara Waters stuck her injured finger into her mouth, sucked at it a few times to stop the bleeding and clean it up a little, then let out a defeated breath and kept wandering around aimlessly.
She couldn’t understand the language. She couldn’t read the writing. She had no money on her. No system. No storage space. Was Heaven seriously trying to finish her off?
Poor her—in the modern world, she had only been a farm girl from a tiny mountain village. After the mother who had sheltered her passed away, she hadn’t even managed to finish middle school before her grandmother and father, who always favored sons over daughters, pushed her out to work and earn money so her younger brother could stay in school.
She had struggled through society for a few years, sure, but in the end she was still just an utterly ordinary working girl—no special skills, average looks, average brains, nothing remarkable at all.
So what exactly had Heaven seen in her to pick her as the one to transmigrate?
Fine, if she had to transmigrate, then so be it. Back in the modern world, there wasn’t really any family left worth missing anyway. But if they were going to throw her across worlds, couldn’t they at least have packed her a starter gift? A cheat? Something?
With fear and grievance all tangled up in her chest, Elara Waters walked through street after street, alley after alley. By the time her legs turned weak and sore, she finally crouched by a wall and stared blankly at the people passing by.
The sky was starting to dim. Where was she supposed to find food? Where was she supposed to sleep?
“No,” she muttered to herself, forcing herself upright in her mind. “I have to try. Even if I have to beg, I can’t just starve to death in this ancient place.”
Elara Waters pulled herself together again, found a storefront that looked like a tavern or an inn, and stepped inside.
The moment the waiter saw someone enter, he immediately came over.
“Esteemed guest, would you like a meal?”
The young woman’s clothes were a little strange—her arms were bare, and even her toes showed—but the fabric on her body clearly wasn’t rough hemp or cheap cloth.
The waiter considered himself someone who had seen all kinds of unusual people, so of course he didn’t let any surprise show on his face.
Elara Waters began gesturing with her hands and said slowly, one word at a time, “Do... you... need... someone... to wash dishes... or do... odd jobs... here?”
The waiter stared at her in complete confusion. “Esteemed guest, I do not understand what you are saying.”
Elara Waters was panicking too. This man clearly looked like a waiter, but she couldn’t understand a single word coming out of his mouth.
She hurriedly acted out washing bowls a few more times, but no matter how hard she tried, the waiter still had no idea what she wanted.
PS: Later on, some readers complained that even in a cultivation world there were still ideas like men being above women, marriage alliances, and things like that, so this note is here to explain a little. According to the main setting, this is just a low-tier cultivation world, and many of its customs are much closer to the mortal world, so new readers need not feel too bothered by it.
This is not the complete world itself, only a transition. The better parts come later. I can’t spoil too much, so I can’t explain it too clearly here.