"Shh, little master. Your mother is right here."
The old midwife, her face a roadmap of wrinkles and sweat, didn't give me a second to breathe.
I lay paralyzed on the blood-soaked sheets, my limbs feeling like lead weights dragging me down into the mattress. Before I could protest, or even summon the strength to lift a finger, the woman's rough hands were on me.
She tugged at the front of my damp blouse, exposing skin to the cool, stale air of the room. Without ceremony, she deposited the screaming bundle of flesh onto my chest.
Instinct took over. Not mine, but his.
The baby rooted blindly for a second before latching onto my nipple with a ferocity that made me gasp.
A strange tickle shot through my chest, followed immediately by a rhythmic tugging. He drank greedily, as if he hadn't eaten in two lifetimes.
I should have hated this.
In my previous life, I was a notorious clean freak. My apartment was a sterile zone, bleached and sanitized to hospital standards.
People were germ factories. Handshakes were a necessary evil I engaged in only when absolutely required, and I always carried a bottle of high-grade sanitizer in my back pocket.
Intimacy? Gross. Physical contact with sweaty, sticky humans? A nightmare.
Yet, as I looked down at the tiny, wrinkled creature feeding from me, the revulsion I expected never arrived.
Instead, a bizarre warmth spread from my chest, diffusal and soft, overriding the pain of childbirth and the sting of his hunger.
His tiny hand, no bigger than a memory card, rested against my skin, fingers curling into a fist.
For the first time since waking up in this hellish scenario, the panic receded.
He was mine.
The feeling was terrifyingly similar to the day I bought my first professional rig.
That sense of overwhelming responsibility, the fear of dropping it, the obsession with keeping it safe from the world's grit.
I loved him as much as my own camera.
Wait.
I frowned, staring at the tuft of dark hair on his head.
Did I just compare my biological son to a piece of electronic equipment?
That was probably a sign of sociopathy. I shouldn't compare a human being to a camera.
A camera was reliable. A camera didn't scream. A camera didn't poop.
'This woman… why is her heartbeat so chaotic?'
The thought cut through my internal monologue like a lens flare ruining a perfect shot.
I froze. My eyes darted around the dim room.
The midwife was busy cleaning up the bloody towels in the corner, humming a low tune. No one else was here.
'In the past, she would have thrown me aside by now. She hated me. She blamed me for ruining her figure and her cultivation prospects.'
The voice was clear, distinct, and dripping with a bitterness that no infant should possess.
I looked down. The baby had stopped drinking. His large, dark eyes were open, staring up at me with an intensity that made the hair on my arms stand up.
'Whatever. Enjoy this peace while you can, Qiao Ling. Once I recover my cultivation, I will leave this cursed family. And then… I will kill him. I will kill that bastard Lin Xiao.'
Lin Xiao?
The name hit me harder than the actor's slap.
Suddenly, the headache that had been lingering in the background surged forward, transforming into a tsunami of foreign memories.
Images flashed behind my eyes like a high-speed shutter burst.
A world of martial spirits.
A continent ruled by strength. The Qiao family. The disgrace of an illegitimate pregnancy.
And the book.
My breath hitched. I knew this world. I didn't just know it; I had obsessed over it during long stakeouts, reading chapters on my phone while waiting for celebrities to stumble out of clubs.
"Chronicles of the Dragon God."
It was a classic stallion novel.
The protagonist, Lin Xiao, started as a cripple, awakened a heaven-defying dragon spirit, and proceeded to slap the faces of everyone who ever looked at him wrong.
He collected jade beauties like Pokémon and ascended to become the ruler of the heavens.
And me?
I was Qiao Ling. The minor antagonist from the first arc. The vain, cruel mother of the early-game villain.
My gaze drifted back to the baby in my arms.
This meant he was Qiao Mingye.
In the novel, Qiao Mingye was a tragic figure. Abandoned by his mother, abused by his clan, he grew up twisted and hateful.
He became a demonic cultivator, purely to spite the world that rejected him.
He was the first major stepping stone for the protagonist, Lin Xiao—a "boss" character meant to demonstrate Lin Xiao's growth.
But there was a twist.
The voice I just heard… he knew the future. He knew about Lin Xiao.
'Regressor.'
The word hung in my mind. My son wasn't just a villain; he was a regressor.
He had lived through the timeline, died, and had come back to fix it.
Holy shit.
I was holding a ticking time bomb.
'Make no mistake,' the baby's internal voice continued, his eyes drooping as the fatigue of being a newborn caught up with him.
'I will tear Lin Xiao's tendons out one by one. I don't care that he is the Child of Destiny. I don't care that the heavens favor him. This time, I will burn it all down.'
His mental voice faded into silence as sleep overtook him. His grip on my shirt loosened, but he didn't let go.
I stared at the ceiling, my mind racing at a million frames per second.
This was a disaster.
A complete, unmitigated disaster.
I knew the plot of "Chronicles of the Dragon God." Lin Xiao wasn't just strong; he was unreasonably, illogically protected by plot armor.
He was the type of protagonist who could fall off a cliff and land on a pile of ancient treasure.
If you tried to poison him, he'd gain immunity and a stronger cultivation base.
If you sent assassins, he'd learn their secret techniques during the fight.
He was the "Most Talented Person Under the Heavens."
And my son? My tiny, angry, breastfeeding son wanted to go to war with that?
It was a suicide mission.
If Qiao Mingye followed the path of revenge, he would die again.
And as his mother—especially a mother he apparently remembered hating—I would definitely be collateral damage.
In the original story, Qiao Ling died miserably.
She was either executed by the family for causing trouble or killed by her own son when he snapped.
I couldn't remember the specifics, but the ending was definitely "Dead."
"Madam?"
The midwife returned to the bedside, wiping her hands on a rag. "Is the young master done?"
I looked at the sleeping face of my son. He looked so peaceful, so innocent.
It was hard to believe that inside that small head, he was currently fantasizing about tearing tendons.
"He's asleep," I whispered, my voice raspy.
"Good. You need rest too. The Patriarch... he will want to see the child tomorrow. We need to prepare."
The Patriarch. My "father." The man who viewed me as a bargaining chip and my son as a stain on the family honor.
A surge of protective anger flared in my chest.
It was a foreign emotion, likely bleeding over from the original Qiao Ling's residual feelings, mixed with my own stubbornness.
I was a paparazzi. I survived in a tank full of sharks by being smarter, faster, and more ruthless than the people I photographed.
I didn't have cultivation yet, I didn't have a martial spirit—wait, I did.
I closed my eyes, focusing inward.
There, in the center of my consciousness, floated my martial spirit.
It wasn't a sword. It wasn't a beast. It wasn't an element.
It was a black, sleek, mechanical box with a glass eye.
My camera.
I almost laughed aloud. Of course. Even in a fantasy world, I couldn't escape my profession.
But this changed things.
If I followed the script, I was dead. If I let my son follow his revenge script, we were both dead.
I looked down at Qiao Mingye again.
'You hate me now,' I thought, brushing a finger against his soft cheek. 'You think I'm the same woman who ruined your first life. You think you're alone in this fight against a god.'
He shifted in his sleep, a tiny frown marring his face.
'Well, you aren't wrong. But, how about we retire ourselves this time?'
If I followed the plot, the very next day when the patriarch came, he would hand the baby over to a demonic cultivator, intending to kill him.
As a mother who only possessed beauty rivaling even the female protagonists of the book, I was supposed to start hating my son for destroying the future I could have had with this face.
But now, it's me in this body. I could change anything if I intended to. As the first step toward survival, I had to escape this family.