Chapter 4

After Mr. Tucker said that, I had no choice but to endure the freezing air for the entire morning. I shivered nonstop, my teeth chattering.

When noon finally arrived, I went downstairs to buy some cold medicine. As I passed the coffee machine, I barely raised my hand. I wasn't even touching it when it suddenly sprayed scalding coffee at me, just like in my last life.

I tried again and again, cautiously reaching out. Every time my hand got close, the machine would fire with uncanny precision, splashing boiling coffee onto the back of my hand.

On the verge of losing my mind, I stepped aside and watched. Other coworkers walked past the coffee machine without any problems at all.

Seeing scene after scene where I was the only one targeted and rejected, memories from my previous life flooded back.

The toilet flush had hated me, too. Whenever I pressed the button, it would either refuse to work at all or suddenly erupt with violent force, splashing water and filth all over me.

Coworkers would wrinkle their noses and cover their mouths whenever they came near me. They would look at me as if I were insane.

The printer swallowed my documents every single time. The moment I fed in my files, it would scream "Paper jam error"! No matter how I adjusted the paper or restarted the machine, nothing helped.

After it happened often enough, management grew dissatisfied. They criticized me—the so-called top graduate—for being careless and incompetent, unable to handle even basic office equipment.

The office computer was even worse. It froze and crashed at random. Project proposals I had worked on all night, struggling through overtime, would black out just as I was about to save them.

My teammates accused me of delaying the group's progress and kicked me out. I became the company's only permanent problem employee.

And it wasn't just one or two things. Everything that belonged to the company seemed to turn against me, finding ways to target and exclude me. Yet with every other coworker, those same objects were perfectly cooperative.

That was why, in my last life, I never used the company coffee machine. I avoided the restroom whenever possible. Even printing documents meant running hundreds of yards to a copy shop outside the building.

The torment from both lives gnawed at my nerves until I felt I was about to be driven mad by this absurd, malicious hostility.

At last, the workday ended. The new fingerprint scanner had been installed.

The moment it was time to clock out, I rushed over.

This felt like my only hope. If I could escape the curse of the fingerprint machine, maybe I could finally find a breakthrough or some explanation for all these bizarre events.

I took a deep breath and placed my hand on the new scanner.

"Fingerprint recognition error. Please try again."

The cold mechanical voice was like a bucket of ice water poured over my head, instantly extinguishing my last trace of hope.

I stood there, frozen, my hands moving frantically. "No! This can't be happening. Why are you targeting me? Why me?"

The coworkers behind me grew impatient and stopped pretending to be polite.

"Can you hurry up? We want to go home."

"I have never seen such a strange new hire. This morning, you said the machine was broken. This is a new one. Don't tell me this one is broken, too."

…

I don't even remember how I got home.

When I arrived, Adam had already cooked dinner. Seeing how hollow and shaken I looked, he hurried over. "Emma, what's wrong? Did something happen at work?"

The moment I met his eyes, all the resentment and terror from both my past and present lives surged up at once.

I broke down completely. Through sobs, I poured everything out. "That company is targeting me. Everything in that place is targeting me. I'm not going back tomorrow. If I stay there any longer, I'll die."

After calming me down, Adam tried to persuade me, just like he had in my previous life.

"How could office equipment target you? Machines aren't alive. There's no such thing as something that evil. You must be stressed from job hunting.

"Besides, your company has great benefits. You're making almost 60 thousand dollars a year before benefits, with weekends off and paid leave.

"Be good. Give it a few days, and you'll adapt."

I shook my head violently. "No. It is real. Please believe me. Look at my hand. The coffee machine burned me on purpose."

In my last life, from the day I joined the company to the day I died, only one month had passed.

This time, I wanted to resign. I didn't want to repeat that fate.

Just then, my phone rang. The moment I saw what was on the screen, I felt my blood turn to ice.

"So this is it…"

So this was the secret behind why I was being targeted.