Chapter 4: The Rules of Survival

I didn’t know how to get home, so all I could do was resign myself to being a maid.

I tried to remember my old life: Saturday mornings at the farmers’ market, my mom’s cinnamon rolls, the glow of my laptop late at night. It all seemed a million miles away. Now, home was a cramped attic room and a bed stuffed with straw.

Just like in my previous life, I became a beast of burden, working hard: sweeping the porch, boiling water, tending fires, hauling buckets, feeding chickens—every task done carefully, day after day.

My days blurred with chores—scrubbing wood floors with lye soap, drawing well water before sunrise, plucking feathers off hens, hauling firewood until my arms shook. It was bone-deep labor, the kind you feel in your joints at night.

I kept telling myself: compared to drafting plans, making spreadsheets, analyzing data, and giving PowerPoint reports, this was just another kind of labor. Whether in a cubicle or as a maid, a beast of burden is still a beast of burden.

There was a strange comfort in the repetition, almost like entering formulas into a spreadsheet or prepping slides for a boss who never looked up. At least here, there was no pretending I mattered.

But I knew, even if labor laws didn’t protect me then, at least the civil code did.

Back home, I’d grumble about my rights—minimum wage, time off, HR hotlines. Here, those words meant nothing. Nobody was coming to save me, and justice was just a faded memory.

A citizen’s rights are sacred and inviolable. Not here—here, a boss’s right to kill me was no different than wringing a chicken’s neck.

The law in this world belonged to the powerful, and if you stepped out of line, your life could be snuffed out without a second thought. Even the chickens got more sympathy.