Naia quickly found out that she was, in fact, not in heaven.
The blue sky above was real, the grass next to her was very real, and the pain crippling her body was also very real.
As if the enduring ache in her body wasn't enough, an additional jolt of pain pierced through her head. It was as if several people started stabbing needles into it.
"Ughh…"
She groaned, her vision turning dark.
Suddenly, it felt like her mind opened, like a faucet turned on, and memories flowed in.
She woke up in the body of Nadia Thomas, a nineteen-year-old girl, who had just been brutally murdered by an old man her own father had sold her to.
The most recent memories were relatively innocuous. It was just a girl who was disappointed at being unable to get into her university due to circumstances.
Naia was born and grew up in the apocalypse, so she naturally found it difficult to absorb the emotions of despair she felt when she remembered this memory.
Naia, who lived through life and death every day for more than a decade, did not understand how someone could be depressed by such a 'little thing'.
However, as more memories got unlocked, and as she saw farther and farther into the girl's life, her heart started to simmer.
This girl's life had not been easy since she was a child. It seemed like for people destined to have unusual fates, it never was.
Nadia's life was even akin to a dramatic, tragic movie she had heard about before.
The girl's family life was destroyed when her mother died, and her father immediately brought in a wife and daughter even older than she was. Very cliche, but surprisingly common.
Her parents were both from lower-middle-class families. Her mother was from a farm village, while her father, hereinafter referred to as sperm donor, was from the slums.
Both of them were smart people with high ambitions. When they met during college, they found that their work values aligned, and they partnered up. They even started a company even before they graduated.
They struck rich at some point, fell in love, got married, and then had her a bit later in life.
Her mother was the main driving force in the company, but when she died when Nadia was around seven years old, it was as if all her efforts for the company were erased.
Nadia was treated like a parasite who did not deserve her own father's resources.
The stepmother and stepsister treated her as a servant. Sometimes, they did not feed her, hurting her often, and this continued on even in the present day.
That had been Nadia's life since she was young, so she had hardly questioned its 'correctness'. Even if she felt it was abnormal, she didn't know how to handle it, and subconsciously ignored the signs.
Hence, she could only suffer in silence.
In fact, it seemed like she did not do well in her exams—one that she had worked so hard for—because she was pushed into a bathtub the night before, causing her to fall very ill. The exams needed a year to retake, so she pushed through despite not being in her best condition.
When the exam ended, she fell unconscious, and none of her family went to visit her in the hospital.
Nadia, unfortunately, failed the exam, and it was then that the family decided to sell her off to an old man in their hometown, in exchange for some property.
Naia found this inconceivable. Though she had heard a lot of dark stories from the previous generation, not to mention there were a lot of disgusting things happening every day in the apocalypse, there was one thing that was treated as an absolute taboo: harming children.
This was an unspoken rule. People were allowed to hurt others, steal from others, and cheat, but this one seemed to be the line, and understandably so.
In her time, it had been difficult to procreate due to what the aliens had done to the world. In fact, in her generation, nearly every child was conceived artificially, if they were conceived at all.
Even that had become difficult as the environment changed too harshly, and the humans could not adapt fast enough.
There were very, very few natural births, and that included her and Kael. They were also the only ones who received the power since birth. Normally, people awakened after absorbing the crystals inside aliens' heads, assuming they did not fail and become monsters themselves.
Anyway, this meant that every child was treasured. It seemed that the population was currently so high that they did not care for their children anymore?
She was sold off just this morning. Even after Nadia overheard their plans, she was unable to escape as her father caught her before she could do so.
She was dragged to this place, by the arm, by the hair, and thrown to the lap of an old man who had been married five times, with all his ex-wives dying from mysterious circumstances.
Nadia resisted with all her might until she even hurt the old man, who, in his anger, grabbed her head and smacked her against furniture, causing her to bleed out.
This wasn't the old man's first rodeo, but he was in pain from the injury. In anger, he threw her down a low cliff next to his house, which was where she was now.
And then poor, tragic Nadia, at the young age of nineteen years old, died— just like that.