The night Lina died, rain fell softly—just like it had the night she was born.
She remembered the pain first.
Then the darkness.
Then… breathing.
Lina gasped.
Her eyes flew open, met by a ceiling she knew too well—cracked white paint, a small glow-in-the-dark star stuck near the corner. Her heart pounded violently as she sat up, hands shaking.
"This isn't possible…" she whispered.
Her hands were smaller. Smoother. No scars.
She rushed to the mirror.
The reflection staring back at her was sixteen-year-old Lina—the Lina who still believed people were kind, the Lina who hadn't yet trusted the wrong friend, loved the wrong man, or lost everything.
She had been reborn.
Memories flooded her mind like a storm. Her first life replayed painfully: betrayal, failure, silence, and finally death. She had died at twenty-six—alone, broken, forgotten.
But now…
Now she was back.
Same world.
Same body.
Same people.
But not the same soul.
Lina clenched her fists.
"This time," she said quietly, eyes burning with determination, "I won't be weak."
At school the next day, everything felt like a warning. The girl who would one day betray her smiled sweetly. The boy who would ruin her future laughed casually nearby.
In her first life, she had followed them blindly.
In this one, she watched. Calculated. Learned.
She studied harder. Spoke less. Observed more.
People started to change how they looked at her.
"You've changed," her old best friend said one afternoon.
Lina smiled politely. "People grow."
But inside, she thought:
No. I survived.
As months passed, Lina rewrote her fate—step by step. She avoided the traps she once fell into. She built strength instead of trust, wisdom instead of hope.
Yet sometimes, late at night, she wondered…
"Why was I reborn?" she asked the silent sky.
The answer came unexpectedly—through a boy she had never noticed before. Quiet. Kind. Someone who had been invisible in her first life.
Meeting him changed something inside her.
Perhaps rebirth wasn't just about revenge.
Perhaps it was about living again—correctly.
Lina looked up at the stars, the same ones she'd seen in both lives.
"This time," she whispered, "I'll choose happiness."
And under the same sky, her second life truly began.