She died infamous—convicted of stealing work she never stole. Forty years later, the headlines still whispered her name as a thief. Then she woke up in a country village as a fourteen-year-old, and the thing that returned with her was not memory but a cold, alien system that called her "host." In a world that thinks talent is stamped by pedigree, Elsie Corbett has one impossible advantage: a buried interstellar archive and a childish teaching AI that can import whole languages, simulate labs, and unlock technologies if she feeds it energy. She will learn to harvest sunlight, convert theory into weapons-grade tools, and write papers that blind the ivory towers. She will farm grudges like fuel. This is about a girl who cheats time—turning humiliation into a laboratory, rumors into evidence, and a small mountain's ancient secrets into the leverage to topple careers and pry open the gates to higher civilizations. When the systems that hidden powers rely on wake up, who will survive—those who hide behind badges, or the girl who learned to read alien code in the dark?
30 Chapters
