Transformers: The Rebirth Novels & Stories

The tour bus that my mother-in-law, Madison Caldwell, and my son, Samuel Sadler, are on flips over on a mountain road. It hangs from a tree on the cliff, on the verge of falling at any moment. My husband, Jared Sadler, is the leader of the nearest emergency response team. When the police officer calls the emergency hotline, he learns that Jared and his team are at a school event for Jared's first love's son. In my previous life, I asked my friend to drag Jared here to save Madison and Samuel. However, ashamed that her son had lost the competition, Jared's first love cut off all ties with him. On top of that, Jared was also fired from the emergency response team. After Madison and Samuel were discharged from the hospital, Jared tied my friend and me up and threw us off a cliff, shouting, "I lost everything because of you!" In this life, his first love's son wins the competition, but Jared will never laugh again.

It all started when my sister made an offhand remark while sponsoring a poor student. She told him it was a coincidence that we were born on the same day, at the exact hour too. That comment made him convince himself that he was the real heir, that we were switched at birth. Soon after, he showed up with two thugs, kidnapped me, and planned to kill me to reclaim his life. I called my fiancée for help in desperation. Instead of saving me, she told me impatiently that I deserved to die for stealing his life. Her friend showed up to save me, but neither of us made it out alive after I was pushed into the river. I was back on the day when I was kidnapped when I opened my eyes again. When the poor student laughed and told me to pick someone to leave my last words to, I did not hesitate to call my sister. Their fates were sealed, with another chance at life, I would make sure to make them pay, and show them who the real heir was.

Gilbert Pierce, my wife's male trainee, bragged that he could disarm a bomb just by relying on his senses and with his eyes closed. However, he misjudged it and triggered the bomb's secondary detonation sequence. I stepped in at the last second and used the most dangerous method available, liquid nitrogen flash cooling, to save the entire building. Gilbert was pulled off frontline duty and placed on suspension for review. My wife, Jasmine Clem, tried to speak up for him, but I stopped her cold. "If you defend him now, you won't save him. You'll just get dragged down and suspended alongside him." Unable to handle the pressure, Gilbert blew himself up in an accident. In his suicide note, he accused Jasmine of choosing self-preservation when he needed her most. Jasmine said nothing. She only locked that letter away in her study. Years later, Jasmine became a nationally renowned bomb disposal expert. During a terrorist attack, I was captured and strapped with a timed explosive. Jasmine came to the scene personally to defuse it, but right in front of me, she repeated the exact same mistake her trainee had made years ago. She watched the countdown and smiled lightly at me. "See? He was just nervous back then. If I had encouraged him, he'd be a hero now." The bomb detonated, and I was blown apart. When I opened my eyes again, I was back at the moment she was about to defend Gilbert. She didn't know that inside that building sat the nation's most classified core servers.

At my own wedding, I find out the woman behind the veil isn't even the one I'm supposed to be marrying. Instead of getting mad, I give her the wedding of the century. It's all because of what happened in my past life. I'd exposed that she wasn't my bride in front of everyone and blew up the whole ceremony. That forced Jessie Clarke, who'd been at the hospital with her childhood sweetheart, Oliver Grant, to rush over reluctantly so we could still get married. Because of that, Oliver refused treatment and died on the operating table. When I heard he was gone, I told Jessie she should see him one last time, but she refused. All she said was, "Blame it on his bad luck." After we got married, we acted just as in love as before. I kept getting money from my family to save her company every time it was on the verge of collapse. But on the anniversary of Oliver's death, Jessie shoved me off the top floor of her company. I hit the ground hard enough to end up a broken, bloody mess. As I fell, I caught one last look at her face, streaked with tears. "If you hadn't forced me back to marry you, Oliver wouldn't have died! You get to keep me, but I lost him for good! Why do you get to live a happy life?" So that was it. She'd blamed me for Oliver's death from the start. She'd never loved me at all. The next time I opened my eyes, I was back at our wedding ceremony.

Even knowing that wailing at an Eravalen aristocratic funeral was considered disrespectful to the deceased, I let my husband's adopted sister make a scene anyway. In my previous life, my husband, Robert Baker, had a distant relative among the Eravalen aristocracy who passed away. A lawyer informed him that he stood to inherit the estate and invited him to attend the funeral. His adopted sister, Mia Carter, insisted on tagging along to see how the privileged few in another country lived. She wanted to rub shoulders with nobles and make herself look important, even planning to wail dramatically in front of everyone. I rushed to stop her. "Loud mourning is taboo among the Eravalen nobility. Forget inheriting anything. We'll all be thrown out!" Yet she burst into tears, accusing me of looking down on her and thinking she was not good enough to mingle with aristocrats. She stormed out and was killed by street thugs in a random attack. I thought Robert would fall apart, but he stayed silent through the entire funeral and collected his inheritance without a hitch. Six months later, on our wedding anniversary, he took me to the snowy mountains for a photoshoot. The moment we reached the peak, he shoved me into a sleeping bag and tied it shut. "If you hadn't blown everything out of proportion, Mia never would've run off and gotten herself shot." He buried me alive in the snow. I froze to death, and he used that aristocratic fortune to become the CEO of a publicly traded company. When I opened my eyes again, I was back on the day Mia insisted on wailing at the funeral.

After reliving my life for the third time, Soren Vantrell still died at 28. Unwilling to accept it, I started over again, meeting him and falling in love as before, until a sudden turn changed everything. He began claiming his mental state was unstable, using it as an excuse to visit his psychologist, Dr. Nadia Pembroke, again and again. Until one day, I caught them kissing inside her consultation room. With a light, mocking laugh, Soren said, "You might think I’m crazy if I told you this, but I really have died three times. Every single time, I died right next to Sloane Hartwell. "I was originally curious to see how she would try to save me this time. Now that I think about it, she must have been bad luck. Once I stayed far away from her, didn’t I end up living just fine?" I quietly stepped back. In this fourth life, whether he lived or died has nothing to do with me anymore. This time, I was going to live my own life.

My fiancé's childhood sweetheart could eat chili peppers like they were nothing, and she even claimed that they tasted sweet. The truth was, whenever she ate something spicy, the heat multiplied a hundred times in my stomach and shrank to almost nothing in hers. That was how she blew up online doing spicy food challenges, pulling in millions of followers in no time. As for me, I ended up with a wrecked stomach and a face covered in breakouts. I had no choice but to ask my fiancé for help. Not only did he refuse, but he also tried to have me committed. "Who still believes in this kind of nonsense? Either see a therapist or go check yourself into a psych ward!" Later, she entered a national spicy eating competition. After downing ten pounds of ghost peppers, she walked away just fine. Meanwhile, I died on the spot from a ruptured stomach. When I opened my eyes again, I was back at the moment Sally Wallaker had just started streaming. I reached out and snatched the utensil from her hand. "I'll take this whole bowl of extra-spicy Cajun wings."

My wife’s childhood friend, Peter White, needed surgery. He requested that I perform the operation as the lead surgeon. I followed every medical protocol exactly and did my best to save him. However, after being discharged, he accused me of practicing medicine illegally. He claimed I had made him permanently disabled. I asked my wife to back me up. But instead, she said to me, “I told you not to act recklessly, but you wouldn’t listen. Now look at what has happened!” The hospital security footage even showed that I did not follow the standard surgical procedure. I had no way to defend myself. In the end, I was stabbed to death by Peter’s wife, Janet White, who had been financially supporting him. Even during my dying moments, I could not understand why the surveillance showed that I was not following the medical protocol! When I opened my eyes again, I had returned to the day Peter came in for his initial examination.

After catching Gideon Hawthorne cheating on me for the 99th time, he decides to sleep with the fake heiress, Helena Fairchild, just to get back at me. When I catch him and Helena together in bed together red-handed, instead of feeling guilty for what he's done, he just grins at me maliciously. "Ophelia, your sister feels a lot tighter than you." In my previous life, when I heard Gideon's comment, I broke down on the spot and started kicking up a huge ruckus over the matter. I even spread intimate, racy photos of Gideon and Helena all over the world on the Internet. Unable to endure my lunatic tendencies anymore, Gideon chose to divorce me. As for my parents, they completely gave up on me and cast me out of the family. I thought things would be better for me, and yet reality taught me otherwise. I practically had to raise myself in the countryside for the past 18 years. Even if I got reunited with my biological family, I still had no survival skills to fall back on. On top of that, the Hawthornes kept exacting revenge on me, causing me to starve all the time. A few years later, I died from cancer. As for Helena, she ended up marrying Gideon and became a rich aristocrat in the upper crust. To think that I, the ex-wife, was reduced to everyone's laughingstock at the end of the day… When I open my eyes again, I've returned to the day Gideon and Helena have slept together.

In my previous life, my three sons told me they wanted to set up a Family Bond Fund for me. Each of them would deposit three thousand dollars every month. I cried with gratitude, truly believing that decades of sacrifice had finally paid off. One of them even said, "Mom, you've given us so much. It's our turn to take care of you now." However, eight years later, I was told I have uremia. That was when I discover that the bank card, which supposedly held the fund, couldn't even cover the dialysis deposit. Soon after, my eldest son video-called me. He said he wanted to buy a better apartment in a good school district. He was short of 150 thousand dollars for the down payment and asked if I could lend it to him first. My second son came to the hospital with his wife and daughter. He didn't ask about my condition at all. Instead, he kept showing off his daughter's piano competition trophy, hinting that he needed 50 thousand dollars to enroll her in a prestigious international piano program. My youngest son was even more straightforward. He said he had his eye on a limited-edition pair of sneakers and wanted me to pay 30 thousand dollars for them as a birthday gift. The moment they realized the bank account didn't have enough money, their faces fell. "We each put in three thousand dollars every month. Over eight years, that's at least eight hundred thousand dollars. Mom, are you hiding the money from us?" To force me to reveal my savings, they took turns pressuring me, switching between sweet talk and threats. They even told relatives that I had dementia and had been scammed out of my money. Unable to take it anymore, I yanked out my IV late one night and walked out of the hospital, only to be hit by a car, dying instantly. When I open my eyes again, I find myself back on the day of my hospital checkup.