Chloe POV:

A man's hands were wrapped around my throat.

The pressure was immense, crushing. My lungs burned. A desperate, primal need for air clawed at me from the inside out. I was drowning. The water was a frigid shock, seeping into my clothes, into my bones, but the lack of oxygen was a far greater agony.

My eyes fluttered open. The world was a blurry, green-and-brown mess under the water. Bubbles escaped my lips, tiny pockets of my life drifting away. Above me, a shape solidified. A face.

It was the most handsome face I had ever seen, even twisted as it was in a mask of pure agony. High cheekbones, a strong jaw, dark hair floating like a halo in the murky water. But his eyes... they were a vortex of pain, fixed on me with a terrifying intensity. And his hands were the source of the crushing pressure on my neck. He was killing me.

My brain was a blank slate of panic. Thrash. Fight. Get away.

But my body didn't listen to the panic.

Instead, a strange, cold calm washed over me. It was a foreign feeling, an instinct that wasn't my own. This new instinct told me that struggling against his superior strength was a waste of precious energy.

So I stopped fighting.

I let my body go limp, my arms floating uselessly at my sides. I allowed the last of the air to bubble out of my lungs, a final, silent surrender. To him, it must have looked like I was dead.

His grip faltered for a fraction of a second. The pressure on my windpipe eased just enough.

It was the only opening I needed.

In one explosive, fluid motion, my body coiled. My knee slammed upward, driving hard into the soft, vulnerable flesh of his groin.

A choked grunt vibrated through the water, the sound muffled but the impact undeniable. His body convulsed, and the hands around my neck went slack.

Instantly, I twisted. My arm snaked around his neck from behind, locking him in a chokehold. My other elbow, guided by a precision I didn't know I possessed, jabbed sharply into the side of his neck. The carotid sinus. A perfect, professional strike designed to cause instantaneous blackout.

The man's powerful body went rigid for a moment, then completely limp. He was a dead weight, his consciousness snuffed out.

I shoved him away and shot towards the surface.

My head broke through the water, and I took a huge, ragged breath of cold, damp air. It felt like swallowing glass. I coughed violently, my body shaking as I expelled water from my lungs. I clung to a mossy rock, my knuckles white, just trying to breathe.

When the coughing subsided, I finally looked around. I was in a shallow, fast-moving stream, surrounded by a dense, unfamiliar forest. The sky above was a grim, overcast gray. I was soaked to the skin, shivering, and utterly alone except for the unconscious man floating face down a few feet away.

Suddenly ,a tidal wave of memories crashed into my mind.

They weren't my memories.

A girl named Chloe Hayes. A life of being called "wolfless," "ugly," "stupid." The constant sneers, the quiet bullying, the crushing loneliness within her own family, the Stonefang Pack.

Then a specific, vivid memory surfaced. My cousin Cassidy Hayes leaned close to me, her face forever wearing that sweet, concerned expression, her fingertips gently stroking my hair as if soothing a disobedient pet dog. She brought a porcelain cup to my lips; the liquid inside glowed with an amber sheen.

"Drink up, my dear cousin," she murmured, the curve of her lips perfectly nauseating, "do you know that your very existence is the greatest disgrace to the Stonefang Pack? No wolf nature, dull as a pig, and yet you still occupy the bloodline legacy your mother left behind—do you even deserve it?"

She let out a low chuckle, cloyingly sweet.

"Your mother drank this very tea before she quietly disappeared. You two are cut from the same cloth—equally obtrusive. Don't worry, this tea won't make you suffer for long—after all, for a waste of space, eternal sleep is the kindest ending."

She personally poured the tea into my mouth, her fingertip lightly scraping across my cheek, as if wiping away a tear that never existed.

The memory of the tea was followed by a searing pain in my gut, a fog descending over my mind, the sensation of being dragged, helpless, through the forest floor.

I understood. I wasn't a different soul in a new body. I was Chloe Hayes. This body, on the brink of death, had awakened something that had been dormant my entire life. A bloodline. And a legacy left by my mother.A mental imprint. The fog that had clouded my mind for years—the dullness, the confusion that earned me the label "intellectually disabled"—was gone, burned away by this awakening. It had been poison, a slow and steady drip designed to keep me docile and stupid. Now, my mind was clear, sharp, and filled with cold fury.

But what awakened wasn't just my instinct—it was another legacy my mother left behind: a complete system of battlefield surgical medicine, like an encrypted encyclopedia now decompressing in my mind. From bone reduction to toxicology analysis, from trauma hemostasis to nerve blockade, every piece of knowledge was as clear as if I had practiced it a thousand times with my own hands. This "Surgeon System" wasn't designed for healing the sick and saving the dying—it was a survival tool my mother built for me.

I looked down at my hands. The skin was pale and marred with ugly, discolored patches. The poison. It hadn't killed me, but it had left its mark.

My gaze shifted to the man in the water. His body was slowly drifting towards a deeper part of the stream. He was still unconscious, his handsome face partially submerged.

The assassin's instinct—The Asset—screamed at me. Leave. He's a threat. You're weak. Survive.

He had, after all, just tried to murder me.

I turned him over, and when I looked at him, I saw the pain that twisted his face. It wasn't the face of a cold-blooded killer. It was the face of someone in unbearable pain, someone who had lost control. I could almost feel a phantom echo of it, a wild, chaotic energy similar to the poison burning in my own veins, but a thousand times more powerful.

Then I noticed something else.

My chest—which had been cold and numb—suddenly flooded with an unfamiliar warmth. It felt like… a string had been plucked. A string I never even knew I possessed. I couldn't tear my gaze from his face—the wet black hair, the tightly pressed thin lips. A thought blazed through my mind like wildfire, absurd, illogical, terrifying: I can't let him die.

This wasn't just the Surgeon System's directive—"you cannot let anyone die." It was something deeper. Something primal, instinctual, something that belonged to my werewolf bloodline. Like a gravitational pull, a fate-bound tug, radiating outward from deep within my chest.

I didn't know him. He had just tried to kill me.

But as I looked at his drowning face, at the lingering pain still etched between his brows even in unconsciousness, my body reacted in a way I couldn't understand. My pulse—which should have been too weak to even sustain life—began pounding violently. My palms tingled. My throat tightened, not from the lingering ache of strangulation, but from something older, something far more powerful.

A scent hung in the air. Even submerged in water, even with my own lungs still burning, I could catch it—a deep, mingled fragrance of cedar and wildfire, and that fragrance resonated through my very blood. The resonance was so fierce it nearly drove me to my knees.

My werewolf instincts, only just awakened, roared inside me. Not a threat. A confirmation. A summons.

I didn't know what it meant. But I knew I couldn't walk away.

I had to save him.

A groan escaped my throat, a sound thick with frustration and exhaustion, and then I made my decision.

Damn it.

I pushed off the rock, my legs trembling. I waded through the icy water, grabbed the collar of his expensive-looking shirt, and began dragging his heavy, unconscious body toward the shore with all the strength I could muster.

Chloe POV:

It felt like dragging a mountain. Every muscle in my body screamed in protest. By the time I heaved his torso onto a patch of damp grass, my vision was spotting with black. I collapsed beside him, my chest heaving, the 1% of life I had left feeling like it was about to flicker out.

For a long moment, I just lay there, listening to the rush of the stream and the frantic beat of my own weak heart.

Slowly, I pushed myself into a sitting position. The memories were still swirling, but they were beginning to settle, to organize themselves. The pain, the fear, the humiliation of the old Chloe was a raw, open wound inside me.

And at the center of it all was Cassidy's smiling face.

"Drink up, my dear cousin. This tea will make you thoroughly 'quiet'—just like your mother, so you'll never be an eyesore to anyone again."

Ice flowed through my veins, a cold fury that burned away the physical weakness. The hurt of the girl I used to be was no longer a passive sorrow. It was fuel. It was a promise.

I looked at my own trembling hands, at the ugly blotches the poison had left behind.

"Cassidy Hayes," I whispered to the empty forest, my voice a raw rasp. "You owe her. I'm going to make you pay for it. A thousand times over."

The vow settled in my soul, a solid piece of iron in the churning sea of my new reality. It gave me focus. It gave me a reason to fight.

My gaze fell upon the man lying beside me. I quiet down now, replaced by the cool, analytical thinking of a surgeon. I need to assess the situation.

I leaned over him and began to unbutton his soaked shirt. The fabric was fine linen, ridiculously impractical for the woods. Underneath, his chest was a landscape of hard muscle, but it was marred by something else. A network of black, vein-like markings spread across his skin, pulsing with a faint, dark energy. They looked like a curse made manifest.

My fingers, guided by a clinical curiosity, reached out and brushed against one of the black lines.A sharp, burning heat zapped my fingertips, and I flinched back. It was a familiar energy, a wilder, more ancient cousin to the poison that was slowly killing me.My System, the fragments of knowledge from The Surgeon, identified the source. Wolfsbane. But his was different. Not a poison ingested, but something woven into his very being. A curse.

His breathing was shallow, his lips tinged with blue. Hypothermia. The curse was probably fighting it, but the cold was winning. If I didn't do something, he would die.

I scanned the woods. No shelter. No tools. Nothing.

I tried to draw on my own energy, to stand, but my body refused. The weakness was absolute.

I looked back at the dying man. An idea, insane and desperate, began to form. He was burning with the curse's fever, while I was freezing to death.

With tremendous effort, I crawled closer to him. I tore a strip from the dry underside of his shirt and used it to wipe some of the water from his chest. It was a pathetic gesture, but it was all I could do.

Then, I lay down beside him.

I pressed my freezing body against his. His skin was scorching hot, a stark contrast to my own icy flesh. I wrapped my arms around his torso, pulling myself as close as I could get. My teeth chattered, my body shaking uncontrollably. I was trying to leech his heat, a human parasite trying to steal a few more moments of life.

The moment my skin made full contact with his, something shifted.

A tiny, almost imperceptible thread of warmth trickled from his body into mine. It wasn't just heat. It was energy. It flowed into my veins, a minuscule current in a dried-up riverbed, pushing back against the encroaching cold. The shivering eased slightly.

My eyes widened in surprise.

The system's voice returned, its tone still flat and mechanical.

I stared at the man's unconscious face. His features, even slack and pale, were aristocratic and severe. He looked like a king. A very dangerous, cursed king who was now, apparently, my personal life support machine.

"Stabilizer?" I muttered, a dry, humorless laugh escaping my chapped lips. "Hammer, my ass. You feel more like a ticking time bomb."

Chloe POV:

I clung to him like a lifeline, greedily soaking up the thin trickle of warmth. But it was like trying to fill an ocean with a teaspoon. The cold in my bones was a deep, persistent ache that the fragile current of energy couldn't erase.

Suddenly, a transparent screen flickered into existence in my mind's eye. It was a clean, minimalist interface, courtesy of the Psychic Imprint. A long, horizontal bar dominated the display. It was glowing a weak, angry red.

Above it, a label read: Life Force: 1%.

A klaxon, silent but mentally deafening, blared through my head.

"Warning: Vitality is below critical threshold. Organ failure will begin in approximately one hour. Urgent energy replenishment is required."

My heart, which was already beating sluggishly, seemed to stutter and fall. One hour. I could feel my body shutting down, the coldness creeping from my fingers and toes towards my core.

"How?" I projected the thought at the system, my voice a desperate plea in my own mind. "How do I supplement?"

On the screen, the image of the man beside me was highlighted with a pulsing red circle. Text appeared next to it.

"Target: Energy anchor. Recommendation: Initiate deep physical contact to establish efficient energy conduction."

I frowned. "Deep physical contact? I'm already hugging him." The absurdity of the situation was almost laughable.

"Current contact efficiency: 0.1% per minute. Projected vitality after one hour: 1.6%. Insufficient to prevent organ failure. A more efficient contact method is required."

The system, ever helpful, then displayed a series of small, clinical diagrams. The first showed two hands, palms pressed together. The second, a full-body embrace, which I was already doing.

And the third... the third was an unmistakable icon of two pairs of lips meeting.

A flush of heat, entirely unrelated to the energy transfer, crept up my neck. "Damn system!" I cursed internally.

I looked down at his face. He was completely vulnerable, his features smoothed out in unconsciousness. The logical, surgical part of my brain saw it as a procedure. A necessary step for survival. But the other part of me, the part that was still just a girl who had never even been kissed, recoiled. Kissing a stranger? A man who had tried to strangle me just minutes ago? It felt violating. Wrong.

As if on cue, a low groan of pain escaped his lips. His body began to twitch, a small seizure racking his powerful frame. The black, curse-like markings on his chest flared, glowing with a malevolent red light.

The tiny thread of warmth flowing into me was severed.

My own body immediately felt the loss. The cold returned with a vengeance. I glanced at the interface in my mind. The number was ticking down.

Life Force: 0.9%.

The shadow of death, which had briefly receded, was now looming directly over me. It was a physical presence, a cold weight pressing down on my chest.

I clenched my jaw, the sound of my teeth grinding loud in the quiet forest. "Hammer, my ass," I muttered, the phrase a strange comfort. "For survival..."

There was no more time for hesitation.

I pushed myself up on one elbow, my movements stiff and clumsy. I cupped his face with my hands. His skin was burning, a dry, feverish heat that spoke of a body at war with itself.

I leaned down, squeezed my eyes shut, and pressed my lips to his.

The world exploded.

It wasn't a gentle kiss. It was a connection. The moment our lips touched, a dam broke. A roaring flood of pure, warm energy surged from him into me. It was overwhelming, a tidal wave of life pouring into a desert. Every cell in my body, starved and dying, screamed in ecstasy. It was better than warmth, better than food. It was life itself.

I watched in stunned amazement as the bar on my mental display skyrocketed.

Life Force: 2%... 5%... 10%!

The feeling was so intensely pleasurable, so profoundly comforting, that a soft moan escaped my throat.

But my salvation was his torment.

As the energy poured out of him, a guttural roar of pure agony was torn from his throat. His body arched violently, his back lifting off the ground as he thrashed against an unseen enemy. It was as if I was siphoning his very soul, and the process was burning him alive.