The Altered Script

What is it like to transmigrate into a book you wrote yourself?

When Su Wantang woke up, she was kneeling in the main hall of the Demon Palace, with the Demon Lord Li Hanyuan looking down at her from above. She had memorized the original story and remembered every plot development. But the man before her was supposed to sit in a way that made everyone feel crushed beneath his weight. He was standing.

The book was wrong.

From the moment she woke up, nothing was right. The one who came to fetch the bride was not Qing Ming, but the Demon Lord himself. Her wedding dress was black, not red. The ferocious beast that had been a giant three zhang tall shrank into a little puppy at the sight of her, wagging its tail as it rubbed against her feet. Seven portraits hung on the stone wall. The first six were mottled and faded; the seventh was mounted in a wooden frame, and it showed her own face.

What unsettled her even more was what the old woman bringing tea into the side hall said: "Child, you didn't transmigrate into a book. You've come back."

She decided to uncover the truth. But the deeper she dug, the more she realized the original story had been altered, and the changes were still happening. Someone was rewriting fate, stroke by stroke, where she couldn't see.

And in the cave walls around the silent Demon Lord who had lived for a thousand years, her name was carved again and again. When she asked him about it, he said only nine words: "Three hundred years, in exchange for you touching me first once."

This is not a story about transmigrating to another world. It is a story about returning to the world she created.