Chapter 2: Reborn to Ten Years Into The Past
April snapped her eyes open. Her hand flew to her neck immediately, her fingers clawing frantically at her throat as if trying to rip away the teeth that had just been burying into her flesh.
She heaved for air, her chest rising and falling violently as her hands roamed over to her shoulder and different parts of her body. She was whole. Her flesh and body parts were intact.
But... but the zombies...
Her wide, frantic eyes darted to scan her surroundings for more incoming zombies, only to find herself in a room.
And there was nothing there. No blood, and no zombies.
Instead, a bright ray of morning light coming from the window caught her attention, piercing through the dim space.
She squinted her eyes for a second. The sun was too bright, even when just filtering into the room. It didn’t feel right. It felt fake. She sat there, still panting, squinting at the light like it would go away if she squinted hard enough, but when it didn’t, she asked herself, "Is this where people go when they are... dead?" she whispered, her voice cracking.
Just a second ago, she had been torn apart. She could still feel the phantom sensation of her skin being ripped away. She looked away from the window and forced herself to look around the room.
This was her room. It was the tiny, cramped attic space she had lived in years ago. It was still just as small and miserable as she remembered.
"Is this a dream?" she muttered to herself, her hands shaking. "Am I dreaming right before I die? Is this what happens when your brain shuts down?"
She knew those things where they say at the moment of your death, you relive a moment you either regret the most, or deem as the happiest in your life.
But April had never had any happy memories, so this was likely the memory of the moment she regretted the most.
But then... Why was it taking so long?
She closed her eyes tightly for a second, her mind instantly flashing back to the zombie apocalypse. She remembered the sheer chaos, the blood-red sky, the monsters roaming the streets, and how the entire world had turned completely upside down.
There was absolutely no way she could still be sitting safely in this room while all of that madness was going on outside.
She waited. If this were a last moment recollection, it should be over the moment she opens her eyes.
But when she opened her eyes again, that ray of unfiltered morning light was still there. The room was still clean there, and nothing was dissolving like dreams did.
She took a deep breath. A deep, fresh breath that didn’t seem damp, acidic, or metallic with blood and rot. It was all clean.
She has a theory, a wild one that she would definitely laugh at herself for. But given the situation...
"Could this really be...?"
Ding.
A sudden, crisp chiming sound rang directly into her ears. April flinched as a glowing screen opened right in front of her face. It looked just like the status screens you see in an RPG game—blue, slightly translucent, and filled with white text.
April blinked two more times, leaning back against the wall. "What on earth is this? Am I going crazy?"
The system chimed again, the text shifting and scrolling rapidly before settling into a neat display of her personal data.
[Character Status Screen]
Name: April
Gender: Female
Age: 26
Height: 165 cm
Weight: 50 kg
Status: Healthy (Mildly Malnourished)
Description: A hardworking maid of the Morgan family. Possesses high endurance but suffers from long-term fatigue due to mistreatment and severe stress.
Before she could even process the words, the screen flashed softly, clearing away the basic statistics. A large, bold notification popped up right in the center, accompanied by a much more cheerful chime.
[Congratulations! Host has been granted a second chance at life. Return to the past and rewrite your destiny!]
April stared at the words for a long moment.
Then she laughed. A short, sharp sound, completely without humor. She pressed the back of her hand against her mouth, but it came out anyway—a second laugh, then a third, until her shoulders were shaking and tears were blurring the glowing text in front of her.
Second chance.
She had scrubbed the Morgan family’s floors for ten years with hands so cracked they bled in winter. She had eaten their leftovers and slept under their leaking roof and told herself every single day that things would get better. But they hadn’t.
And then after that, the world ended. It was horrible, especially for those who had no influence and no way to cope, used as meat shields. For another ten years, she had lived even harder than she did in the Morgans’ house.
But all of that was for what? How did it end?
Yeah, she remembered it clearly because it happened not more than a damn minute ago. Her life had ended with her body being eaten, ripped in different places, and teeth in her throat in a burning street while the sky turned the color of an open wound.
The people whom she thought cared about her and had done her all for, had voted to use her as a scapegoat and left her for dead.
Second chance.
She pressed her palms flat against the mattress to stop her hands from shaking. It took a while, but they finally stopped.
"Okay," she finally whispered, her voice scraped raw. "Okay."
Slowly, she raised her hand, intending to just pass her fingers through the weird system window to see if it was solid or if this was all just a trick as well. The room, she knew, but this system appearing out of nowhere in her past life? She did not.
So, all of this was definitely just an illusion; her death moment was playing tricks on her, trying to give her some sort of hope when she was already dead.
She did not believe she was given a second chance. After all, only main characters got that kind of special perks, and she had never been a main character once in her life.
Her hand did not pass through, and her fingertip made contact with the glowing text instead. A soft click echoed in her head like she had just tapped a smartphone notification.
The screen instantly shifted.
A new menu popped up, displaying today’s date in bold letters at the top: May 27, 2016.
Right below the date, a neat list of events started scrolling down, mapping out everything that had already happened today and what was supposed to happen next. It looked like a detailed timeline of her past life, staring right back at her.
"May 2016..." April whispered, her eyes widening as she stared at the numbers.
This... wasn’t this exactly ten years before the world ended? No, wait. She calculated the time in her head, her breath catching.
The apocalypse hit in July 2016. She wasn’t just ten years back—she was only two months away from the end of the world. But she had been stuck in this house for ten years total.
"If this date is correct, then today is..."
April practically threw the thin, scratchy blanket off her legs. She scrambled down from the mattress and rushed over to the small window. She pressed her hands against the cold glass, her heart pounding against her ribs as she looked down into the courtyard below.
The Morgan family’s driveway was packed with luxury cars, their polished hoods glinting in the morning sun. But April’s eyes went straight to Madam Morgan, who was openly weeping — not the delicate, dabbing kind of crying, but the heaving, ugly kind, the kind that meant years of grief finally breaking open all at once.
Master Morgan had his arms around a young girl, whom April had never seen in person, only glimpsed from this same window a decade ago. He was stroking her hair like she was made of something fragile and irreplaceable.
April remembered watching this exact scene the first time and feeling something hollow and hot carve itself into her chest.
She had just turned twenty-six. She had spent the morning ironing Madam Morgan’s dresses, and no one had said good morning to her, and here was a complete stranger being held like she was the most precious thing in the world.
April had stood at this window for a long time that day. She hadn’t cried. She had just gone back downstairs and finished the ironing.
Now, looking at them, she didn’t feel an ounce of that old bitterness. Her face was completely wide with disbelief.
Is this for real?
She was starting to believe it. Starting to believe that the weird glowing thing that announced to her that she had gotten a second chance was real and that this was not a dream or an illusion.
"Damn, I really did come back to ten years in the past," she exclaimed, breathless, and then looked away.
Then, that meant that there were indeed two months to the apocalypse, and she was the only one who knew about it.
These happy ones down there were as oblivious as the rest of the world. Her grip on the window panel hardened as something began to stir inside her.
"Enjoy it while it lasts," April muttered, a cold smirk touching her lips.
She knew exactly what was going to happen next. This precious daughter was the ’protagonist’ of the early days of the apocalypse, and it was all because of a simple jade necklace she was going to receive tonight as a welcome gift.
In her past life, April had only caught a single glimpse of it before the girl accidentally cut her finger, bled on it, and bound a massive spatial dimension to her soul.
The girl didn’t even know what it was before she accepted it, and just thought it was something fancy. But April knew what it was and knew exactly what it was capable of.
The perks of a protagonist, she wanted them, but she absolutely did not want to live like one. This time... she was going to live life like she wanted and not have anyone boss her around or use her as a scapegoat.
This time, it was every man for themselves.
April let out a slow, quiet breath. "That necklace will be mine."
