The first hint of consciousness was a dull, penetrating pain.

It wasn't the distant echo of the accident that had killed her, but a new and overwhelming reality imposing itself through every fiber of her new being. You gasped, and the air that filled her lungs was laden with the smell of damp earth, rancid straw, and a faint acidity of recent illness.

Opening her eyes required a superhuman effort. The light was dim, filtering through cracks in rotten wooden planks that served as a ceiling. Persistent drops of rainwater fell with a monotonous plink, plink into a cracked clay bowl in the center of the room. Each drop was a hammer pounding against her temples.

With agonizing slowness, you sat up. Every movement was a revelation of extreme weakness. Her new arms, thin and pale, trembled under their own weight. Her hair, tangled and dirty, stuck to her face and back. A feeling of profound misfit, of inhabiting a skin that was not her own, ran through her like a chill. This body, young and fragile, was exhausted. The emptiness in her stomach was a clenched fist, and a bitter taste coated her tongue. The fever that had killed the previous occupant had left its mark: a heaviness in the bones and a mental fog that was hard to dispel.

Her gaze, still clouded, scrutinized her new home.

The hut was a shell of misery. Three tiny rooms opened from the main chamber, their entrances covered by tattered curtains. The walls, of cracked adobe, revealed the bare straw in some places and were stained with damp and mold. The floor was packed earth, cold and uneven under her bare feet.

Around her, the evidence of absolute poverty. A kang, the adobe sleeping platform, was covered by a thin, rough blanket full of patches. A wooden chest, so old it was warped, served as both table and storage. The few kitchen utensils—a rusty iron wok, some chipped wooden bowls—lay in a corner near the stone hearth, in which cold ashes spoke of days without fire, without warmth, without food.

The silence was the most terrifying thing. There was no hum of appliances, no murmur of city traffic. Only the endless dripping, the whisper of the wind seeping through the cracks, and, in the distance, the pitiful clucking of a chicken. It was a heavy silence, laden with abandonment.

From the door of poorly fitted planks, you could see a piece of the outside world: a barren field, overrun with tall, thorny weeds swaying with cruel indifference under a grayish sky. These were the three hectares that now, somehow, belonged to her. A legacy of sickly, neglected land.

There was no one else. Just her, the ghost of a family extinguished by sacrifice and oblivion, and the echo of a past life that now existed only in her memory. The reality, raw and inescapable, closed in on her: she had escaped death only to be born into a broken body, in a ruined home, in a world she did not know and which had no reason to be kind to a woman alone, orphaned, and poor.

The challenge was not just to survive. It was to learn to live again, from scratch, with nothing but her will and the fragments of knowledge from another era as her only, fragile weapon.