The entire restaurant was dead silent.

People stared in a horrified awe at the beautiful young master having a complete, table-flipping psychological meltdown in the middle of lunch.

And then, from the street below the pavilion, a sound broke the silence.

It was a laugh.

It wasn’t a polite chuckle.

It was a booming, uncontrollable roar of pure hilarity.

Ji’an snapped her head toward the railing, breathing heavy, imaginary fire practically shooting from her nostrils.

Standing on the cobblestones below, having followed her from the estate because, of course, he had, since he was a terrifyingly competent stalker, was Lin Feng.

He was holding onto a wooden lamppost for support.

His shoulders were shaking violently.

His head was thrown back, and he was laughing so hard that tears were streaming down his battle-scarred face.

He didn’t care about the rumors.

He didn’t care about the scandalous gossip.

He was watching this tiny, furious, transmigrated chef completely lose her mind over teenage shipping dynamics, flipping tables and screaming at fujoshis like an angry dragon defending its honor.

And to Lin Feng, it was the most beautiful, hilarious, undeniably endearing thing he had ever seen in his entire life.

"Shut up!" Ji’an shrieked, leaning over the railing and pointing her finger furiously down at the laughing Vanguard Commander. "Do not laugh at me! This is your fault! You and your stupid flute! I am going to the Eastern Coastal Wastes right now! I am leaving! I am going to go fight the giant crabs! At least the crabs don’t write fanfiction about me!"

Lin Feng just laughed harder, clutching his stomach, entirely unable to breathe.

Lin Ji’an spun around, grabbing a terrified Su Yin by the wrist, and stormed out of the ruined pavilion, leaving a trail of flipped tables, shattered porcelain, and confused noblewomen in her wake.

The capital city was a lost cause.

The crabs were waiting to be crushed by her hands.

And Lin Ji’an was ready to murder those things that can’t gossip.

***

The Golden Lotus Pavilion table-flipping incident had left Lin Ji’an in a state of fury.

She marched through the bustling streets of the Azure Empire’s capital city with the heavy footfalls of an executioner ascending the scaffold. 𝓯𝓻𝓮𝙚𝙬𝓮𝙗𝒏𝙤𝒗𝙚𝙡.𝒄𝒐𝓶

Her pale blue tunic billowed fiercely behind her.

Her hands were curled into tight fists.

The ambient spiritual pressure radiating from her small frame was so densely packed with murderous rage that civilian pedestrians, stray dogs, and even heavily armored city guards instinctively threw themselves out of her path, pressing their backs against the plaster walls of the merchant stalls to avoid her wrath.

Trailing half a step behind her while clutching the sleeves of her own pink silk dress, Su Yin was uncharacteristically silent.

The usually bratty, demanding stray girl had witnessed Ji’an launch a solid mahogany table, laden with roast duck and boiling tea, into the stratosphere with her bare hands.

Su Yin had correctly deduced that now was not the time to complain about her feet hurting.

"Fujoshis," Ji’an muttered under her breath, a low, venomous hiss that sounded like water hitting a blazing wok. "Absolute, delusional, gossip-mongering lunatics! I’m going to invent the internet in this universe just so I can cyberbully them. I’ll introduce them to reality television so they stop projecting their twisted, incestuous romantic fantasies onto my actual, biological family members!"

She took a sharp right turn onto the avenue leading to the Lin General’s Estate.

"Hero," Su Yin squeaked nervously, jogging to keep up. "Are you going to murder someone? Because if you are, I can hold their legs down. Trust me. I’m very helpful."

"I’m not murdering anyone, Su Yin. Murder is a crime, and I don’t have the time to deal with the Imperial Judiciary," Ji’an snapped, her silver-flecked eyes fixed dead ahead. "I’m going to march into my courtyard and lock the doors, then wrap myself in a blanket, and I’ll scream into a pillow until my vocal cords detach."

It was the only plan she could come up with to vent her anger.

But the universe, as Lin Ji’an had discovered time and time again since her transmigration, possessed a twisted, sadistic sense of timing.

Just as the towering gates of the Lin Estate came into view, Ji’an took a heavy step forward.

And then, it hit her.

It didn’t feel like a martial arts strike or the backlash of a flawed Qi circulation.

It felt as though an invisible, microscopic demonic beast armed with a serrated, rusty carving knife had suddenly manifested directly inside her lower abdomen and decided to start tenderizing her internal organs.

Ji’an stopped dead in her tracks.

The color, which had been a furious, blazing crimson, completely drained from her face, leaving her a sickly, translucent shade of gray.

She gasped in a sharp, ragged intake of breath, her hands flying to her stomach as she bent double in the middle of the cobblestone street.

"Hero?!" Su Yin gasped, lunging forward to catch Ji’an’s elbow as the older girl swayed dangerously. "Hero, what is wrong?! Are you under attack?! Is it an invisible assassin?! Where are they?! I’ll bite them!"

"No," Ji’an groaned, her voice a strained, breathless rasp, squeezing her eyes shut as a second more vicious wave of cramping tore through her uterus. "It’s... not an assassin, just a biological betrayal of my body!"

There is no way she can mistake it for something else.

It was her period.

Two days.

She had exactly two days before she was supposed to leave the safety of the capital, trudge through the muddy, miserable, monster-infested Eastern Coastal Wastes, and battle giant, acid-spitting crabs to secure her ranking on the Celestial Sword Sect’s mission board.

And her uterine lining had decided that today, of all days, immediately following a public, psychological meltdown, was the perfect time to shed.

"Why," Ji’an whimpered softly to the uncaring heavens, leaning heavily on Su Yin’s shoulder as she forced her legs to resume walking, albeit at a drastically reduced, shuffling pace.