New York City. Chinatown.
Smoke curled above a rusted rooftop grill as a young man stood in flip-flops, cigarette hanging from his lip, staring blankly at the steak he'd managed to burn on one side and leave raw on the other. The T-bone hissed, but his mind was somewhere far from the fire.
What he kept turning over in his hand wasn't the fork he'd just tossed aside, but a ring: two brass-colored bands joined by a thin rectangular bridge. It looked cheap, but he knew better. A Sling Ring.
He squatted against the rooftop wall, beer bottle dangling from one hand, the other resting on a soft stomach that had grown in the last couple of years. Two years. My soul and this body finally fused. Even if Kamar-Taj hunted me down, they'd never notice I don't belong here.
Two years earlier…
No lightning strike. No portal sucking him through dimensions. No alien beam tearing him apart.
He had just gone to sleep. Then woken in a hospital.
A nurse bustled between beds. She was speaking English, rapid and professional. He understood almost nothing.
"Where…?" he croaked, but the sound was clumsy, tongue thick. What the hell? Why am I butchering Chinese like some foreign exchange student?
The nurse gasped, rattling off more English.
Lady, I barely scraped twenty points on English tests back home. And you're unloading native-speed? Say that again in Chinese—I dare you.
For half a second, delirium pushed him toward pettiness. He wanted to demand she rattle off tongue twisters—the cursed "red carp, green carp, donkey" drills from school. Then his foggy brain stalled on whether there were twenty-five or twenty-six letters in the alphabet.
Before he could spiral further, a doctor in a white coat swept in. Penlight. Eyes pried open. Pupils checked.
Li Feng swatted weakly. "Eye… dizzy…"
Normal reflexes. That was enough for the doctor. He turned to the nurse. "CT scan?"
"Already filed," she said. "The police want to question him."
"Five minutes. Patient needs rest." He left.
Two uniformed officers entered. White, broad-shouldered. They opened a file.
"Li Feng. English name Austin. Second-generation Chinese American. Born in New York. Parents—deceased, car accident last year. Correct?"
Li Feng caught only his own name. The rest was static.
He stammered in Mandarin, "I don't understand what you're saying."
The officers blinked. Recognized the language, not the words. One muttered, "No record of him studying Chinese. Must've been his parents. Kid's trying to impress us."
The patient in the next bed leaned over, translating: "He says he doesn't understand you."
Skepticism hardened the cops' faces. A local kid suddenly forgetting English? Didn't add up.
The nurse offered a theory. "Head trauma. Maybe amnesia?"
Amnesia that erased English but left Chinese intact. She couldn't explain more.
Through halting translations, Li Feng pieced together the story: a car accident. He'd survived. His parents, the file claimed, had died a year ago.
That's not my life. Yesterday my parents were alive. Which means… my soul crossed into this body. Took it over. If souls are real, does this mean Parallel worlds are real or is this a different universe entirely?
He forced himself calm. Amnesia is cover enough. Doctors say my brain's damaged. The cops can't push me. I'll get discharged, go home, live quietly. Who cares if I can't speak English? With my family background it should be fine.
The officers finally relented, leaving him with paperwork and a business card. "If you remember anything, call us. The crash was very serious, and we need witness testimonies."
Days later he was cleared. "When his memory returns" became a shrug of uncertainty. Li Feng didn't care.
He ditched the gown, flagged a cab outside, and handed over the address scrawled in the file.
The driver filled the silence with chatter. Li Feng ignored it—until his eyes landed on a folded newspaper in the back seat.
A photo of a building. Stark Industries headquarters.
His chest tightened. He knew that tower. Not from this world, but from a movie. Iron Man 2. Tony had dragged home that model, uncovered a new element, saved his life.
Li Feng's throat went dry. He pointed at the picture. "Tony Stark?"
The driver glanced back with a grin. "Yeah. Weapons expo opens Tuesday. You going, pal?"
Li Feng couldn't remember how he left the taxi, or how he made it back home. All he knew was that this world really did have Stark Industries.
Slumped on the sofa in his bedroom, eyes blank, he stared at a Captain America poster pinned to the wall.
If it were just Stark Industries existing here, he might have chalked it up to coincidence. But Tony Stark and Captain America? No need for more evidence—this was the Marvel Universe. The very same world where a purple Titan could snap his fingers and wipe out half of all life.
His head spun. In his original world, he had a loving wife and a toddler just learning to talk.
If he'd had a choice, he would've paid to give up the chance to transmigrate. He wasn't some chosen one, had no cheat system or golden finger. Just an ordinary man—plain and powerless. He didn't dare imagine playing the role of a hero here.
All he wanted was to go back, to hear his child call him "dad" again.
After a long silence, he gave a bitter laugh, stood, and began packing to return to China.
There was no choice. Compared to New York, where danger came in wave after wave, he felt his homeland would be far safer for someone like him. And with his foreknowledge of future developments, maybe he could carve out a decent life. Real estate, perhaps. He didn't need to be a tycoon—just a landlord collecting rent would keep him fed and clothed. Maybe he'd even find his wife again, rekindling their bond.
Besides, Tony still had years before becoming Iron Man, and it was nearly two decades before Thanos's snap. Even if he died, the Avengers would bring people back five years later. He could treat it as an enforced vacation.
As he mulled over his plans, he wandered into his parents' old room. He wanted to see if anything valuable was left—something he could sell to fund his return home.
He searched with painstaking care. Without the original memories of this body, he couldn't risk overlooking a hidden safe or treasure.
And then he found it—something that made him freeze, and abandon all thoughts of leaving.
A Sling Ring. A spell notebook written in Chinese. And a diary explaining the principles of magic.
When he saw the ring, he was stunned. Could one of his parents have been a sorcerer?
Still, in his eyes, the so-called sorcerers of Marvel were really just monks with magic tricks. None of them could even conjure a simple fireball.
Sure, the Ancient One was broken—tapping the Dark Dimension for power. But the rest? Their "magic" amounted to glowing shields and conjured weapons, fighting like martial artists with fancy visuals.
Yet, jokes aside, Li Feng slid the Sling Ring onto his right hand, remembering Mordo's line from the movie: "The Sling Ring is crucial to mastering magic. It allows us to traverse worlds and dimensions."
In the films, sorcerers mostly used portals like taxis across Earth. But still—this was a tool of the extraordinary. Should he go to Kamar-Taj in Kathmandu, seek out the Ancient One, and claim lineage as the child of a sorcerer?
For now, he stayed put, flipping open the diary.
It turned out the writings belonged to his grandfather. His father had tried magic but quit early for lack of talent. Grandfather himself only managed three spells before dying in regret.
That meant Li Feng's aptitude was poor too. According to the notes, even as a child he hadn't shown much promise—at best, he might learn two spells in his lifetime.
Rubbing his temples, he made a decision: this was a different soul in the same body. Maybe his new essence could awaken greater potential. He'd try.
The spell notebook listed three techniques.
A portal spell—limited to ten meters.A pocket mirror dimension—barely big enough to trap half a mouse.And an astral projection spell—measured in seconds.
From the diary, he grasped the key: the astral body. Without it, a sorcerer couldn't sense or channel magic. The astral form not only heightened perception of mystical energy but could also draw from other dimensions.
Carefully, word by word, he studied the method for astral projection.
Moments later, his body slumped in the chair while a transparent form rose up.
Excitement froze into shock as he looked down. His astral body wasn't the youthful form of his host—it was himself, from his previous life. Complete with the paunch at his belly.
And worse—the tether between soul and flesh was thinning. If it broke, he'd be stranded, a wandering ghost.
Panic surged. He snapped back into his body, pale and sweating, then buried himself in the notes for answers.
The journals confirmed it: the astral body mirrored the soul. And soul and flesh constantly influenced each other. Over time, his middle-aged spirit would adapt to the young body, strengthening their bond. That explained his slow, delayed reflexes after waking in the hospital—his spirit hadn't fused properly yet.
Given enough time, his astral body would also become young again, restoring full synchronization. Until then, he dared not separate soul from body too often.
Still, he pressed on with the basics. Without a solid foundation, there could be no tower.
What he didn't notice: his brief astral excursion had rippled outwards.
Far away, a black-robed sorcerer sensed the disturbance and rushed over. Spotting Li Feng from a distance, he relaxed.
"Old Li's grandson," the man chuckled. "Just dabbling again, huh?" Shaking his head, he turned away. "As long as it's not an otherworldly incursion. Without a teacher, the kid's got no future anyway."
Meanwhile, Li Feng realized his mistake. The Earth's three Sanctums monitored mystical disturbances across the globe. His astral projection—even for seconds—had set off alarms.
He rose to shut the window, only to feel that same lag creep back. Damn it. A few seconds of projection and I'm lagging again? How am I supposed to play this game?
Days later, he sold everything he could. With delayed reflexes and no English, what work could he possibly get? He needed money to live and to keep studying.
At last, he rented a tiny room in Chinatown, cheap and cramped. It wasn't much, but it was survival.
And so two years passed.
By day, odd jobs for pocket change and English practice. By night, poring over spell theory and meditation, preparing himself for the day he could truly call himself a sorcerer.
The right environment made all the difference.
Two years in New York had turned Chinatown into Li Feng's classroom. Every shouted sale pitch, every street-corner argument in English became practice. Coupled with his body's muscle memory, he now spoke fluently.
Sometimes he laughed at himself. If I'd studied this hard in school, I could've aimed past Tsinghua, past Peking. Straight off Earth and into the stars.
His soul and body had fused completely. The middle-aged drag he'd feared never came. Still, when he pinched the softness at his stomach, he sighed. "Ah, my faithful companion. Even in another universe, you cling to me. The belly never lies."
He chuckled and climbed the stairs to his cramped flat. The rooftop beer and burnt steak had been his private fusion celebration. Now it was time for work.
Inside his thirty-square-meter unit, he locked the windows and doors, drew a breath, and pressed his hands together, sketching a circle in the air.
Nothing.
No spark, no glow.
He didn't flinch. Failure had been the routine for months. Only recently had body and soul synced enough to cough up stray sparks. Enough to keep him hungry.
Half an hour later, something clicked. A rhythm, subtle but alive, pulsed through him. If he nudged it just right—
A faint orange line lit between his palms, stretching half a meter. Sparks snapped as he widened it into a ring. For one glorious second, triumph burned across his face.
Then it fizzled to nothing.
Failure again. But this time he grinned. "Progress. Once I lock onto that rhythm, I've got it."
He glanced at the Sling Ring on his hand, then at the grainy feed on his monitor: a figure in robes, standing watch from a rooftop blocks away. A sorcerer of the New York Sanctum.
He ignored the surveillance. By now, he'd caught them at least three times. Who knew how many more he hadn't spotted?
After one meditation session he muttered, "Gone again. They always detect me instantly but never approach. Respect for my grandfather? Or do they think I'm just a dud? Maybe they're just making sure I don't turn into another Kaecilius."
Once, discovery had terrified him. Now? If they refused to come, maybe he'd go to Kamar-Taj himself.
For now, he pressed on. With each attempt, sparks came easier, like unclogging blocked channels. Soon he could draw them on command—so long as the room stayed silent. Noise shattered his focus, and combat casting remained impossible. But he was moving forward.
That night he sat on his bed, flipping through photos of world landmarks. He'd always dreamed of travel. In his last life, diapers and formula bills had chained him down. Here, he had power. Not enough to gather the Infinity Stones, but enough to skip tickets and visas.
His finger lingered on a photo of an abandoned train station. Empty. Secluded. Perfect.
He closed his eyes and built the place in detail. A portal demanded precision. Anything less gave only sparks.
At that very moment, in the same Argentine station, scientist Elihas Starr checked the last diagnostics on his quantum tunnel prototype. Once disgraced and expelled from S.H.I.E.L.D. by Hank Pym, Starr was determined to prove Pym wrong.
The machine screamed warnings. Failure cascaded across the panels. Explosion imminent. He shouted for his wife and daughter to run, then turned back for a final desperate fix.
Li Feng's Sling Ring flared. Before him opened a circle of orange light—his first portal.
But then the glow warped. Orange bled to blue-white. The view dissolved into a wall of solid radiance.
"What the—? Since when do portals look like that?"
A surge of force slammed him against the wall. The portal swallowed him whole.
When the light cleared, his room stood empty. On the floor lay only a T-shirt, jeans, flip-flops… and his underwear.
Li Feng tumbled through a kaleidoscope of bubble worlds, squeezed like toothpaste through a rubber tube. His stomach flipped inside out.
He landed hard, gagging bile. "Damn it! Portals are supposed to be a step across the world—not a human milk-machine squeeze play!"
Groaning, he swore he'd never use portals for travel again.
"Sir, are you all right?"
An elderly man bent down to help—only for his hand to pass through Li Feng like smoke. He froze, scanning for hidden cameras. Illusion? Street trick?
Then a shadow fell across them. From above, a clay urn plummeted.
The old man sneered. "Projection gimmicks? You'll have to do better."
Li Feng barely heard him. Agony lit every muscle, as though his body were tearing itself apart. Worse, he was naked. The Sling Ring clung to his hand, but nothing else had survived the trip.
He grimaced. "Fine. Forget portal. Call it the Strip-You-Bare Gate."
Thick-skinned as ever, he hunched, eyes darting for anything to cover himself. Newspaper, tarp—anything to keep tomorrow's headlines from showing his bare face and bare everything else.
"Sir," he managed, "could you lend me something to wear?"
The old man didn't answer. His gaze was locked upward.
Summer air turned icy. Frost prickled Li Feng's skin.
From the shattered urn crawled a figure wreathed in black smoke, dragging itself into the world.
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