Ling Lan sighed, leaning back against the cool metal wall of her cell. Dying? It was a strange way to get reborn, she thought, landing in this messed-up future timeline with all its weird tech and confusing politics. She really just wanted peace, quiet – maybe even started a tiny family already! But then, *bam*, her dad comes back from the dead, totally powered up by some cosmic reset button, and decides she gotta go to this top-tier Federation military boys' school.
It felt like such a betrayal of her hard-won freedom. She was sixteen now, officially outta the boy-pretense phase thanks to... well, mostly just sheer stubbornness and maybe some luck nobody else got. But before she could even *think* about tying the knot or settling down, things went sideways again.
Her dad's resurgence threw a wrench in everything. Now, facing this Federation academy? That was another layer of crazy piled onto her pile. Could she really walk away from that too? The path ahead suddenly felt colder, maybe more lonely than before as she adjusted to being sixteen and navigating all these new pressures – the original wish for peace, then the forced boyhood survival tactics, now this whole military dominance thing.
And sometimes, when things just got *too* much, her friend would whisper something like, "Ling Lan, remember what you said about rebirths?" A reminder that maybe some paths are never truly escape routes.