Chapter 1

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My best friend and I transmigrated into the ancient world at the same time.

She became the Queen of Dayong, the most beloved woman in the royal harem; I became the Realm-Guarding High Priestess who reads fate from the stars and communes with the living and the dead.

After ten months carrying the child, she gave birth to the only little princess in nine generations of the dynasty.

And then she told me she wanted to go home.

"Stella Henson, I want to go back to the slushie stand."

I froze where I stood.

"You want to go back where?"

She held the little princess, and something like homesickness welled up in her eyes.

"Back to our hometown, of course. You know the little jingle from home."

"You love me and I love you, sweet as the slushie stand, honey-honey."

I stared at that achingly familiar face, and every drop of blood in me ran cold.

In our first year here, we had made a pact.

So that we wouldn't be branded as outsiders and executed in these lawless times, we swore never to breathe a single word about the modern world.

But now my best friend had the slushie stand on her lips, and was even calling it our hometown.

This woman smiling so gently in front of me was absolutely not my best friend, Mabel Pruitt.

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I kept my face calm, untroubled, and answered in an even voice.

"You're joking again. There's no city called the slushie stand anywhere within Dayong's borders."

She lifted her head, eyes curving into a smile.

"Are you getting muddled? Our hometown before we transmigrated was called the slushie stand."

She took my hand and went on talking, lost in it.

"I miss the days we spent in school together before we came here."

"Splitting one bagel in the morning, sharing a single pair of earbuds to watch shows in class."

The way she spoke, the little crinkle of her nose when she smiled, even the messy bun she'd twisted up without thinking—all of it was Mabel Pruitt down to the last detail.

But an alarm was going off inside me, and my hand tightened instinctively around the short blade at my waist.

Back when we first transmigrated.

On our very first day here, Mabel had done nothing but casually say she wanted to charge her phone.

And she'd been taken for an enemy spy, nearly strung up on the city wall for all to see.

After surviving that, Mabel had made a solemn pact with me.

"To stay alive, we can never mention anything modern again."

But now she not only had the word transmigrate on her lips.

She'd even turned the slushie stand into the hometown we came from?!

I pushed down the panic rising in me.

And ran through the situation fast.

Was it just that Mabel was weak after the birth?

Her guard down, joking with me?

Or was she not Mabel Pruitt at all.

I drew a slow breath and probed carefully.

"You have a husband who loves you now, and a sweet little daughter."

"Stop dwelling on the past. Just settle in and be Dayong's queen."

Then I watched her reaction closely.

Mabel raised her head.

A single tear dropped onto the back of my hand with no warning at all.

"How can I not go back..."

"All those relatives of mine scraped together a hundred thousand to send me to the northern capital for school."

"I'd just gotten the money, and then I vanished without a word."

She covered her face and sobbed, tear after tear soaking through the thin garment over her chest.

"My mom is such a proud woman."

"When she borrowed that money she swore up and down she'd pay them back the moment my student loan came through."

"Now both I and the money are gone. I don't even know how she's supposed to face them."

My throat tightened, and some of my suspicion eased.

Mabel came from a single-parent home, and her mother's health was poor.

The two of them were proud in exactly the same way.

She'd been working odd jobs to help with the household since high school.

The fact that her family had scraped together the money for college.

Was her most private secret.

Besides her family, I was the only one who knew.

So I really had been too on edge.

I wrapped an arm around Mabel's shoulders and murmured to comfort her.

"Don't worry. I'll take you home, I promise."

She threw her arms around my waist, gripping hard enough to nearly crack my ribs.

"Stella, thank god I have you."

"No matter where we are, you're my best friend."

I let my guard down and said a few soothing words.

When I turned back to play with the little princess, delicate and lovely as carved jade.

Emperor Jasper Harding strode into the royal bedchamber, his whole face lit with the joy of new fatherhood.

"Stella, hurry, cast a fate chart for my little princess."

"My daughter is surely a lucky star sent down from heaven!"

I noted the little princess's birth time and laid out her chart with celestial fate-charting.

But the moment the pattern surfaced, I felt myself plunge into a pit of ice.