The Transmigrated Unlucky Corporate Drone

According to Jing City's forecast, the city will see heavy rain and sleet this month, with lows down to minus three degrees Celsius. Residents are advised to bundle up and stay warm...

The forecast in her earbuds had just ended when the subway doors opened. Lin Meng rose quickly and followed the crowd out.

The plane trees lining both sides of the road had turned golden yellow. The forecast had called for it, but a scattered drizzle had been falling since early morning, shrouding the entire city in mist.

The moment Lin Meng stepped out of the subway, the cold wind cut straight through her. Today was the last day of October. She squinted, opened the umbrella she carried, and pushed against the fierce wind toward the company building.

This year's winter seemed to have arrived earlier than usual, which meant it would likely be longer too. So Lin Meng's mood had plunged to freezing point right along with the weather.

What she hated most was winter.

Lin Meng had transmigrated into this world three months ago. The first time she realized what had happened, she'd been utterly bewildered.

Looking back now, she could trace the trigger for her transmigration to one thing: staying up all night to finish a novel.

Ever since she'd graduated at twenty-two and become a proper nine-to-six corporate drone, the endless, machine-like repetition had bored her stiff, so she'd started scrolling on her phone in her spare time.

Later, Lin Meng would think: the internet really is a wonderful thing.

She could see every type of beautiful woman online without ever leaving her home. She wasn't much of a talker, so whenever she came across a video of a pretty woman, she'd quietly like it and save it. Then one day, beneath one of those videos, she came across a recommendation for something called a “yuri” novel. Curious, she went looking for some to read.

Lin Meng had read plenty of genres before, but in the end, yuri novels suited her taste best. After that, she read nothing else.

She still clearly remembered that one melodramatic yuri novel. The top and bottom went through every trope in the book: mutual stabbing, car accidents, blindness, miscarriage, the whole sea of bitterness and melodrama, before finally becoming a couple best summed up as “no way out”—a resentful pair with a happy ending.

While reading, Lin Meng felt like a mouthful of blood was stuck in her throat. With her god's-eye view, she knew every misunderstanding between the two leads and could see that plenty of the physical harm could have been avoided outright. Several times she wanted to jump in and stop those melodramatic torture scenes from happening.

Unfortunately, she and the characters didn't exist in the same dimension. No matter how badly she wanted to shove the two of them into happiness, there was nothing she could do.

That night she stayed up until three-thirty in the morning. The story left a bitter taste in her chest, but she had work tomorrow, so she went to sleep with that something-stuck-in-her-throat feeling.

When her alarm went off again, she got up, dressed, washed, ate breakfast, and got ready for work as usual. But when she groggily opened her door and saw that the world outside seemed different from the one she knew, that was when she started to panic.

Lin Meng didn't believe she could have sleepwalked that far. Almost immediately she opened her phone to confirm her work group chat and this week's proposal were still there.

When she saw what was on her phone, her world collapsed completely.

Not only were the group chat and the proposal gone—even her supervisor's contact was missing. In their place was another work group she'd never seen before, full of people she didn't recognize.

Lin Meng figured she must still be asleep and confused, so she decided to lie back down for a while. Maybe she'd wake up tomorrow morning. But when she tried to punch in her door code from memory, nothing worked no matter how many times she tried, and eventually the keypad let out a warning beep and locked itself automatically.

Lin Meng: “...”

After standing in the hallway hugging her phone and calming down for three hours, she finally understood: she had transmigrated.

As for the transmigration itself, Lin Meng kept feeling as if she were dreaming. But whenever she saw the familiar workflow in the work group chat, the clients' various proposals, and the nitpicking, she finally felt grounded.

Over the past three months, Lin Meng had pieced together her general relationships in this world from her phone. What surprised her was that they were almost identical to those in her original world.

Aside from parents who only checked in a couple of times around the holidays, her social apps held nothing but a pile of client contacts and various supervisors skilled at dangling carrots. Even the tone her supervisor used when dangling those carrots was exactly the same as her old boss's. Lin Meng felt a long-lost sense of home in this other world.

Work was work wherever you did it, anyway. Plus, the salary here was two thousand yuan more than in her original world.

As usual, Lin Meng sat down at her desk ten minutes early. Several seats around her were empty, which meant that if a rush proposal came in today, she'd be stuck here working until midnight.

Actually, Lin Meng didn't particularly mind overtime. The company she'd joined in this world treated its employees well—triple overtime pay. At her old company, getting overtime pay on time would have been considered a luxury.

Lin Meng opened her computer and typed for a while, then felt cold, so she went to the hot water room to fill her hand warmer. By the time she returned, everyone except those who'd taken leave today had basically arrived.

“The weather's been changing so fast lately. A few days ago it was still in the teens, and today it's below zero. I heard several omegas at the company got their heat cycles triggered early because of it.”

“I hope we don't have to work overtime today. I'm supposed to go see a movie with my wife.”

Lin Meng silently immersed herself in her work. An hour later, she sent her client the proposal she'd revised five times. The client looked at it for ten minutes and ultimately decided the first version was the most satisfactory.

Lin Meng replied without expression and sent over the first-version backup from the folder.

Once that was done, she stretched to work the stiffness out of her body. Just then, someone set a steaming cup of pearl milk tea on her desk.

Lin Meng looked up and was met with a bright, radiant smile. “Last time I left my keys at the office—thanks for making that trip for me.”

Lin Meng quickly nodded in thanks. “Oh, it was nothing—just a small favor. Thank you for the milk tea, Team Leader Liu.”

Liu Yun smiled. “Don't mention it. A lot of omegas have taken leave lately. Even though you're a beta, you should still keep warm. Everyone in the company has made at least a few mistakes at work, but you haven't made a single one. An excellent employee like you absolutely can't afford to get sick.”

Lin Meng smiled awkwardly. “Th-thank you for the praise, Team Leader.”

Liu Yun was the team leader of Lin Meng's planning group. She'd asked Lin Meng to run errands for her more than once, and each time, Lin Meng thought: It's just unpaid errands, not unpaid overtime. This supervisor is practically an angel. I won't ask for more. At least Liu Yun was a decent person; she actually handed out small perks, unlike ordinary supervisors who only knew how to dangle carrots.

After saying that, Liu Yun pushed a concert ticket across the desk toward Lin Meng. “Mengmeng, you like Yun Huaizhu, right? I happen to have a ticket to one of her performances. I can't make it that day, so consider this ticket a thank-you for all the times you've helped me.”

When Lin Meng heard the name “Yun Huaizhu,” an expression of disbelief flickered across her face. “Huh?”

Seeing her so happy she could barely speak, Liu Yun covered her mouth and laughed. “Actually, I've seen you scrolling through Yun Huaizhu posts on your phone a few times.”

And every time Lin Meng came across Yun Huaizhu, she'd like and save the post, even gazing at the screen with an almost reverent look at the actress, who was as lovely and pure as a goddess.

Yun Huaizhu was a rising star. She could sing, dance, and act, and even Liu Yun, who rarely went online, knew of her. Yun Huaizhu's tickets were notoriously hard to get; Liu Yun had called in a favor just to get this one.

Liu Yun continued explaining. “I wasn't deliberately peeking. A few times I happened to walk past your desk and saw it by accident.”

Lin Meng had plenty she wanted to explain, but hearing Liu Yun say that, she could only nod and accept the ticket with a shy smile. “Yeah, yeah. Thank you so much, Team Leader.”

...

After Liu Yun left, Lin Meng lifted her head and looked at the Yun Huaizhu concert ticket on her desk.

The world she'd transmigrated into was actually an ABO world made up of alphas, omegas, and betas. That was also why the novel she'd read—despite being a yuri story—had a bottom who could suffer a miscarriage. Because here, female alphas could get omegas pregnant.

When Lin Meng first fell into the genre, she really didn't understand all the worldbuilding, but as she kept reading, she went from doubt and curiosity to finding her groove to genuinely loving it.

Because ABO smut was hot, okay?

And Yun Huaizhu, the woman Liu Yun had just mentioned, was the protagonist bottom of that ABO novel.

Yun Huaizhu had been a child star, the youngest film empress in the history of the novel's film industry. But when she was eighteen, her family went bankrupt overnight, and her once-loving family held a discussion and unanimously decided to give her to the then-heir of Jing City's Su family, Su Yutang, as a tool for venting their desires.

And Su Yutang despised people like Yun Huaizhu above all—greedy for profit and power. She used every method she could think of to torment Yun Huaizhu, and when Yun Huaizhu differentiated into an S-rank omega at twenty, Su Yutang put her in a transparent glass room and watched her in that shameful state for two days and two nights.

With her tenacious willpower and an S-rank omega's monstrous constitution, Yun Huaizhu endured her first heat without any alpha pheromone soothing or suppressants. But the damage from that ordeal left her heat cycles extremely unstable.

When Su Yutang saw that Yun Huaizhu hadn't broken down and begged for mercy after that humiliation, she went on to use even crueler methods to shatter Yun Huaizhu's pride and make her submit.

The more Lin Meng read, the angrier she got, and the more her heart ached. Things that could have been cleared up in one or two sentences—yet the two of them insisted on torturing each other back and forth.

Later, Su Yutang learned that Yun Huaizhu hadn't been after her power at all—she'd been sold out by her family—and guilt took root in her heart. But what drove Lin Meng crazy was that the novel was only halfway through. What followed was more melodramatic torture of body and heart, until the two of them couldn't even tell whether they loved more or hated more, and became a resentful couple who barely made it to a happy ending.

The first time Lin Meng realized she was inside this novel was when she accidentally scrolled onto a photo of a woman's divine face on her phone. Lin Meng had seen countless beauties online, but this was the first time one had made her blush, her heart race, and her throat go dry with a single glance.

The woman's perfect chin, high nose bridge, and skin as white as jade came together into a face so beautiful that not a single flaw could be found.

She had to know this beauty's name immediately!

But when she impatiently opened the comments, the next moment, she was stunned to discover that the person in the photo was named Yun Huaizhu!