My Cold Cohabiting Roommate Was a Reborn Empress – Xu An’yan woke up screaming inside her own skin. For a long moment she couldn’t move. Her body was small. Soft. Wrong. The hands lying on top of the blanket were a girl’s hands — slim, untrained, useless. Then she saw the ceiling. Pale blue. With a water stain in the corner she hadn’t seen in a hundred years. I’m back. She was seventeen again. Sun bled through the curtains of her childhood bedroom. Outside, traffic. A bird. Down the hall, the hiss of a kettle. Tomorrow was her awakening ceremony. She closed her eyes and let one slow breath out. In her last life, she had been called the Cold Empress of the Ten Lights — one of the ten young sovereigns the cosmos itself bowed to.
She had walked between galaxies. She had silenced star-domains with a glance. She had been murdered by a friend. And now she was back here. In a ninety-square-meter apartment in a city called Lan, on a backwater planet at the edge of the Ancient Source Star Domain. Fine. She opened her eyes. I’ll start again. Then a knock. “An’yan. Breakfast.” A boy’s voice. Right. Him. She remembered Su Yuan only vaguely. The orphan her foster mother had taken in a year ago. The boy who slept in the room across the hall and called her foster mother “Auntie” and tried, every single morning, to be polite to her. In her last life he had awakened a D-rank talent and died young, on some routine mission. Her foster mother had cried for months.
This time she would save him. Out of respect for the woman who had raised her. Nothing more. She and Su Yuan were not from the same world. She pulled on her hoodie, opened the door, and walked past him without looking up. Su Yuan watched her go. One year, he thought. One year of breakfast together and she’s said maybe twenty sentences to me. In the kitchen, Auntie Xu Qingling was already plating eggs. Her glasses had fogged from the steam. She brightened when both teenagers reached the table. “Today’s the day,” she said, pushing food toward both of them. “Try not to be nervous. Talent doesn’t decide your future. Effort does.” Su Yuan smiled and started eating. He had his own reasons not to be nervous. Twelve months ago, when his parents had died on a hunting expedition, the grief had cracked something open inside him — and a second set of memories had spilled out. A whole other life. On a world called Earth. He had read enough cultivation novels in his last life to know the script. Reborn into a high-martial world. Tomorrow is the awakening ceremony.
Today is the last day before the cheat system kicks in. He just had to wait. Xu An’yan finished her eggs in seven minutes flat and stood up. “I’m done.” She walked back to her room without looking at either of them. The door clicked shut. Her foster mother sighed. Su Yuan looked up from his soy milk. “Auntie.” “Mm?” “Don’t take it personally. Some people are born warm. Some people are born cold.” He set down his cup. “Besides — there’s an upside to a daughter like that.” “What upside?” “She won’t run off with some bleach-blond delinquent on a motorbike.” Auntie Xu choked on her tea, laughing. Inside her room, Xu An’yan stood at the window. Cloudless sky. Open horizon. She lifted one hand and felt — for the first time in this fragile young body — the faint, distant pulse of source energy in the air. Tomorrow she would touch it. Tomorrow she would awaken her talent. The talent that had once carried her across galaxies. She had been the strongest of her generation in the cosmos. She would be again. She drew a breath. And then a chime rang inside her skull.
[Ding! Compare System. Binding…] [Binding successful.] Xu An’yan went still. A system? She had read of such things in her last life — the kind of fantasy that filled cheap novels on Earth, the planet humans on Blue Star secretly modeled their fiction after. She had assumed it was fiction. Apparently not. [Welcome, host. Every ten days, the system will measure your strength against a bound subject.] [Exceed the subject — receive resource rewards.] [Fall below the subject — enter the Simp’s Gauntlet.] [Fail the Gauntlet, and all cultivation is forfeit.] A faint, cold smile touched her lips. She would not be falling below anyone. [Selecting bound subject within range…] [Subject locked: Su Yuan.] The smile froze.
[Note: each victory doubles the next reward and re-rolls a stronger subject.] Xu An’yan stared at the ceiling. Of all the talented heirs in this miserable backwater city — of all the rising stars on this whole pathetic planet — the system had bound her to him. The boy across the hall. The D-rank. The kindly, oblivious orphan eating breakfast in her kitchen. She let out a slow breath through her nose. Fine. Easiest opening fight of my second life. In the kitchen, Su Yuan was still sipping soy milk. Somewhere far above his head, somewhere he could not yet see, a cosmic empress was quietly preparing to crush him. He had no idea. Yet. Today was awakening day.