She stopped pacing.
She looked at the plush, massive silk pillows resting at the head of her canopy bed.
Ji’an let out a primal growl of pure rage.
She launched herself onto the bed, grabbing the thickest, heaviest goose-down pillow she could find. She slammed her face directly into the center of the plush silk.
And she screamed.
She screamed with the maximum capacity of her lungs. It was a roar of suffocating frustration.
The scream of a game developer whose code had completely broken right before launch and couldn’t find the missing semicolon.
It was the scream of a girl who just wanted a bakery but was instead dealing with clones, ice demons, and continental politics.
The heavy pillow muffled the sound, absorbing her wrath so as not to wake the sleeping peak.
"FUCK THE WORLD WILL!" Ji’an screamed into the feathers, her voice vibrating against the fabric. "FUCK THE PLOT! FUCK THE SZECHUAN TRIM! FUCK THE ABYSS! FUCK EVERYTHING!"
She didn’t just scream, she even utilized her martial training.
She raised her fists, channeling kinetic energy into her knuckles, and began to pulverize the mattress around the pillow.
She punched the silk sheets, the blankets, and beat the absolute living hell out of her bedding, treating the mattress like it was the physical manifestation of the web novel’s author.
Tears of hot, furious frustration streamed down her cheeks, soaking into the pillowcase.
She was angry.
She was so incredibly, deeply angry that she couldn’t just have a simple life.
She was angry that she was stuck playing the role of the overpowered, arrogant vanguard when all she wanted was to curl up in a ball and not care about anything anymore.
"I don’t care," Ji’an sobbed into the pillow, her punches slowing down as the exhaustion finally, truly began to overtake her adrenaline. "I don’t care about the tournament. I don’t care about the engagement. Let them all burn. Let the protagonist die. Let the Ice Demon freeze the world. I’m done. I quit."
She lay there, her face buried in the down, her shoulders heaving with ragged, hiccuping sobs.
The catharsis of the meltdown was absolute.
She let all the terror, all the loneliness, and all the agonizing mystery bleed out of her into the mattress.
She stayed like that for hours, the letter from her father crumpled in her fist, until the deep, bruised exhaustion of her body finally pulled her under into a heavy, dreamless, and exhausted sleep.
***
The morning sun did not care about the emotional breakdowns of transmigrators.
It rose over the jagged peaks of the Celestial Sword Sect, piercing through the paper screens of Ji’an’s bedchamber, casting sharp, bright rectangles of light across the ruined, pulverized landscape of her bed.
Ji’an stirred.
She groaned, a deep, raspy sound, as the sunlight hit her face.
She slowly pushed herself up into a sitting position. Her body felt as though it had been repeatedly run over by a carriage drawn by heavily armored rhinos.
Her abdominal muscles ached from the recoil of the Searing Palm of Heavens. Her knuckles were bruised from punching the mattress.
But worse than the physical pain was the feeling in her face.
Her eyes were puffy, swollen, and painfully dry from crying.
Her throat felt like sandpaper.
She looked down at her right hand.
The letter from General Lin was still clutched in her fist, crumpled into a tight, wrinkled ball.
Ji’an sat on the edge of the bed for a long, quiet moment, staring at the crumpled paper.
The sadness from last night was still there.
The aching loneliness and the terrifying mystery of Shen Zechuan still lingered in the back of her mind, threatening to pull her back down into the depressive spiral.
But as she sat there in the morning light, a different, deeply ingrained survival instinct booted up in her brain.
She couldn’t afford to be sad.
She was the Apex Anomaly, the newly appointed Leader of the Vanguard Tour.
In exactly forty-eight hours, she was going to be responsible for keeping sixteen of the most volatile, homicidal, emotionally unstable prodigies in the continent from killing each other on the open road.
If she walked out of this room looking like a heartbroken, depressed girl, they would smell the blood in the water.
The foreign sects would try to manipulate her. The Sword Lord would start moralizing at her. And Wangchen would probably try to murder the sun for hurting her eyes.
"No," Ji’an whispered, her voice rough, but steady.
She took the crumpled letter.
She didn’t throw it away, but channeled a tiny spark of her Five-Grain Qi into her fingertips. The paper instantly flared into a brief, bright burst of crimson flame, turning to fine ash that drifted harmlessly onto the floor mat.
The message was destroyed, as ordered.
Ji’an closed her eyes.
She engaged in a psychological mental exercise she had perfected during her first brutal months in this world.
She visualized a box.
A heavy, completely impenetrable lockbox situated in the deepest, darkest corner of her spiritual sea.
She took her sadness, took her longing for the bakery on Earth, took the terrifying, unsolvable paradox of Shen Zechuan’s identity, and took the overwhelming burden of her overpowered status.
She shoved all of it, every single turbulent, chaotic, vulnerable emotion, directly into the iron box.
She slammed the lid shut, turned the key, then threw the key into the void.
Ji’an opened her eyes.
The silver-flecked irises were no longer cloudy with tears or softened by vulnerability. They were sharp, clear, and hard as polished obsidian.
She stood up, ignoring the soreness in her muscles, and marched into her adjoining washroom.
She splashed freezing cold spring water onto her face, shocking the puffiness out of her eyes, stripped off the ruined Szechuan Red combat silk from the tournament, leaving it in a pile on the floor.
Standing in front of the polished bronze mirror, wearing only her trousers, Ji’an went to work.