At first everything was blurred.
Light bled through a heavy fog, shapes drifting without form, voices echoing but never clear. He lingered there, neither awake nor gone, a shadow clinging to existence.
Then came a name.
Lin Xun.
The sound struck deep, rare and heavy, as though it had always belonged to him. With it, memories began to crawl out of the haze, splitting into two streams, two lives, until they twisted together like strands of rope.
One belonged to Earth.
He saw himself again, a boy who had just entered university. Nothing remarkable, nothing bright. A student who scraped by, irrelevant to most, faceless in crowded lecture halls. His peers chased dreams while he carried only exhaustion. No talent, no shining ambition, no path beyond surviving the day.
Hardship had been his companion. A childhood without guidance, years of scraping coin by coin, a youth bent beneath pressure. People overlooked him because there was nothing to see. He was ordinary to the bone, his existence passing without weight.
Until her.
A girl smiled at him, spoke kindly, walked beside him. For the first time he thought perhaps his life might change. But fate is cruel. She had already drawn the gaze of another, a gang leader whose name carried fear across the night streets.
The memory cut deep.
That night was black and wet with rain. He remembered footsteps behind him, the glint of blades, the fists that broke bone, the laughter that drowned out his cries. He had no strength to fight back, no power to resist. His death was cruel, pitiful, meaningless. The girl never even knew what he endured.
And then darkness claimed him.
Yet the other stream of memory was no less bitter.
The Lin Clan, proud and ancient, standing firm in Lutong Town. Here too his name was Lin Xun. Born with rare talent, praised by elders, envied by peers. Whispers called him a prodigy, a future pillar, one who would surpass the town's so called geniuses. But talent is as dangerous as a blade turned outward.
One night he was ambushed outside the clan's walls. Shadows in the dark, steel piercing flesh. He fell beneath countless wounds, abandoned in the dirt. They thought him dead, and in truth, he was. Until another soul fell into his body.
The two became one.
When his eyes opened again, he did not feel like the boy of Earth. Nor was he simply the slain genius of the Lin Clan. His soul carried the weight of both, bound together by death and rebirth. He would no longer live for himself alone. He would carry the lives of two, and carve a path wide enough to redeem them both.
He breathed in. The bitter scent of herbs filled his lungs. His body ached, but within the pain flowed faint currents of energy, weak but alive. Above him hung a timbered ceiling, the world solid and real once more.
Fear might have taken root in another. But not him. Not now.
On Earth he had been small, forgotten, struck down for nothing. In this world he had been envied, betrayed, slain before his star could rise. Two failures. Two graves. Yet the heavens, in their cruelty or mercy, had bound those graves into one rebirth.
Lin Xun clenched his fists, trembling with new fire. His voice was quiet, but steady.
"This time I will not waste it. This time I will rise. For the one who suffered in silence. For the one cut down too soon. For us both."
A man who once lived without purpose now burned with it.
A soul that had tasted death twice now refused to bow again.
Lin Xun had returned