Tang Li had just finished a long day at work and picked up her chopsticks, ready to eat dinner, when her phone suddenly rang.

Seeing the word "Mom" displayed on the screen, Tang Li sighed silently and put down her chopsticks to answer the call. She could guess what the other person was going to say. Sure enough, after a few sentences, the topic of marriage came up as usual.

"I'm not just saying this, but at your age, you really need to find a man soon. You're already 27 or 28, and in the blink of an eye you'll be 30. Who will want you then? Don't set your sights too high. That guy I introduced to you last time was pretty good. Although he's not very tall and earns less than you, he's a local with a house. You two can buy a car as soon as you get married..."

The other end went on and on. When they finally paused, Tang Li interjected, "Mom, I don't want to get married yet."

The other side immediately got agitated. "Don't want to get married, don't want to get married, how can you be so selfish? You just want to enjoy life by yourself without thinking about me? When people ask me why my daughter isn't married at this age, it's me who has to endure the gossip from relatives. It's easy for you to say. You're a girl, what can you do if you don't get married? I'm doing this for your own good. I'm your biological mother, would I ever harm you?"

Tang Li picked up her chopsticks and started eating silently, occasionally responding. By the time she hung up, she had finished her meal. It was yet another unpleasant phone call.

Although the pressure to marry had intensified in the past two years, Tang Li still didn't want to get married. She had opened a shop with a friend and worked there as the head chef. Every day she could do what she loved and earned enough. She felt free and fulfilled with this life.

As for the marriage pressure, borrowing a line from "The Heaven Sword and Dragon Saber" - "Let them urge all they want, I am like a clear breeze sweeping over the mountain ridge."

Her greatest strength was her good temper. Her friends all envied that she could make delicious food every day without worrying about troubling matters.

Perhaps because she was a chef, Tang Li had a round face. Coupled with her gentle personality and dislike for fighting, she was soft and sweet. From childhood to adulthood, her friends all called her Sweet Dumpling. At 27, with several friends already married, they still liked to call her Dumpling.

Tang Li thought this life would go on until her mother gave up the futile marriage pressure. But she didn't expect that before her mother's surrender, an accident happened first. On her way to a friend's gathering, the bus she was on crashed off a bridge and plunged into the river.

--

In a tightly shut room in the North City Lord's Manor, a petite girl let out a moan, flailing her arms like a drowning person, then suddenly opened her eyes.

She sat up, panting heavily, only to find herself in a completely unfamiliar place. She couldn't help but show a look of surprise.

The door opened and a kindly matron walked in, carrying food and placing it on the table. She said to the girl, "Lady Chu, don't keep defying our City Lord. Eat something first."

Lady Chu, who had just swapped souls not long ago, sat at the table eating with a dumbfounded expression on her face, glancing at her slender arms and hands as she ate. She had a chubby figure, with plump arms and hands, not at all this slim.

She had probably died in the car accident and become someone else. In short, she had transmigrated.

How could she encounter transmigration? After pondering over this mess for a while, Tang Li patted her chest. Putting everything else aside, she had gained a new lease on life, which was something to be happy about. She just didn't know where exactly this place was, or whose body she was in.

Judging from the architectural style and the matron's clothing, this was definitely not modern times. But if it was ancient times, which dynasty was it? Tang Li carefully asked the matron, "May I go out and take a look?"

The matron seemed to be a straightforward person. She waved her hand and said, "As long as you don't leave the City Lord's manor, it's fine. The City Lord has instructed that Lady Chu is to stay here while he is in seclusion."

Tang Li walked out the door with an exploratory mindset. At first, she only wandered nearby, seeing maids dressed as servants and guards in warrior attire.

Later, she accidentally walked to the martial arts training ground and saw those warriors. When they brandished swords, various lights flashed. They could jump two stories high onto a wooden stake in one leap, and stand on one foot on a single leaf at a treetop.

Tang Li: "..."

This was definitely not any dynasty she knew of _(:з」∠)_

Tang Li became familiar with the matron who delivered her meals, as the matron was the cook in the kitchen. Auntie Sun never imagined Tang Li would be so good at cooking.

After tasting her dishes, she praised endlessly, "It's really delicious. Your skills can even surpass mine. When you first arrived, you were so clumsy and careless. Now you're so much better, gentle and graceful. The City Lord will surely like you."

Tang Li had no idea who this so-called City Lord was. In the past few days, she only figured out that this place was the North City Lord's Manor, and the body she was in was named Chu Li. She didn't know anything else. Afraid of exposing flaws, Tang Li didn't dare ask too much. She just thought it would be better to leave here as soon as possible and go to a place where no one knew her.

She had just left the kitchen, carrying a box of pastries and wanting to return to her room, when she encountered trouble halfway. A richly dressed girl, accompanied by a dozen or so servants, stopped her.

"Chu Li, let me tell you, my cousin Xuanyu is the City Lord of North City, with a noble status that a lowly commoner like you can never match. Don't think that just because Cousin Xuanyu brought you back, you can soar into the sky and become a phoenix. As long as I'm here, don't even think about it."

The girl said arrogantly and smiled viciously, "I've seen many women like you who want to latch onto Cousin Xuanyu. I must teach you a lesson."

Tang Li: Huh? What?

The girl waved her hand. "Throw her into the Ghostly Crying Forest for me."

Before Tang Li could say a word, her mouth was covered. She could only hug the pastry box tightly as she was carried like a piece of luggage and thrown into a sinister forest.

The surroundings were filled with thick fog, with dark and terrifying tree branches crisscrossing in the mist. There was no way forward, and the way back was unclear.

Tang Li stood there holding the pastry box, feeling a strange sense of familiarity with all this, but no matter how hard she tried, she couldn't remember where she had experienced it before. She heard the howling wind around her and felt a bit scared, worried that there might be ghosts inside.

The big brother who threw her in here earlier could jump three meters high, and his sword even glowed, which was very unscientific. So there might also be unscientific ghosts and monsters in this forest.

Being alone here, Tang Li felt frightened. She couldn't help but open the lid of the pastry box and take out a pastry to nibble on to calm her nerves. Just at this moment, a fiery red animal that looked like a fox appeared at the edge of the bushes. After observing for a while, it came forward, howling.

Tang Li fed it a piece of pastry. The fox took the pastry in its mouth, howled at her, and then led the way in front. Tang Li's face lit up with joy and she hurriedly lifted her skirt to follow. They walked for a long time, so long that Tang Li felt she could barely walk anymore, before a faint light finally appeared ahead. The fox howled again and jumped into the fog, disappearing from sight.

Tang Li sighed and wanted to catch up, but although she didn't catch the red fox, the white fog ahead was getting thinner and the trees were gone. After walking out a dozen more steps, the scene in front of her suddenly opened up. The setting sun hung on the horizon, the blood-red sunset glow spread across the sky, reflecting on the countless barren hills in front of her.

Putting down the pastry box, Tang Li sat on the ground and rubbed her legs. She had to rub them, as the scene in front of her had scared her legs soft.

There were no more trees in front, only countless undulating hills. These small hills were stuck with broken flags, and countless corpses that had turned into white bones lay fallen, badly weathered. Was this an ancient battlefield or some other place? Why were there so many skeletal corpses?

Tang Li felt her scalp go numb and wanted to run, but there were mountains of corpses in front and a complex white fog ghost forest behind her. She didn't want to go anywhere.

What exactly was this place... A sudden flash of realization struck Tang Li's mind, and she abruptly woke up to where her earlier sense of familiarity had come from.

The lord of North City, cousin Xuanyu, Chu Li, the Ghostly Crying Forest... Tang Li connected these into a line and found relevant clues deep in her memory.

When she was in junior high, the first book she read was a dog-blood romance novel about a tragic love. At that time, this kind of thick romance novel was very popular, and they were all rented from nearby bookstores.

In that book, the male lead was the lord of North City, one of the four cities. She forgot his name, but it was something like Xuanyu. The female lead seemed to be Chu Li, the body she was in now.

Tang Li couldn't remember the details very clearly, only a general outline. It seemed that the female lead was an orphan who had wandered around since childhood. She met the male lead, and because her appearance was the same as the male lead's first love, he took her back to North City. The two of them were a quarrelsome but happy couple.

In the process, the male lead fell in love with the female lead, but he always refused to admit it, because his first love had fallen into a coma after being seriously injured to save him, and he felt that he could not betray her. So he was hot and cold towards the female lead. The female lead accidentally learned about the existence of the first love and found that she looked exactly like herself, so she thought that the male lead was treating her as a substitute.

The story was full of twists and turns. Just as the two were getting closer and the misunderstanding was about to be resolved, the first love woke up and provoked the male lead to hurt the female lead. Of course, as the vicious female supporting character, the first love's true colors were finally revealed, and the female lead finally had a perfect ending with the male lead.

The most dog-blood part of the plot was that the female lead and the first love were actually twin sisters, but the female lead was taken away by enemies when they were born and lost her identity. Moreover, what the male lead thought was his first meeting with the first love in his childhood was actually with the female lead.

It was just that because the two looked the same, he misunderstood. And the first love's serious injury from blocking an arrow for him was actually staged by herself.

At that time, the female classmates around Tang Li were all infatuated with the male lead's coldness and domineering attitude. Only Tang Li was different. She hated the willful male and female leads to death. The one she felt most distressed for was the devoted male supporting character.

The devoted male supporting character, Xun Nu, was a very powerful assassin. He was heartless and emotionless, the best in the world. It was only because he was saved by the female lead that he was willing to silently protect her from then on. He learned what love was, and in the end, he even lost his life for her.

Back then, Tang Li had a big fight with her deskmate over the question of who was better, the male lead or the second male lead. That was probably the first time the good-tempered Tang Li had argued so fiercely with someone. Later, it was also because Xun Nu died in the book that Tang Li cried for two days.

If she remembered correctly, the first time Xun Nu and the female lead met in the book was at Ghostly Crying Plains, behind the Ghostly Crying Forest. He was seriously injured, secretly harmed by people in the organization who were jealous of him, and thrown into Ghostly Crying Plains. He met the female lead when he was on the verge of death.

In other words, Xun Nu was now in the piles of corpses in front of her, and she had become the female lead "Chu Li" and had to go save him.

Tang Li looked at the endless piles of corpses, hugged her little pastry box tightly, and stood up. The first love of a young girl, no matter how many years had passed, was still special. Although she didn't know why she had crossed into the female lead of this story, she had to go save him now, or he would die!

Stepping on those crisp bones and tattered clothes, Tang Li walked in the piles of corpses, one foot deep and one foot shallow. She saw that on top of those years-old corpses, there were actually some relatively fresh corpses that hadn't completely rotted away, emitting bursts of stench.

The carrion birds gathered together to peck at the corpses. Startled by Tang Li's footsteps, they didn't fly away, but turned their heads one by one to stare at her, making cawing sounds.

This scene was a combination of horror and disgust. Tang Li wandered around the mounds, realizing that she had no idea which one was Xun Nu. She could only go check if someone had died whenever she found a fresher body.

After searching more than a dozen mounds, with only a sliver of light left on the horizon, she finally saw an unusual black figure among the desolate ruins of bones.