It feels as if my throat is packed with sandpaper. Every breath burns.
I jerk my eyes open. A leaky roof and cobwebs greet my gaze as cold rain drips onto my face. One second ago, I was at my computer, revising a proposal until three in the morning to meet that damned KPI. The next, I’d transmigrated into a beggar on the verge of starving to death!
My stomach clenches. Instinctively, I reach into my clothes for the half piece of stale steamed bread, hard as a rock.
Before I can bring it to my mouth, two burly beggars rush through the door of the ruined temple, their eyes as vicious as hungry wolves.
“New here? Don’t you know the rules?” The leader, a man with a face full of flesh, kicks me hard in the stomach. “Everything in this territory, including that half piece of bread, belongs to me!”
The pain makes me curl up, but an even fiercer rage rises from the depths of my overworked office-drone soul. I clutch a sharp shard of porcelain I must have picked up without realizing, then lunge at him the instant he bends down to snatch the bread!
“Rules?” The shard sinks into his arm. Grabbing his filthy hair, I slam him toward a nearby pillar, wild with fury. “My rule is, whoever steals my stuff dies!”
