Jing City, the Quinlan residence.

Old Master Gabriel had meant to bring his real granddaughter along and get the marriage arranged properly, only to find out her engagement had long since been stolen by somebody else. And his muddleheaded son had not only kept his mouth shut, he had practically agreed to it by pretending not to see.

The old man had been holding that anger in his chest the whole way. The moment he got in, he lifted his leg and kicked Danny Quinlan hard in the knee.

"I truly cannot figure it out. How in heaven’s name did I end up raising a fool like you? Back then, Jacqueline was switched out by that vicious woman and suffered who knows how much out in the countryside. I went to enormous trouble to track her down and bring her back.

"And look at the pair of you. For Lily Ashford’s sake, you shoved your own daughter over to my place, and now you’ve even handed her marriage over to that adopted girl!"

Old Master Gabriel paced back and forth across the sitting room, each turn making his voice louder. "What exactly have you two got in your heads? Sawdust? How can parents be this confused?"

"Dad, please, don’t get worked up. Sit down first."

Seeing the old man so furious that he looked ready to collapse on the spot, Danny did not dare talk back. He lowered his voice and tried to explain, "Lily and Eric fell for each other on their own. They’ve already got the certificate. There wasn’t anything I could do."

"So you ran to the Seymours and told them Lily Ashford is the Quinlan family’s flesh and blood?"

Danny opened his mouth, wanting to say something.

The old master did not even give him the chance. He cut him off at once. "Don’t start circling around me. I’ve already asked around. I know every bit of it."

At that, Danny went quiet.

In a fit of rage, Old Master Gabriel grabbed the heavy stick at hand and brought it down squarely across Danny’s back. It was not just anger. It was heartbreak.

This marriage had been settled by his own hand all those years ago, face-to-face with old Mr. Seymour. They had agreed plainly enough that the marriage was for a true Quinlan blood descendant.

What was Lily Ashford?

An adopted daughter.

And not just that—she was the child left behind by the very pair who had swapped away his real granddaughter.

"Even animals wouldn’t do something this rotten! Anyone who didn’t know better would think Lily Ashford was your actual daughter! Have all of you forgotten what her parents did to Jacqueline? When I found Jacqueline and brought her home, she was so thin she looked like a bundle of dry reeds!"

"Grandpa, please don’t be angry. It’s not worth hurting your health over this." Jacqueline Quinlan walked over, poured him a cup of tea, and handed it to him. "Here, have some tea and calm down a bit. The water’s just right."

Looking at such a sensible granddaughter, Old Master Gabriel felt a deep ache in his chest. Then he glanced at his son Danny still kneeling on the floor, and whatever father-son feeling remained in him turned cold.

From the moment Jacqueline walked over to the moment she offered the tea, she never once looked Danny’s way, as if the man kneeling there did not exist at all.

She slowly lifted her hand and gently patted Old Master Gabriel on the back.

"Jacqueline, you and Eric Seymour never really built any feelings for each other, so maybe we should just let Lily…"

Brandy Quinlan chose her words carefully before speaking in a low voice.

"So what? The engagement is mine."

Jacqueline turned her eyes toward Brandy.

Brandy’s heart clenched all at once.

That look in the girl’s eyes… it was terrifying.

Even worse than two years ago.

In an instant, Brandy’s mind flashed back to that incident—when Jacqueline had nearly chopped Lily.

It was because of that very thing that she and her husband had packed Jacqueline off to the old residence that same night.

But Old Master Gabriel had never believed any of it. He only thought the two of them were playing favorites.

The truth was simple enough…

They were scared.

"Jacqueline, Grandpa is here. I’ll settle this grievance for you."

Old Master Gabriel patted the back of his granddaughter’s hand, worried she might bottle everything up and break.

He was afraid she would take it too hard.

But the truth was, Jacqueline saw it all very clearly.

That Eric Seymour? She did not care about him in the least.

That was right. She was not the real Jacqueline Quinlan.

She had crawled through the apocalypse and then plunged straight into a period novel about a stepmother.

In that book, the original Jacqueline Quinlan had been switched at birth and left in the countryside for fourteen years. It was only because Old Master Gabriel followed a trail of tiny clues that he finally found her and brought her home.

The original owner of this body had come back timid and fearful. Standing beside Lily Ashford, she was like someone from an entirely different world.

But the original Jacqueline had been beautiful, and she had a marriage arrangement with the male lead, Eric Seymour. Eric had fallen for her at first sight, and later on he really did marry her.

Only, she had suffered so much since childhood in the countryside that her body had long been worn down. After giving birth to triplets for Eric Seymour, she could not hold on and died.

In the three years after her death, Eric Seymour and Lily Ashford got together, and the two of them went on to live their sweet little life.

Lily handled the man till he was obedient in every way, while also raising children and keeping house, and her days only got better and better.

Everything Old Master Gabriel had left to the original Jacqueline was stripped away by her trash father and trash mother and stuffed straight into Lily Ashford’s hands.

After Lily married Eric Seymour, she gave birth to two more children. Every one of them was outstanding, the sort of gifted youngsters everyone in the book praised.

As for the three children left behind by the cannon-fodder first wife, they became nothing more than props in the author’s hands. Whenever Lily’s children had even a little moment of glory, those three had to be dragged out for comparison, just to make Lily’s side look even brighter.

When all was said and done, the original Jacqueline’s whole life had only served one purpose—to pave the way for Lily Ashford to become a stepmother.

When Jacqueline Quinlan had read that plotline, she had been so angry her teeth nearly cracked.

The world was already in the apocalypse, and somebody still had the nerve to write trash like that?

She had seriously suspected it was cooked up by some bored rival with too much free time. A brain not half-chewed hollow by zombies could never have written something so idiotic.

What she had never expected was that after she and her sworn enemy died together, she opened her eyes and landed inside this rotten book.

In her previous life, she had been born into the apocalypse and clawed her way through life with blood on the blade. To her, killing was no more unusual than eating a meal.

Her lightning ability had once been unstoppable. But after coming here, that bit of power had weakened to a pitiful degree. It was not even as strong as the static spark from rubbing her fingertips together.

On that matter, Jacqueline truly had nothing to say.

When she first crossed over, the original owner was still trapped in the countryside, enduring bitter days under her adoptive mother’s hand, doing all the work for the whole household by herself.

Just as Old Master Gabriel had said, she was starved so badly she looked like a dried stalk, without an ounce of flesh on her.

The adoptive mother had planned to sell her off to the old butcher at the village entrance in exchange for bride price money.

Jacqueline waited until the woman went up the mountain to gather honey, then kicked her clean off the slope.

By the time the villagers found her, she was already a mangled mess, bloody all over, her face smashed beyond recognition.

The adoptive father was no good either. As Jacqueline grew prettier by the day, filthy thoughts started brewing in his mind.

Without showing a thing on her face, Jacqueline drugged him and arranged for him to die on Widow Wang’s bed, ugly and humiliating to the very end.

As for the adoptive brother?

He was even less worth mentioning.

The man had long been one of the village’s most notorious loafers.

Jacqueline only had to use one small trick, and he ruined himself in the gambling den.