TRANSMIGRATED

ADELINE

"Adeline, if you embarrass me in front of my family tomorrow, I swear to God, I will make you regret it."

I opened my eyes to find a strange man standing beside my bed.

For one disoriented second, I thought someone had broken into my apartment. I grabbed the nearest object, which happened to be a decorative pillow, and hurled it at his face.

He caught it.

The man stared at me, the pillow hanging from one hand, while I scrambled backward until my shoulders struck the headboard.

"Who the hell are you?" I asked and immediately, His expression changed into irritation.

"Are you serious right now?"

"Do I look like I'm joking? Why are you in my bedroom? Where am I? How did you get in here?"

He dropped the pillow onto the bed.

"Enough, Adeline. I'm not in the mood for another one of your performances."

My heart slammed against my ribs.He knew my name, That was the first problem. The second problem was that I didn't know him personally, but I knew his face.

I knew his face because I had watched him on my laptop the previous night. I had watched him ignore his fiancée, run after his secretary, and behave as though emotional neglect were a perfectly reasonable relationship strategy. I had even written a review insulting him.

His name was Dorian cross. He was a fictional character from When the Green Tide Rises, a movie I had watched for entertainment and then spent half an hour criticizing.

Yet there he stood, wearing a white shirt and black trousers, looking at me as if I were the most irritating woman he had ever met.

I pinched my arm.

Pain shot through it. Again, I pinched harder losing my bloody mind, Dorian 's eyebrows drew together.

 "What are you doing?Have you lost your mind?" He screamed, switching from being irritated to extremely agitated.

"I am beginning to suspect that I have, actually."

I slapped myself. The sound cracked through the bedroom but everything remained the same, I wasn’t asleep 

"Adeline, stop that!"

He reached for me, and I scrambled away from his hand so quickly that my knee struck the edge of the mattress.

"Don't touch me! Don't you dare touch me!"

He stopped, his face darkening.

"What is wrong with you this morning? You've been acting strangely since last night, and now you're behaving as if you've never seen me before. If this is another attempt to get me to do something new for  the wedding arrangements, you can save yourself the trouble."

The wedding?

My stomach dropped.

I looked around the bedroom properly for the first time.

The bed was enormous, covered in white silk sheets. A chandelier hung from the ceiling. Heavy curtains framed windows, and a dressing table stood against one wall with perfume bottles arranged in neat rows. Beyond the open bedroom door, I could see a corridor decorated with expensive paintings.

I had never been in a room like this. I had never owned anything like this. And the woman in the full-length mirror across from the bed was not me.

I stopped breathing.

The woman had long, dark hair, clear skin, and features so beautiful they looked almost unreal. She wore a silk nightdress that clung loosely to her body. Her face was pale, her lips parted, and her eyes were wide with terror.

When I raised my hand to my mouth, she did the same.

"No."

The word came out so quietly that I barely heard it.

I jumped off the bed and rushed toward the mirror.

"No. No, no, no. This isn't happening." I looked exactly like Adeline, Dorian cross's fiancée The villainess.

"My name is Dorian . You know that. You have been calling me Dorian  for years. Why are you acting as if you've only just met me?"

"I need you to tell me something. What date is it?"

He looked at me as though I had asked him to explain how calendars worked.

"October twenty-eighth."

My heart stopped.

"Our wedding is tomorrow morning, Adeline. The invitations have been sent, the venue is prepared, and people are already arriving. I have spent the last several months trying to make this marriage work despite your constant arguments, your accusations, and your insistence that every decision I make must somehow be a personal insult to you. So, if you're planning to start another argument about Sloane, I would appreciate it if you could at least wait until after the wedding."

I remembered the film.But I also remembered something else. The apocalypse.

The Green Tide.

The world was going to collapse.

And I was apparently standing in the middle of it with a fictional billionaire demanding that I behave myself.

I needed to get out.I needed to get home.I needed someone to wake me up before I lost my mind completely.

Instead, I looked at Dorian  and said, "Cancel the wedding."

He went very still.

"What did you just say?"

"I said cancel the wedding. Call whoever needs to be called, send whatever messages need to be sent, and tell your family that the wedding isn't happening. I don't care if the guests have already arrived. I don't care if the flowers have been delivered. I don't care if the entire city has booked a hotel room to watch you marry me. It's over."

He stared at me for several seconds before giving a disbelieving laugh.

"You're doing this again."

"Doing what?"

"This little routine where you threaten to leave whenever you don't get your way. You expect me to panic, to reassure you, and to promise that things will be different. I'm not going to play along this time."

I felt something hot rise in my chest.

Perhaps it was fear. Perhaps it was frustration. Perhaps it was the realization that even after being dropped into a fictional world, I still had to listen to a man explain my own feelings to me.

"Do you hear yourself? I've just told you I don't want to marry you, and your first response is to accuse me of trying to manipulate you. Does it ever occur to you that a woman might actually mean what she says? That she might reach a point where she looks at the life she's about to enter and decides she'd rather walk away than spend another day trying to convince her fiancé that she deserves to be treated like a person?"

His eyes narrowed.

"You've been unhappy because you refuse to understand the demands of my life. I run a company, Adeline. I have responsibilities that cannot simply be abandoned whenever you want attention. You know how much pressure I'm under, and yet you keep turning every missed dinner and every unanswered message into a crisis."

"Because those missed dinners and unanswered messages are my life, Dorian ! You keep talking about your responsibilities as if I'm asking you to abandon your company and move into a cave with me. I asked you to come home for dinner. I asked you to remember things that mattered to me. I asked you to stop making promises you had no intention of keeping. And somehow, every time I ask for the bare minimum, you behave as if I've demanded your entire fortune."

He looked away briefly.I laughed without humor. He studied me as though he were searching for the trick.

Then he said, "This is about Sloane."

Of all the things he could have said, that was the one that nearly made me lose my mind.I pulled the engagement ring from my finger and dropped it onto the dressing table.

It landed beside the perfume bottle with a small, sharp sound.

"There. One less thing for you to worry about. You can keep the ring, the wedding, the guests, the company, and the secretary. I'm done."

He stared at the ring. Then he looked at me, For the first time, he seemed uncertain.

"Are you feeling unwell? You've been acting strangely since last night. You're not making any sense, and now you're talking about cancelling a wedding you've spent years insisting you wanted. Sit down. I'll have someone bring you something to drink, and we can discuss this when you've calmed down."

"I have a meeting. I will not spend the morning entertaining this nonsense. The wedding is tomorrow, and unless you have a genuine reason for cancelling it, I expect you to be ready when the car arrives."

I watched him turn toward the door.

"Dorian  If you come back here expecting me to beg, save yourself the trip."

He looked over his shoulder.

"You'll change your mind." The door slammed shut behind him.

The apocalypse was supposed to start in about a week.A week to get money. A week to find somewhere safe. A week to secure food, water, medicine, and anything else I might need when the world began to collapse.

And if I was wrong about the date, I would be in trouble. I needed to leave the mansion immediately.

I threw open the bedroom door and hurried into the corridor.  I reached the staircase leading into the atrium and was almost at the bottom when someone called my name.

"Adeline, wait."

I stopped. Sloane   stood near the entrance, holding a tablet against her chest.

Of course she did.

The original heroine had apparently decided that the most important thing she could do with her morning was interfere with my attempt to survive.

She glanced at my robe and bare feet.

"Where are you going dressed like that? Dorian  said you weren't feeling well. You should go back upstairs and rest before you make yourself worse."

"Did he also tell you to stand here and prevent me from leaving, or is that something you decided to do for free?"

Her face tightened but I couldn't waste time arguing with her. I tried to move past her but  caught my wrist, I yanked free but the movement threw her off balance. Her heel caught the edge of the carpet, and she stumbled backward.

A tablet fell from her hand. She reached for the railing and missed. Before I could react, Dorian  appeared behind her and caught her around the waist.

His eyes went straight to me.

"What the hell did you do?"

"Dorian , please, don't make this worse. It was my fault. I grabbed her wrist, and I lost my balance. Adeline didn't push me."

He looked down at her, checking her arms as if he expected to find a serious injury. I suddenly felt sick to my stomach as I backed away from them. I turned and hurried toward the atrium.

I could hear Dorian  calling after me, but I didn't stop.

The front entrance stood beyond the glass doors. Sunlight filled the garden, illuminating the neat lawns and trimmed hedges. Everything looked normal. Beautiful, even.

That made it worse.

How could the world I knew be gone while the sun still shone? How could I be trapped in a fictional woman's body while the garden outside looked like an ordinary garden?

I reached the doors and put my hand against the handle.I couldn't stay in this world and pretend I knew what I was doing. I couldn't live someone else's life, marry someone else's fiancé, and wait for an apocalypse I barely remembered.

I needed to go home.

My gaze moved toward the upper railing overlooking the lower terrace. Beneath it, a glass canopy covered part of the outdoor seating area.

A terrible idea entered my mind.

If this was a dream, perhaps dying would wake me up.

I knew how insane that sounded. I knew people didn't simply jump from balconies and wake up in their own beds. I knew the human brain could produce terrifying dreams without offering a convenient exit.

But I was desperate.

I climbed onto the railing.

Someone screamed behind me.I looked over my shoulder and Dorian  was running toward me.

"Don't do this! Whatever you're trying to prove, stop it and get down from there. You could kill yourself!"

That was the problem, wasn't it? He still thought this was about him. I looked down at the terrace then I jumped.

The fall lasted only seconds.

I struck the glass canopy hard enough to shatter it. The frame caught my side, and I crashed through the broken panels before hitting the terrace floor.

Pain exploded through my left arm.Something struck my head. For a few seconds, I couldn't breathe, move, or even scream. I lay among the broken glass, staring at the sky while the world spun around me.

I heard Dorian  shouting my name.Footsteps pounded across the terrace. He dropped beside me, his face pale with shock.

"What the hell were you thinking? Adeline, look at me! Can you hear me? Don't move. Don't you dare try to get up. We’ll get you help, someone call a  fucking ambulance.”

The mansion's security alarm suddenly blared. A voice came over the speakers, repeating a warning that grew louder with every passing second.

"Emergency alert. All residents must remain indoors. Avoid contact with exterior rainwater. Do not touch unfamiliar vegetation. Secure all doors and windows immediately."

Beyond the glass doors, the garden began to move.

The hedges swelled. Thick green vines twisted across the walls, spreading faster than anything natural should have grown. Branches bent beneath new leaves, and roots pushed through the lawn, breaking the soil apart.

The first attack.

The first screams.

The scene I had barely paid attention to because Dorian  and Sloane had been arguing about their feelings while the world began to die around them.

But the movie's timeline was wrong. This wasn't supposed to happen today. It wasn't supposed to happen for another week. I grabbed Dorian 's sleeve with my good hand.

"I don't know why I'm here, I don't know why this is happening, and I don't know how we're supposed to survive! But I know those plants are dangerous, and I know that if we stay outside, we're going to die!"

Dorian  stared at me for one terrible second. Suddenly a loud scream drew our attentions, the guard's screams stopped. The vine dragged him into the hedge and he  disappeared beneath a mass of rapidly growing leaves.

And every plant in the garden turned toward the mansion. The glass doors shuddered Something struck them from the other side.

Once.

Twice.

Then a thick green vine punched through the glass.