The first thing he remembered was the taste of iron then the cold. A seeping cold, not the kind that bit the skin but one that slithered into the bones and made a nest there.
He gasped.
Air didn't come. Only wetness. Something thick and coppery flooded his throat. Blood. His own, probably. Maybe someone else's. It didn't matter. He choked, coughed, and felt something soft burst behind his ribs. Lungs, maybe or whatever was left of them.
He rolled.
The world shifted — not light, not sound, but rot. The stench of decay hit him like a hammer: burnt flesh, spoiled rice, the faint perfume of camellias crushed under boot. A battlefield or a mass grave.
A groan scraped its way out of his throat. He wasn't dead.
Not yet and that… might've been the worst part.
He tried to move, but his limbs weren't his. Too small and light. Like a puppet whose strings had been cut and rewoven wrong. His breath came shallow and fast. Panic clawed up — and something old, something quiet inside, pressed it back down.
Not now, it whispered.
Not again.
Memory came not in a flood but in glacial shards: the IV drip ticking in a cancer ward. The way his mother cried when she thought he was asleep. The sound of rain hitting the tin roof during chemo sessions. Twenty-nine years, gone in a slow rot. He'd died.
He had died.
So why… Why was he breathing through someone else's mouth?
He opened his eyes or tried to. One was sealed shut. The other fluttered open just enough to glimpse snow. Not falling, just lingering — clumps caught in dried grass, smeared red with old blood. Above him, a ragged sky. Grey. Torn open.
He lifted a hand. Skin stretched over bones far too thin. Fingers trembling, veins dark. No — not veins. Black tendrils. Poison. The body had been dead. Long enough to be cold, not long enough to forget dying.
And yet… He was in it.
Not alone. He coughed again, and this time something moved inside his chest — a memory, maybe not his.
A boy. Twelve years old. Dressed in silks, sitting still while an older man smiled over a bowl of tea.
"Drink. Your Highness."
And he had because princes weren't allowed to doubt loyalty then came the pain, confusion, taste of camellias and bile. Guards dragging him from his chambers. The snow that night had been the same shade of ash.
The boy had died.
"Qinyan… Wuye."
The name spilled out of his mouth like a curse.
The wind didn't answer. The corpses didn't stir but inside — deep, tangled in the marrow — something recognized it. That had been this body's name. A prince. Poisoned. Thrown out with the rest of the Empire's refuse. Left to rot like a dog in a ditch and now, a dying man from Earth was squatting in his corpse.
"Fantastic."
He forced himself upright. Every part of him screamed. His vision blurred — not from the pain, but from the weight of it all. Two lives. Neither asked for. Neither wanted.
"I was supposed to be done," he rasped.
The grave didn't care.
He shuffled forward. One palm dragged through snow, fingers digging into wet soil. There were other bodies nearby — he could feel them more than see them. Their silence pressed down on him, heavy and accusing. Soldiers? Servants? The boy's retainers? No. They didn't deserve grief.
He didn't either.
What he deserved was… unclear.
He crawled, inch by inch, until he reached the edge of the hill. Below lay a ravine. Twisted pines, rock ledges slick with ice. A river hissed in the distance, muffled by the snow. Somewhere out there was the Empire. The people who'd left this boy — this body — to die and somewhere within that Empire, the man who had smiled and handed him poison.
Father or maybe brother. Both. Neither. Memory was still slippery.
He sat there for a long time. Eventually, he found a broken sword half-buried in the mud. The blade was rusted, the hilt cracked. A ceremonial weapon, not meant for war. Still, he cradled it like something holy.
"Right," he muttered, lips cracked. "Start with a weapon. Not bad, considering the usual transmigration discount."
A joke. Bad one but the sound of it steadied him.
His name had been Kai once. Earth-born, body-wrecked, brain too sharp to ever rest. That was gone now. Burned out in some hospital ward where his mother still sat by an empty bed but he was breathing again. Cold air. Blood in his teeth. Dirt under his nails.
And he'd been given a second life.
Not as a hero. Not as a saint.
As a prince tossed away by the Qinyan Empire. A prince with poison still threading through his veins, and nothing left to lose. The edge of the rusted sword caught the light — just barely. A reflection, maybe or a warning.
Kai — no, Qinyan Wuye stared at it.
He wasn't going back to the palace. He wasn't crawling back to beg for scraps of legitimacy. If fate had been stupid enough to hand him this body… Then he'd use it to tear the Empire to the ground.
Slowly, painfully, he stood. Snow crunched beneath bare feet. The grave behind him was still. Ahead, the ravine beckoned.
His voice cracked as he whispered to no one, "I won't reclaim the throne."
A pause.
A vow.
"I'll burn it."
And deep within his body, the original owner Qinyan Wuye wanted this too.
Then he walked. Each step away from the grave was a step toward something else. Not redemption. Not even revenge.
Just survival, sharpened into a blade.