Chapter 2: The Price of Survival

During my first year here, I cried myself to sleep every night.

Life in this world was brutally harsh. Nothing from my quiet American suburb could have prepared me for it.

I was the lowest of the low. Anyone could command me. From sunrise until long past midnight, my body wasn’t mine.

They treated me like livestock. I remember the way they’d pry open my mouth, checking my teeth like I was something to be sold.

Even the slave master’s dogs were above me. They ate meat while I scrambled for scraps.

Once, a slave knocked over a dog’s food bowl.

The slave master had the person’s limbs chopped off and boiled them alive in a pot. The screaming echoed through the stone halls, seeping into my bones. That night, I stuffed my fist in my mouth to keep from making a sound.

I was terrified, every muscle tight as a wire. I knew I could never really escape.

Every night, I dreamed I was home.

Opening the door, I’d see our old cat waiting, Mom in the kitchen cooking her pot roast—the house always smelled like Mom’s pot roast—rosemary and garlic curling through the air, mixing with the dryer sheets and the lemony dish soap. Dad would cut strawberries and grapes, arranging them on my favorite blue plate, just for me.

But when I woke, I was still on a cold stone floor, dressed in rags that barely covered me.

Desperate for any way out, I followed the system’s instructions and saved the male protagonist of this world—Marcus.

To "repay" me, Marcus made me his concubine. It was just a prettier cage. Silk over bruises.

I tried everything to please him, swallowing my pride and memories of my old life, just hoping to finish the mission and go home.

I took sword strikes for him—three scars across my back that still throb when it rains.

I tasted his food for poison, surviving four attempts that left me vomiting blood for weeks.

I killed his enemies, learned to smile while holding a blade, to act innocent while plotting murder.

Once, Marcus drunkenly muttered, "I heard the cherry blossoms in the southern valleys are beautiful."

So I rode alone for three days and nights, my thighs were rubbed raw by the saddle, blood sticking my dress to my skin, but I kept riding. I wasn’t going to let the wind steal a single petal.

Bandits attacked me—ten wounds, one so close to my throat I still feel it when I swallow. But I brought back a perfect branch of cherry blossoms, petals trembling in the wind, like a piece of the life I’d lost.

When I returned, Marcus was wrapped around his newest beauty. His voice was lazy and cruel: "I’ve lost interest in cherry blossoms. Darling, could you pick wildflowers from the southern valleys for me instead?"

I looked at the romance mission’s progress bar—still at zero percent, like it was mocking me.

That was the first time I truly felt despair. Not fear, not sadness—just emptiness, like hope itself had died.

If I couldn’t finish the mission, the system would electrocute me—sharp, burning pain that made me bite through my own tongue. Or it would lock my mind in darkness, where time didn’t exist and even my name faded away.

Seventeen years of numbness, of missed birthdays and graduations and first loves, all lost to the haze.

Until Number 075 appeared.

She said my parents had sent her to bring me home. Like it could be that simple, like I could just step out of this nightmare and back into my old life.