✦ Chapter 5: The Name She Inherited ✦
250 Words
The pain came suddenly.
A sharp migraine tore through her skull, violent enough to steal her breath. Alice staggered, gripping a tree trunk as memories crashed into place—unwanted, relentless. Humiliation. Isolation. Years of being ignored and mocked, of standing at the edge of court gatherings while laughter passed her by as if she didn’t exist.
Her vision swam.
This was not her pain.
It belonged to someone else.
Understanding followed with cruel clarity, settling into her bones like a verdict.
This body had belonged to the First Princess of the Qing dynasty.
A fragile girl named Alice Qing.
Foolish. Powerless. Forgotten.
She saw flashes of bowed heads that never turned toward her, of whispered ridicule behind silk sleeves, of expectations that had never been meant for her in the first place. A princess in name only, left to wither quietly in the shadow of stronger figures.
That girl was gone.
Alice inhaled slowly, forcing the ache in her skull to subside, grounding herself in the present. The night air filled her lungs, cool and steady, and with it came resolve—sharp, unyielding.
No one would dismiss her again.
Not this world. Not its courts. Not the man in the hot spring who had looked at her with contempt.
If she had inherited a broken name and a fragile body, then she would remake them both.
Whatever fate this world intended for the Foolish Princess, it would soon learn—
She was no longer the girl it remembered.
- Writer
