Woke Up In The Body Of A County Magistrate's Daughter.

"How is my daughter?"

"Young Lady is still unconscious, however, her condition has pretty much stabilized; pulse rate has returned to normal. She is out of danger."

Low, barely perceptible voices, coming from somewhere in the distance, knotted Tang Yu's eyebrows. Her eyelids twitched, wrinkling like dried cherry, before fluttering open.

The male voices faded, more accurately, two others with high pitched whining quality replaced them, smothering the subsequent talk.

"Young Miss, w-why did you do that?" A very girly voice soaked with heartaches cried out. Her nose was getting congested; she dragged the snots backward audioably, then continued, "You used to be just as healthy as a cow... now look at you...wuu!" Zhu Wan went on crying, warring with her clogged, drippy nose that accompanied it.

"Wu, oo, wu…" Zhu Taotao blew her nose in a pink handkerchief, ejecting all the thin watery snots. "Wu... when will you—" she hiccuped, breathing heavy and shaky. "When will you w-wake up, young miss?"

Tang Yu turned her head sideways, and saw two teenage girls sitting on their feet, on the stone floor, beside the edge of the bed. Their mournful cry made up very the atmosphere of funeral. Grief hung heavy in the air.

She stiffened instantly, fear squeezed her heart, shock skittered her spine, breath lodged in her throat. She snapped her gaze over the girls' heads, past the slatted window, and positioned it at the weeping willow. Its branches were drooping earthward with heavy pink blossoms.

Deja vu! Nervousness besieged her lungs, not letting the air escape or enter. She maneuvered her right hand towards the left one, employing a good amount of strength; and pinched herself hard on the dainty forearm.

Sharp pain sharpened her senses, kicking out the little to nothing remainder of haziness from the long slumber.

How did her dream manifest into reality?! Her usual witty brain took the back seat for a while. The inclined roof had four sweeping curvatures which rose at the corners; mottles of red clay roofing tiles could be seen vaguely from the thick willow.

Tang Yu tore her gaze from outside, and gave it a tour of the interior of the room she was in. As she kept taking everything in, another dose of horror surfaced on the sparkling phoenix eyes.

A wide pink bedroom stripe wrapped the walls and ceiling. A baby pink tapestry with dark pink fairies hanging upside down from willow branches was mounted in the wall opposite her.

Tang Yu couldn't but cringe, accompanied by a light tremor. Approaching the bedroom scheme as a whole rather than as separate elements, could be also a nice idea. But doing it with the color pink? It cloyed her!

She thought briefly of her dream, and realized new, it wasn't one! Even the most humongous dream couldn't flush memories worth of sixteen years in her head!

She folded her hand across her chest, still lying supine, her gaze floating around the room.

The whole situation was bizarre, even more shocking than earth falling off its axis! It was akin to a colossal elephant, and she needed to assimilate it bite after bite.

"Young Miss, you are awake!" Zhu Taotao screamed at the top of her broken voice, tears spilling down from her red eyes. She sprang up to her knees, wiping her wet reddened cheeks with the root of her palms briskly. "You are alive!"

Tang Yu, who had been jolted out from her thoughts with a start, curved her lips in a weak smile.

How would it sound, if she were to confess that she wasn't the real Tang Yu, but a soul from the future, occupying her Young Miss's body? They would most definitely pass her as someone mentally unstable!

"Oh, young miss, you scared the hell out of me. Master won't force you again, so don't think of doing such things ever again!" Zhu Wan broke into another fit of sobs. Due to excessive crying, her eyes shrank like a slit of coin banks; pinkened piggy nose expanded out like a tiny balloon.

"Oh Buddha, a million big thanks to your feet for returning our young miss to us!"

He didn't.

Tang Yu heaved out a sigh.

"Young Miss, my heart tore off of the chest's veins and dropped to the pit of my stomach yesterday when Physical Xu said, your eyes were motionless, pupils were dilated, the skin was very cold, the limbs relaxed, the pulse and the respirations were scarcely discernible."

You memorized it all?

"I'm oka—" Tang Yu came over with a fit of cough, not chesty but the shallow one from her sore throat. It burned, starting tears in the eyes. "Water." She said with a wheeze.

"I'm on it!" Zhu Taotao leaped to her legs, went out to fetch water with an empty pitcher.

Tang Yu's coughing slowly simmered down, but the itchiness sort of remained. She craned her neck to the left, looking out for water and happened to see a stripe of mirror leaning against the wall.

A short gasp escaped her lungs; corroboration to her assumption was staring right back at her! With big sparkling eyes, small pointed nose, red plump lips, smooth skin and coal black hair -- she was a peerless beauty indeed.

Not that she herself wasn't one in the modern world; but unlike the host's innocent beauty, hers was more inclined towards the provocative edge.

"Yu'er!"

The magistrate barged in, followed by a voluptuous woman in her mid thirties, and two identical twins in their early teens.

"Yu'er...my daughter!" Tang Yangran sat on the edge of the bed, his heart squeezed with pain. He lifted his hand, seemingly wanting to caress her head, then retracted it from midway. A twinge of guilt tearing at him. "Yu'er, I'm sorry."

Feng Xuan, Tang Yangran's second wife, stood beside him. She squeezed out two drops of tears, but sprang forth a down-market imitation of someone crying straight for an hour by making an exaggerated sniffing sound.

"Yu'er, you are already sixteen years old, but your naivety hasn't been shed yet at all. How can you jump into the decorative fish pond just like that? It was shallow, otherwise..." Madam Feng snuff harder.

The thickly veiled sarcastic remarks must have eluded the magistrate, but not Tang Yu.

If her interpretation was correct, then what her stepmother actually meant would go along with the lines, 'You are approaching maturity at snail's pace to have staged a suicide drama at the shallow pond!'

Tang Yu snickered inside. 'Too bad, hottie, you are dealing with an old aunt here...' She looked at the maid servant massaging her legs, and croaked out, "Wan wan, what are you waiting for? Check out the courtyard, a fat dog must have sneaked inside. Can't you hear the extra loud sniffing sounds?"

"I'm on it!" Zhu Wan rose to her feet, and already marched a few steps towards the door, before stopping abruptly. "Miss, isn't it…" she choked back the rest of the words.

The magistrate: "...."

Feng Xuan quirked a corner of her lips in a tiny twitch of an almost imperceptible smirk, before it did a disappearing act, putting its existence in question. She summoned the inner actress out of her, and threw the 'I have been wronged' expression on her oval-shaped face, fully ready to poison her husband's affection for this black sheep daughter of his.

"Husband," She called out, placing a trembling hand on Tang Yangran's shoulder. However, he unheard it.

If it was a normal occasion, he would reprimand his daughter for her misconduct. However, at that point, he just couldn't bring himself to do it. Tang Yu was still in her sickbed.

"Sister, my mother is crying for you! And, this is how you insult her?" Tang Bai yelled, cramming his foot in the ground.

His twin stayed silent, but his mouth twisted into a downward frown of disapproval.

"Oh, I couldn't tell it from dog's…" Tang Yu said, smiling sheepishly. Sparks of mischief soared in her heart. "Oh, Aunt Feng, from the way you are sniffing, it seems like you have been crying for hours."

A flicker of surprise glinted across Feng Xuan's eyes. However, she was a pathological liar, and fabricating fresh lies was her forte. Adding a bit of her acting skills, she had been cooking many unpleasant situations, and sowing the seeds of discord between the father-daughter duo for years. A drop of tears always spiced things up.

"I can't stop cry—" the severely aggrieved voice died down in the middle, grabbing everyone's both full attention, and sympathy.

Tang Yu was excluded from the list, also Zhu Wan appeared somewhat unaffected by the forlorn charm.

Feng Xuan looked up, elegantly wiping her paltry tears with the back of her thumbs. "My eyes just won't stop running." She lowered her frame on the bed by Tang Yu's head, giving her husband a clearer view of her drama, and letting him absorb more of her pain.

'Are you getting an emotional meltdown? Jesus, you are giving me Kris Jenner's impression! Oh I'll miss that iconic woman! There is no internet here, also, mommy Kris doesn't exist yet.'