Reborn As The Beastmen's Wicked Wife

A splitting pain tore through the back of her skull, yanking her consciousness up from an endless dark abyss. Isolde gasped, her lungs burning as she choked on the icy air. She tried to force her eyes open, but her eyelids felt like lead, glued shut by dried blood.

The stench of rust hit her nostrils next, thick and metallic. Blood. It was everywhere. She tried to lift a hand to touch the source of the agony at the back of her head, but her limbs were stiff and frozen, as if they belonged to a corpse that had been lying in the snow for days.

[Host vitals critical. Life signs at 5%. Binding in progress. ]

A flat, mechanical voice echoed inside her mind, followed by a piercing alarm that made her eardrums throb. Nexus. The system. Before she could even process what that meant, a tidal wave of memories slammed into her brain, violent and uninvited.

She saw a world divided not into men and women, but into males and females. Males were born with a dual nature—a powerful beast form and a human form—granting them extraordinary strength and combat ability to hunt and provide. Females, like her, were born with only a human form, but possessed a powerful mental force.

This spiritual power was the only thing that could soothe the chaotic, raging sea of a male beastman's mind after battle. Without a female's touch, a male's spirit could shatter.

She saw hands-her hands-wielding a whip covered in barbs. She heard screams, saw men cowering on the floor, their backs torn to ribbons. Her stomach heaved, a violent spasm of nausea rolling through her as the sheer cruelty of those memories washed over her. That wasn't her. That was the original Isolde.

They were her mates, her five beast-husbands, bound by a sacred contract she treated as a chain of ownership.

The memory shifted. She was being dragged through the snow, the cold biting into her skin. Imperial guards threw her into this ruin like garbage, leaving her to rot in the Northern Wasteland. The humiliation and despair of that moment seared into her soul, mixing with the physical pain until she couldn't tell where the memory ended and her reality began.

A red panel flashed before her eyes, obscuring the dim light trying to filter through her lashes.

[Vitals: 5%. Status: Near-death. Immediate action required. ]

Isolde pushed against the floor, her palm scraping against rough, icy stone. Her hand slipped into something warm and sticky. Blood. Half-dried blood glued her palm to the floor, the sensation making her skin crawl. She was lying in a pool of her own blood.

Heavy footsteps crunched on the snow outside the door. Isolde's heart lurched against her ribs. She held her breath, forcing her body to go limp, falling back into the bloody mess on the floor.

The footsteps stopped right outside the rickety wooden door.

"Just go in and finish her," a young, furious voice snarled. The