“Mirror mirror on the wall……who’s the fairest of them all?”
（Magic Mirror, Magic Mirror, tell me……who is the most beautiful woman in the world?）
Ye Tang felt like she heard a voice.
It was a woman’s voice filled with obsession and resentment, brimming with grief and pain, yet faintly laced with fear.
“My dear Queen, the most beautiful woman in the world is of course none other than you.”
A young boy’s voice answered like this, but Ye Tang detected disdain and a hint of sarcasm in his tone.
Ye Tang’s consciousness was not yet fully awake. The question and answer she heard made her feel deeply familiar, but for the moment, she could not recall where she had heard such an exchange before.
A long time passed, or perhaps it was only an instant. Ye Tang heard the same question again.
“Magic Mirror, Magic Mirror, tell me……who is the most beautiful woman in the world?”
This time, the woman asking the same question was crying.
Her hoarse sobs made Ye Tang struggle to pry open her eyelids. In a blur, Ye Tang saw an extraordinarily beautiful woman.
The woman had radiant golden long hair, each strand seeming woven from sunlight itself, or like the purest gold melted into liquid and blown into delicate, dense threads.
The woman was very fair-skinned, a whiteness that surpassed even that of white people. This gave her an elfin, ethereal beauty. Moreover, her eyes were golden, with long, curled, and thick lashes. Every blink made her eyelashes flutter like fairy wings dusted with mystical scales.
Beneath her golden eyes was a high-bridged nose and sensual lips. Her chin was dainty, and her slender white neck evoked the image of a white swan.
Not only was her face stunningly beautiful, but her figure was perfect too. Even with Ye Tang’s vision still blurry, she could tell the woman was over 1.7 meters tall, nearly 1.8, a true nine-head body where everything from the neck down was legs.
If this were the 21st century, such a world-shattering beauty would definitely spark a global craze for her face. Yet this dreamlike, unreal beauty was now crying her eyes out in a total mess.
She repeated the same question nearly madly: “Magic Mirror, Magic Mirror, tell me! Who is the most beautiful woman in the world! Who is the most beautiful woman in the world!!?”
“Queen, have I not already answered you? Here, you are the most beautiful woman in the world.”
The young boy’s voice was ice-cold. The disdain and mockery in his words grew even thicker.
“……‘Here’? Why do you say ‘here’? If it’s not ‘here,’ then I’m not the most beautiful woman in the world!?”
The beauty pounded madly on the transparent wall-like thing in front of Ye Tang, then turned and dragged over a chair made of ebony, raising it to smash down.
“……!!”
With a “Bang!” it exploded right in front of Ye Tang. Ye Tang was now fully awake.
She realized she was locked in a pitch-black space. There was no up or down, no left or right. The only light source came from beyond that transparent wall.
However, that transparent wall did not seem breakable by external force. No matter how frantically the beauty thrashed, even after she smashed the ebony chair to pieces, the transparent wall remained utterly unmoved, without the slightest damage.
“Queen, please calm your anger.”
The boy said words of pleading, but his tone was anything but.
“I merely did not wish to see you upset.”
The beauty outside the wall froze. She trembled as she retreated a few steps, releasing the broken ebony chair.
“N-No……don’t……don’t say it, I don’t want to hear……I don’t want to hear—”
The boy’s voice laughed: “My dear Queen, here you are the most beautiful woman in the world. But Snow White, playing in the courtyard, is a thousand times more beautiful than you!”
Her golden pupils contracted sharply. In that instant, the dreamlike beauty clutched her head and let out a scream like a crushed flower, then wilted and collapsed limply.
“Nooooooo—!!”
Damn it! Don’t take seriously words that were obviously meant to maliciously belittle you!!
If she could see where the boy’s voice came from, Ye Tang would definitely punch that twisted kid who took pleasure in tormenting people first.
In that moment, without thinking, Ye Tang reached both hands toward the beauty outside the transparent wall. She wanted to hold the woman and prevent her from crashing hard to the ground.
Ye Tang passed through the transparent wall that the beauty could not damage no matter how she struck it, but Ye Tang failed to catch her—The half-transparent Ye Tang directly merged into the beauty’s body, and Ye Tang’s consciousness went offline.
Ye Tang woke again at dusk. The sunset’s afterglow shone through the window into the room, painting everything inside with a layer of orange-red.
“Mm……”
Ye Tang, crawling up from the floor, felt a headache, and her body ached all over, especially her joints—This castle was unusually cold, and the queen’s room had no thick animal furs on the floor. The stone floor was bitingly chill.
She wobbled to the bed and sat down, beginning to sort through the information she knew.
This was the world of Snow White. As usual, she had not become the female lead but the story’s vicious supporting female character.
In the world of Snow White, there was only one vicious supporting character: Snow White’s stepmother, the successor queen obsessed with witchcraft and whether she or Snow White was more beautiful.
In the fairy tale, the stepmother had no name, so readers of Snow White usually called her: the old witch.
After arriving, Ye Tang learned the stepmother was named Marinfield. Moments ago, Marinfield had been too agitated, her mind reaching its limit. A blood vessel or several in her brain went “pop,” and Marinfield died suddenly.
Transmigration itself could not repair the original host’s body. The reason Ye Tang was fine now was due to the Millennium Rose—It seemed not only to affect the flesh but also the soul. After Ye Tang’s soul entered Marinfield’s body, the Millennium Rose’s power automatically repaired the burst blood vessels in Marinfield’s brain.
But Marinfield’s soul had already left its shell by then. This beautiful yet pitiful woman seemed unwilling to continue living, so her body became Ye Tang’s.
The pain in Ye Tang’s head faded quickly, but the sunset’s afterglow vanished even faster.
The country Marinfield had married into, Castellion, sat in the extreme cold of the northern border. Winters here were very long, as were the endless nights.
For Marinfield, winter and night were not the hardest to endure. Harder was the cold violence from her husband.
In Marinfield’s memories, from the first day she married over, she never received a kind look from her husband. His smiles bloomed only for his stepdaughter Snow White.
Influenced by Marinfield’s husband, the ministers and even servants who dared not defy the king treated Marinfield as nothing. Proof was that she had made such a racket in her room—smashing mirrors and collapsing to the floor—yet in all that time, no servant or guard came to check or inquire. No one in the entire castle cared about Marinfield.
In such an icy-cold country, it was understandable that Marinfield did not wish to stay. Ye Tang could only wish that Marinfield’s soul would go to a land of spring warmth and flowers next time, to meet people with warm hearts.