Today was the third day since Godfrey Holloway died in the line of duty. The funeral had only just ended.

The original Vivienne Holloway had been so wrecked with grief that she cried herself unconscious right there at the funeral. After that, she burned with fever, drifting in and out, and then just... stopped breathing.

At this moment, Vivienne, who had only crossed over not long ago, was still desperately sorting through all the memories the original owner had left behind.

Ten minutes ago, she had still been standing at the celebration marking the end of the apocalypse, a fresh medal hanging on her chest. She carried the grand, ridiculous title of "the Number One Survival General," one of the top healing-type powerhouses in the whole new world. In her hand was a mobile space station. When she spoke, nobody dared brush her off.

And honestly, that title had not come from luck. In a world gone to hell, surviving to the very end while racking up one achievement after another was not something just anybody could pull off.

But then, of all things, she had only sneaked in a tiny nap. Who knew what went wrong after that? The whole Blue Planet blew sky-high.

There was a thunderous boom, and the shockwave came crashing over like a mountain falling into the sea. She only had time to feel everything around her vanish. A moment later, even she had been blasted apart, vaporized into nothing.

Then she opened her eyes again and somehow landed in Longguo in the 1950s.

That was right. She had transmigrated into a novel, one called Reborn at Twenty-Eight: The Soldier's Wife Wins Without Lifting a Finger, and she had become an early-dead cannon-fodder character in it, Vivienne Holloway.

Same exact name too?

Good lord, what kind of sense did that make?

The original owner's father, Godfrey Holloway, had been an army doctor. His main field was traditional medicine, though later he had also picked up some basics of Western medicine.

After that, steel and machinery plants in different regions asked the military district to send people over for support. He was assigned to Shan Province, and that was how he became the chief physician in the factory clinic there.

The original Vivienne had never seen her mother since childhood. Every now and then, her father would mention her and say she had suffered a massive hemorrhage while giving birth and had not made it. She had died young.

Her father had been skilled, gentle-looking, and soft-spoken. As for his daughter, he doted on her like she was something precious in the palm of his hand, as if he wished he could block every bump and bruise for her himself.

Because of that, the original owner had been raised into a quiet, delicate, soft-tempered girl, like a flower kept inside a greenhouse.

And that flower had terrible luck. Her father was gone one moment, and before she had ever weathered even a bit of real wind or rain, she withered right after him.

Vivienne Holloway went over every bit of memory the original owner had left behind. Gritting her teeth, she forced this body to open its eyes, only to feel as if all four limbs had been filled with lead. Her head was heavy too, wave after wave of dizziness rolling through it.

She drew in several deep breaths, then let them out slowly. After struggling for quite a while, she finally felt a little more like a living person. Swaying unsteadily, Vivienne pushed herself up from the bed. Following the original owner's memories, she felt her way to the bottom of the cabinet, found a tin, and mixed herself a big mug of malted milk.

She drank it down in one go. Only then did she feel a faint bit of strength return to her body.

Her head did not feel quite so heavy anymore.

She lowered her head and checked the index finger on each hand. Sure enough, on both fingers there was a tiny flesh-colored bump, so small you would miss it if you weren’t looking hard. As expected, her portable space had come along with her.

Vivienne Holloway let out a breath and hurried into the space, thinking she could at least find something to eat and settle her empty stomach first. But the second she saw what was inside, she was dumbfounded.

The space was locked.

Not only locked, there was now a bare little hill sitting in the middle of it out of nowhere, bald as could be, not even a blade of grass on it.

That wretched original novel was still lying on the ground, and beside it was a sheet of instructions for using the space.

"There is currently no life within the space. Please search for plants carrying vital energy to awaken it. Valuable medicinal herbs will also speed up the space’s upgrade."

"You—" Vivienne Holloway couldn’t hold it in and cursed under her breath.

Fine. At least it could still store things. She would just have to make do.

She drew in a deep breath. While no one was in the room, she carefully shoved the bed she had been sleeping on aside bit by bit, then lifted a loose floorboard from beneath it, revealing a hollow hidden underneath.

Inside the hole sat a tin box. Its original color was long gone, the whole thing mottled and worn.

When she opened the lid, the first thing on top was Godfrey Holloway’s bankbook. The number written in it was 2,723 yuan, all of it saved up little by little from his pay and military allowance.

Beneath the bankbook was a thick stack of ration coupons, tied up neatly in bundles: grain coupons, cloth coupons, tobacco and liquor coupons, industrial vouchers, every sort you could think of.

Further down were several medical books and prescription manuals wrapped layer after layer in kraft paper. They were treasures passed down through the Holloway family for generations. The pages had already yellowed with age, yet they had been preserved with extreme care.

At the very bottom was Vivienne Holloway’s junior middle school graduation certificate.

The date at the bottom read November 18, 1957, and beside it was the red seal of the Revolutionary Committee of Qing Province No. 1 Middle School. Vivienne Holloway stared at it for a moment, feeling something was off. The timeline of Longguo in this book did not seem to match the history she remembered.

Otherwise, how could a Revolutionary Committee have shown up this early?

Under that was the deed to this house.

After putting everything into the space and arranging it neatly, she laid the floorboard back in place and pushed the bed to its original spot as well.

Vivienne Holloway shook out her arms and moved this body around a little. It really was weak beyond words. Still, she was only fifteen, so maybe it was no wonder. Just one small fever, and it had burned the girl’s life right out of her.

But right now she had no time to feel sorry for the original owner. She still had a pile of things on her own plate that had yet to be dealt with.

The heroine of Reborn at Twenty-Eight: The Lucky American Army Wife was Vivian Hartwell—who, on paper at least, was Vivienne Holloway’s stepsister.

On paper, that was. The truth behind it was a whole crooked mess.

Vivian Hartwell’s mother, Gloria Hartwell, had once fainted at the gate of the steel machinery plant. Godfrey Holloway happened to be passing by and, out of simple decency, helped her up. He never expected she'd cling to him over it. Worse still, there had been a witness right there: workshop director Clifton Ashford, who swore he’d seen Godfrey Holloway and Gloria Hartwell acting far too close for comfort.

Just like that, the blame got dumped squarely on Father Meng’s head.

Why call it a false charge?

Because Gloria Hartwell wasn’t some stranger at all. She was Clifton Ashford’s sister-in-law from the countryside. Her husband was dead, and she’d come into the city with her daughter to rely on her brother-in-law’s household.

In the book, the heroine was described as a real beauty, the sort of woman born to live in comfort. And Gloria Hartwell, though she was pushing forty, still had charm about her; not a bit of that feminine allure had faded.

So once things started looking questionable between brother-in-law and sister-in-law, it naturally became awkward for a seventeen-year-old daughter to keep living under Clifton Ashford’s roof. After some scheming, the two of them fixed their eyes on the soft-hearted Godfrey Holloway.

Godfrey Holloway had no way to defend himself, so he could only swallow it. At the same time, he worried his own daughter wouldn’t be able to take it, so he rented a small place nearby first and settled that mother and daughter there.

In the original story, after Father Meng died, the original Vivienne Holloway barely held on for a few days before following him. Once the funeral was put on with plenty of fake grief, the mother and daughter calmly collected Godfrey Holloway’s rather large death compensation from the factory. They even got this very two-bedroom flat for free, and jobs were arranged for them too. They scraped up every last bit of profit there was.

What came later made people grit their teeth even more. Vivian Hartwell rummaged through the room where Vivienne Holloway used to live and dug out Godfrey Holloway’s treasured medical books and old prescriptions from the bottom of a trunk. Using the connections he had built up while alive, she forced her way into medical school, and there she met the son of the machinery plant’s Party secretary.

A young, striking military doctor, and a woman carrying old family remedies, trained as a nurse, and pretty as a flower—once those two got together, the marriage went through smooth as oil, without a hitch.

After that, when the times turned chaotic, Vivian Hartwell followed her husband away from the machinery plant and, after several transfers, went with the army to Gansheng. In the blink of an eye, she became the kind of military wife everyone envied. She kept her job, had children too, and managed both without falling behind in either.

Then, once those turbulent years were over, money from some foreign investor appeared out of nowhere. Vivian Hartwell caught the tide just like that and became a well-known entrepreneur.

Calling her a winner in life was no exaggeration.

And yet, standing in the middle of that splendid life, Vivian Hartwell had never once remembered that everything in her hands had been stolen—stolen from the original Vivienne Holloway’s life, stolen from the road that should have belonged to Vivienne Holloway.

Scene after scene from the book streamed through her mind.

Vivienne Holloway’s chest heaved. It felt as if she could sense the grievance the original owner had buried deep inside, that breath of resentment she had never been able to spit out.

She drew in a slow breath and spoke in a low voice, as if to herself, and also as if to the one who could never come back. Her tone was calm, but there was steel in it.

"Don’t worry. I’ll settle every last score for you."