It began with silence.
There was nothing in the Void.
Elias Vance had no senses—only the impression of self suspended in something colder than thought. He wasn't dreaming. He wasn't floating. He was... paused.
Then something cracked.
In him.
And suddenly, he was falling.
Light rushed in—too fast, too much. Sensation slammed into his nerves like a tidal wave. Breath. Cold. Weight. Smell.
Pain.
A blinding ache lanced through his skull as he gasped and tumbled sideways, coughing dryly. Air hit his lungs like smoke. His arms moved, foreign and disobedient, pushing against cold stone.
Stone?
He blinked hard.
Above him: a rough-hewn ceiling of dark slate. Incense curled from a cracked ceramic dish. A faint pulse thrummed in the room—not sound, not light, but something else, as if the space itself were breathing.
Elias choked, shook once, and then sat upright far too fast. The world spun.
He leaned forward, elbows on his knees, and steadied himself with ragged breaths.
What—
His thoughts stuttered.
Where am I?
And then—before the panic could bloom—another set of thoughts slipped in, smooth as silk.
Not his voice.
Not his cadence.
But familiar.
Shen Yuan.
A name. A face. A hundred disconnected memories. Scraps of emotion. A tangle of identity not quite whole.
He remembered... being him.
Not entirely and clearly. But enough.
The memories weren't full-color flashbacks—they were burned-in echoes. He saw a cold courtyard at dawn. Felt a wooden staff strike his shoulder in training. Heard voices in unfamiliar tones. Laughed once. Cried once. Bled often.
Elias gripped the sides of his head as the bleedover grew sharper. The memories weren't trying to replace his own—they were offering context. Language. Names. Social codes. The shape of life in this world.
It hurt, but he understood.
And as the understanding solidified, so did a truth.
He wasn't on Earth anymore.
Not in a lab. Not in Lamina Station. Not inside the capsule, fighting off neural entropy as his thoughts dissolved.
That life was gone.
This was something new.
Elias leaned back slowly and took stock of the body.
Not child-sized. Not infantile. Roughly adolescent—maybe sixteen or seventeen, based on proportions and joint pressure. He stretched a hand in front of his face: calloused fingers, thin wrist, faint scars on the forearm.
This body had trained. Not expertly—but daily. But it held more potential than his previous body
His robes were loose-fitting and coarse, streaked with ash and sweat. He was seated cross-legged on a circular mat in a small stone chamber lit by two faint wall crystals. A pair of empty wooden scroll racks leaned in one corner. On the floor beside him lay a blackened jade slip—its runes cracked.
He reached for it instinctively, but stopped an inch short.
Something had gone wrong.
The memory shard clarified: the body's previous owner—Shen Yuan, an outer disciple in a cultivation sect—had found a jade slip shelved without label or restriction.
He'd scanned it, curious. Desperate to rise above mediocrity. Thought it was rare. Maybe forbidden.
It had described itself simply:
Soul Refinement Scripture – Fragmented.
Elias exhaled. A cold truth settled into place.
Shen Yuan had cultivated a technique far beyond his level. Likely damaged, incomplete, or inherently unstable.
And it had erased him.
His consciousness—his informational self—had destabilized, fractured, and faded.
And in the gap that remained...
Elias's quantum-entangled mind had found its anchor.
He'd landed in a dying signal.
He stayed still for a long while, breathing steadily, letting the pieces fall into place.
Most people, he thought, might have screamed. Panicked. Denied it. Scrambled to understand.
But Elias Vance wasn't most people.
He didn't need emotional resolution. He needed a model.
And the data made sense.
He'd theorized it already—that the self was information, and that under the right quantum architecture, it could persist.
He hadn't expected success. Not in the first jump. Not consciously. But some part of him had believed in the possibility.
And here it was.
Proof.
His mind was alive—somehow encoded, transmitted, or drawn by resonance to a compatible substrate. The "how" could wait.
Now came the real work.
Observation. Experimentation. Integration.
He stood. His legs trembled, but held. The floor was cold under bare feet.
He examined the chamber—stone walls carved with faint geometric patterns. Unfamiliar, but not irrational. The architecture followed purpose. There was a balance to the air distribution, a subtle current in the space.
Every part of the room was built to focus attention inward.
It was a cultivation chamber.
From Shen Yuan's memories, he understood the term now.
Cultivation.
Not agriculture.
Spiritual refinement. Power drawn from the world. Internal and external energy shaping life itself.
And Shen Yuan had tried to refine the soul.
No wonder it had gone wrong. Soul refinement was delicate—more so than anything on Earth. To tamper with the mind's core data without full awareness was like letting a child rewrite their own operating system.
But in failing, he had opened the door.
And Elias had walked through.
He crossed the chamber slowly. Muscles ached. Breathing was uneven. He was still syncing with the body's rhythm. There would be adjustment. But the framework was solid. The nervous system intact.
As he neared the wall, he touched a glyph embedded in the stone—another inherited instinct—and a soft hiss of air preceded the grinding open of the door.
Elias stepped into the light—and into the life of a stranger.
He would play the role for now.
He had memories. Enough to act.
But behind Shen Yuan's face was someone else.
Someone who had once mapped subatomic harmonics for lunar orbit stations. Someone who had tried to talk to the universe with mathematics and died trying.
Now, the universe had answered in its own strange language.
And Elias Vance intended to learn every word.