Sweet Romance13 min read
I Died, I Woke Up a "Waste" — Then I Broke Them All
ButterPicks14 views
I woke because light stabbed my eyes like a dozen needles.
"Where am I?" I hissed, blinking as if sunrise itself had betrayed me. My head pounded, and then memories barged in—my old life, the mercenary queenship, the betrayal that tasted like rust. I had been Callen Lang's—no. I had been someone else, a dark-worlden blade named in whispers. I had been strong, cunning, feared. Someone I'd loved tried to take my strength. He gave me poison, and I died on purpose before he could pry anything from me.
Now I lay in a strange courtyard, in a body wearing simple garments. A faint silver scent touched the air, and a man in a silver robe smiled at me like he owned the sun.
"You can call me Dorian," he said. "You're awake."
"Who — what is this?" I spat, sitting up too fast and nearly tumbling. "Am I dead? Reborn? You better have answers."
Dorian's smile didn't fade. "You're not dead. You're given a second turn. I took you into a different current to save a different fate. Eat. Grow. Then become the reckoning you should have been."
He waved his hand and fruit appeared. I grabbed a slice and swallowed like a woman who had been starving for a lifetime. My stomach growled despite myself. Dorian watched me like a collector watches an art piece live.
When I rose to leave, he touched my shoulder. "The world you wake in is the West-Chen Continent. You are in the Ye household's side compound. The girl whose body you took—her name was Emilia Coleman in that family ledger, but she died long ago in one life. You are not Emilia in heart; you are me."
"Me?" I laughed, too bitter to be amused. "So I die twice and wake as somebody's pawn? Typical."
He didn't argue. "You've been given a chance. But understand: something follows the thread of fate. I could not spare you forever." His palm flicked, and a dark spiral opened like a mouth. "Walk through. Learn. Make them pay."
The world tilted. I fell through that mouth and landed in a different sky.
— — —
The first breath here tasted of smoke and neglect. My hands felt foreign. When I looked down, my clothes were coarse; I smelled of damp straw. My name on paper was Emilia Coleman. The Ye family had married that name to linen and indignity. They called her "the waste" because the child's spirit had been broken by thieves of destiny. I flexed my fingers with the old memory of iron.
"Who is in there? That's the room of the seven miss!" a sneering voice said from beyond the cracked door.
"You worthless thing, the Lord of Lu will come to take you. Better cooperate," another girl cooed.
That voice—Veronika Guerrero's giggle—sent the old hatred through me like a second birth wound. She and her sisters—Freja Abbott, Natalya Larsen—were queens of small cruelties. They had turned the compound into a theater of humiliation for Emilia. The maid Everly Archer had been the only one who had ever shown kindness.
"Open it," a steward barked.
I stepped out exactly as they expected: limp, small, a girl who shouldn't move mountains. They all leaned in to gloat.
"You are pathetic," Veronika said. "Why are you still alive? Good. We will make you useful."
"Rich husband awaits," Freja added with the practiced leer of an accomplice.
I let them circle. My fingers brushed the hilt I had not yet known I possessed. The old mercenary instincts stirred like coals. When the hulking man, Callen Lang, swaggered in—his face a map of appetites—I made a promise to myself.
"Try me," I said.
They expected squeals. Instead, I moved like a shadow. A dozen small actions: a sweep, a twist, a precise flash of bone and impact. The two thugs who had barged in fell with broken throats and stunned curses. The house went white with the sound of the wrong kind of silence.
"Seven Miss?" someone whispered with genuine fear.
But fear was only the beginning. The next days were flood and hammer. The old memories—the mercenary noose—came back as if the world had glued them to my chest. When the corpse of Everly's warmth lay in the yard, I touched her cold fingers and said words I had not planned.
"They'll pay for this," I promised myself. "If anyone dares, I'll make them taste what it means to be hunted."
"Why are you so calm?" Everly had asked before she died, eyes bright with trust.
"Because I know how to win," I answered then, and the words were true in a way that made me shiver.
— — —
I found the space while bleeding and laughing. A soft white creature—Isla Liang—peeked from the corner of a dark pocket of mind.
"You are awake," it said, in a voice like moth wings. "You have a spirit-space. Congratulations."
"A what?" I wiped sweat into my sleeve. "A... what do I call you?"
"Isla will do. I was bound to the one who belonged in this body. I waited."
Isla wasn't small; she was a pocket of warmth and practical sarcasm. Later, when I crawled into the "blood pool" the space offered—something terrible and purifying—Isla stayed with me, and a soft, white light wrapped my ribs like a cradle.
"You promised," Dorian's voice returned in the edge of the space. "This world is crueler than most. You'll need more than fists. There is a sword inside the space."
I reached, and in that library of lost things I found a sword calling itself "No-Mistake"—a bone-crafted gleam. A little guard-cat of a thing—Jasmine Ziegler—hissed and said, "Take it. Don't play shy."
"Is it safe?" Isla sniffed.
"Safe?" I laughed, but not a pleasant laugh. "Nothing that good is safe. But I'll take it."
— — —
I learned quickly. The "waste" girl was a repository of shame—and some old maps of weakness: her dantian had been tampered with, her cultivation sabotaged. I reassembled her. I sucked the poison out with knowledge from lives; I pulled the cobwebs from channels and smashed the knots. A taste of pain, a parade of howls, a white-hot furnace in my gut—then a hand opening like dawn.
"I feel it," I said, and the world hummed a new note. My body wasn't merely healed: the spirit's original fire flared back. Elements brushed my skin. I tested with Isla beside me and found not only a spark of fire but a dozen threads: water's memory, wind's laughter, wood's patience, lightning's crackle. My hands could taste the world.
"All elements," Isla squeaked. "That's ridiculous."
"Not ridiculous," I whispered. "Advantageous."
When I walked back into the compound, Veronika and the sisters were waiting to gloat. They had found small triumphs in marriage arrangements for other girls—an ugly man named Callen Lang volunteered as the 'Lu family's fourth son' and strutted like he had bought the sun.
"Seven Miss," Veronika cooed venomously, "have you tidied yourself for the feast?"
"The feast?" I smiled like a blade. "You mean the court banquet? The one the Emperor will attend? Come. I plan on going."
Her face bloomed with cruel delight. "If you go, you disgrace us."
"Then I will displease you exquisitely," I replied.
— — —
The court was a beast of silk and simmering light. I sat where guests of the Ye household were permitted—close enough to the sisters to be in their line of sight. The "national teacher" who had returned—Cooper Pierce—was there like a storm wrapped in white. The first time he looked at me, the world tilted.
"May I sit here?" he asked in that voice that had thunder backed by a toothsome smile.
"Suit yourself," I muttered. The embers in his eyes made it hard to breathe.
Later, he found reasons to stay. He offered a little jade pendant with the dead seriousness of a man who packs thunder.
"Keep it," he said. "If you are ever in mortal peril, whisper '天地无影' and the charm will buy you a breath."
"That's a bit dramatic," I said, but inside I stored the word like a button to a life jacket.
Cooper laughed softly. "I like drama where it involves you."
"Don't be ridiculous," I told him. "You're ridiculous."
"Only for you," he said.
— — —
At the banquet I played what I had never been allowed to play: the zither. The strings under my fingers sang a thing older than their faces. The hall smelt of wine and expectation; the melody wrapped the Emperor like a cloak and got under the skin of every noble. When I finished, silence hung like a blade. Then the Emperor applauded, rich and surprised.
Cooper smiled only for me.
"That was gorgeous," he said. "Only... Cecilia? Pardon, Emilia, you should be careful. Fame is a blade that cuts both the hand that holds it and the arm that offers it."
"They'll slice me anyway," I responded.
"They will. I'll make certain of it that they cannot."
— — —
I left the court with a purse thicker than before. I had sold some of the "gifts" I had found—rare reagents and a single crafted pill—at the grand auction under a male persona I called "Callen Lang." The auction master—Conrad Olivier—took me inside to the private boxes. I didn't want to be recognized: the Ye household had powerful enemies and more mouths than conscience.
“Who are you, really?” Conrad asked kindly, eyeing the coin in my hand.
"A necessary nuisance," I said. He laughed and gave me an insider's card—an invitation to come back.
"Don't hide who you are entirely," he warned. "People like you rarely stay hidden."
That night, a man came for the bone-flower—an item worth more than most estates. He was Miles Kuenz, a longtime elder from the Alchemists' Hall. He thought a fairy-tale of ownership was his. He suspected nothing of the girl they called a "waste."
He sent his monstrous contract beast, a lion-headed snake that breathed cinders.
"You want the bone-flower?" I called into the forest. "Come and take it."
He snarled, a sound like coal under a boot. The beast lunged. I let it. It tore air. I let my blade whisper its name and Cooper's soft, precise intervention cut through the air like a kiln.
Cooper held the snake's seven-chambered throat in a single, glowing grip. He laughed as if he always won fights for the privilege of novelty.
"Who are you?" I gasped when the beast died in a collapse of steam.
"Someone who likes your temper," he said. "And someone who thinks you should learn to like me."
"Annoying," I said. "Also necessary."
— — —
People change when they taste power. The Ye household thrummed with small axes hidden under skirts and contracts in the folds of polite conversation. The three sisters grew cocky. But the thing about arrogance is how raw it goes when it meets exposure.
I spent three months outside—walking forests, killing the things that lay in the dark. I trained until my bones sang. I learned to coax elements from the air with a laugh. I refined pills until they tasted like sunlight and promise. I learned the No-Mistake sword's whisper like a lover's secret.
Then I came back.
They thought a pale apology and a courtesied entry could break me again. They couldn't have guessed I had No-Mistake at my hip and a spirit-fox that had learned to bite like winter.
The day of reckoning was public. The Ye family held a ceremony: the Lord had invited all the household to observe a simple matter of reputation. They expected me inside, small and obedient. Instead, I arrived in armor of silk and shadow, my hair braided with the white of mourning I had refused to wear. Cooper came with me and took his seat like a king that had invented patience.
I stood before the house and spoke.
"You humiliated a maid for years," I said, and the sleeping air woke. "You sold daughters' honor. You beat and set wolves on someone who dared to save a life. Who here favors that sort of cruelty?"
Veronika's mouth twitched. Freja's expression hardened. Their mother Giulia Burnett, who had taught the art of indifference, smiled like acid.
"She is a liar," Giulia hissed.
"Then hear this testimony," I said. "Everly Archer's bones are under the oak at the northern slope. You burned her letters. You swapped her wages for wine. You laughed as you watched her die."
"Blasphemy!" Veronika screamed.
Two maids stepped forward—one trembling, one with an open wound of conscience. Audrey, who had hidden behind fear, now knelt in the dust. "It's true," she said, under oath and trembling with truth. "I saw them toss Everly from the ridge when she wouldn't be quiet about debts. I was ordered to say nothing."
I let the truth hang like a single candle in a draft. The household's faces changed. The world of their petty cruelty collapsed.
"She is a wolf masquerading as a lamb!" fretted Veronika.
"Then judge her in the eyes of all," I said. "I call for the elders. I call for the magistrates."
They tried to shout me down. The Lord of the family—Nicolas Everett—stumbled between panic and pride. "You will not ruin my family's name," he barked, eyes flat and old.
"You already have," I replied. "And I have witnesses."
This is where the punishment unfolded, and those who thought cruelty could be private felt the bone-deep exposure of public shame.
They were dragged—literally and ceremonially—into the courtyard under the same oak where Everly had fallen. The magistrate came with his official robe, and citizens gathered like gulls at a thrown fish. I stood and watched the sisters' faces change through the stages I'd seen on a thousand battlefields: smugness, confusion, unsettledness, then panic. They went from bright arrogance to pale denial in a matter of breaths.
"You sold daughters' marriages to the highest bidder!" I intoned as the magistrate read the charges from a folded parchment. "You orchestrated the abandonment of service girls. You hired men to assault and silence them. We have witnesses. We have coin trails. We have your own letters."
"False!" Veronika tried again. She struck the magistrate's table in fury—an animal's last thrash. Her hand shook. The crowd muttered, and someone remembered the coin her brother had given a local gambler the week before. Proof is a slow animal. It pounced only when invited.
Freja tried to flee. Guards held her. The crowd, once curious, began to hiss like a winded animal—a growing chorus of disgust. The merchants, who owed their livelihoods to honesty, turned away from the sisters' husbands. The Lord's face reddened as allies withdrew like shadows at noon.
I had expected some to beg. They did. Veronika's voice cracked from confident screams into thin whimpers.
"Please," she begged at the magistrate, "I..." She staggered on words that had been fashionably cruel before.
But public punishment is not a curtain pulled in a private room. It is a mirror. It shows the entire street. The magistrate read the sentences: fines that would strip them of their dowries, public service in the breadlines, tendon-breakings where men of authority used old, formalized punishments to make a statement without bloodshed. The market traders took to singing names as the sisters were led past the stalls. Mothers pulled their children closer, uttering, "See what happens to those who sell their kindness." Men who had once laughed now emptied coinpurses into the magistrate's lap.
The sisters' faces shifted: surprise, then anger, then the most yielding, humiliating fear. Veronika's hands clawed at the sleeves that still fitted like kings' banners. She'd thought herself untouchable; the crowd's fingers found a weakness. The market girls—those she'd humiliated—lined up and spat words of accusation and betrayal. Some photographed the scene; more recorded it in their memory.
Freja cried out for their mother. Giulia tried to broker deals, but the magistrate's eyes were firm; not through mercy, but because the law felt like a blade the moment the public demands it. For a long while, Veronika's defiance ripped into denial, then into bargaining, then into a small, childlike collapse when even the Lord refused to shelter all of them.
"Look at them now," I told the crowd. "They want sympathy. They got only the mirror of what they have done. Let this be a lesson not only to them but to all houses who think cruelty a private art. I will not be quiet. I will not disappear into the disposal they made of those they feared."
As they were confined to public service and branded with the stain of their reputation, the crowd's reaction was not a savage crush; it was a justice that left room for the wronged to walk away with the dignity they'd been denied. People cheered not because they enjoyed suffering, but because they honored the reclamation: the truth had been spoken aloud and it had weight.
When it was over Veronika's proud face was gone; she looked like someone left in the rain too long—changed, smaller. Freja wavered in the magistrate's grip, and Giulia's scheming mask had slipped into an expression that needed more than a mirror to be repaired.
I did not throw them from roofs. I let the world be the judge it had been trained to be. I taught them a different lesson: cruelty breeds exposure; exposure breeds loss. They would not die ashamed somewhere in a room. They would live and feel the consequence daily. They would be watched. People would point. They would remember what they had done. That, to me, is often worse than death.
— — —
After the public reckoning, the Ye household's structure splintered. The Lord's finances sank with the withdrawal of favors. The sisters' suitors found new reasons to look away. People who had once been in their pockets now bought bedsheets with their reputations. The world tightened around them like a fist.
As for me, I felt less light and more comfortable—my choices had weight. Cooper stayed, not because I had asked him to but because he had chosen to. He sat with me in the long hours and helped gather my threads.
"You make everything complicated," he said once in a low, amused voice. "You make me want to stay in every one of your storms."
"I make your life inconvenient," I replied, and he laughed, a low sound like someone who'd bartered with danger before.
"Only you get to cause that sort of trouble and expect me to smile."
"Because I'm worth it?" I asked, letting that be both a joke and a promise.
He nodded. "Yes. Because you're worth it."
We did not make vows in the way songs do. We made them in the quieter, crueler way of people who had lived beyond one life. We agreed to ally when battle called and to hide when the world demanded shadows. He taught me about politics and silk as if both were weapons. I taught him to hold a sword if he had to.
— — —
I kept moving. The fox, Jasmine, grew into a companion who sat beside my bed and commanded as if she were my lieutenant. Isla kept her watch in the space and would not be outdone. I kept making pills, and the world kept buying them. The auction house card with Conrad's name worked when needed. I sold rare concoctions, not because I wanted wealth, but because money buys the simplest law in a dangerous land: options.
"Where do you think you will end?" Cooper asked me once on a veranda as the moon bled silver into the courtyard well.
"Somewhere they can't ever put me back in a cage," I said. "Somewhere I can decide for myself."
"You mean, you plan to make them all kneel?" he teased.
"No," I answered, and his hand found mine. "I plan to make them look at the world and reconsider cruelty."
He kissed the back of my hand, an old-fashioned promise done new. "Then let's go on being inconvenient, together."
"Deal," I answered.
— — —
My old life as a mercenary queen had left a map in my bones: how to read threats, how to refuse to be prey. This life taught me something the field never did—how to unmake a house that pretends to be better than its hungers. My revenge was not bloodless nor purely violent; it was honest and public, a reckoning that took away the mask and left the owner glaring at the empty room.
In the quiet afterward I kept the small jade pendant Cooper had given me. When the nights were sharp and old patterns rose like ghosts, I would hold it and remember the soup of stars Dorian had first promised—a chance to step off the path someone else had laid for me.
The world had offered me a second life. I took it. I learned to laugh with islands in my chest. I taught the cruel to taste their medicine. And when the wind turned sweet, and a zither sounded far off, I let the note linger like a promise: I would not be silent. I would not be small. I would be the reckoning I had always meant to be.
The End
— Thank you for reading —