The London Rose

Yu Dong died in prison, but her consciousness was reborn in the body of Zhen, a Chinese student studying in London.

Zhen had come to London with her fiance to help build the newly established Republic of China. But the other Chinese students ostracized her, forcing her to move into a narrow lane in London's East End called Hugo Lane.

In that two-story apartment building, she only wanted to live carefully under Zhen's identity and leave her past life behind. But a document the German military was hunting for entangled their lives, though they had never had anything to do with each other before. He had thought she was just a lowly foreign student from a weak nation. Yet as German soldiers interrogated and tortured him, all he could think of was her smiling Eastern face.

In early summer of that year, a young man shot the heir to the throne. A month later, Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia, and World War I began. Kashu was sent into France to gather intelligence on the German military. The stalemate between France and Germany dragged on, and Kashu lost contact with everyone.

Two years later, China sent 140,000 laborers to Britain and France to support the front lines. Yu Dong joined them as an interpreter, and later encountered that man again in northern France.

Later, he found her amid the raging flames of war. A stray bullet blew apart the crumbling wall beside them, and he took off his helmet and put it on her head.

She was stunned, thinking he had long since died.

He replied, "I told myself that only not seeing you could make me give up on life."

Years later, she still often thought of an old photograph: at London's harbor, a man was shaking hands with Germany's newly appointed ambassador to Britain.

The photograph was published in the Daily Mail the next day.

The female lead transmigrates and is reborn; the male lead is a native. Set against the backdrop of World War I, in a fictionalized world.