The first thing he noticed was silence.
It was a silence that pressed, that weighed, as if the air itself had been sucked out of the world, leaving only the echo of its absence. It was the kind of quiet that made his ears ring and his pulse quicken unintentionally.
Lan Jinyue opened his eyes.
The ceiling above him was wrong.
He expected to see the dull white of hospital buildings and faint humming of the LED lights. Instead, long cracks webbed across the surface, dust sifting faintly whenever he stirred. A cough rattled his chest, dry and raw, and a fine sift of grit rained down from above, tickling his lashes.
Where the hell am I?
For a long moment, he lay still, unsure whether he had been buried alive. His breath came ragged, his chest heavy with heat that clung to his skin.
His body ached and shuddered constantly, as if his bones had been replaced with rotting sticks. His ribs jutted against his skin, each breath shallow and laboured. He tried to sit up. His arms buckled. The world tilted, and he crashed back down, teeth snapping together. A metallic tang flooded his mouth, and he tasted his own blood. He'd bitten his tongue.
What the hell happened to me?
He remembered the liquor. The papers. Her face, blurred and smiling as the room tilted. Then darkness
His hand flew to his chest, fingers clutched over his heart. It beat too fast, erratic even, which was odd since he kept fit and was rarely sick. His skin was too pale, almost translucent, stretched thin over sharp angles. He flexed his fingers. They were longer, more delicate.
This was not his body.
Or rather, it was his now, but it carried none of the strength he had once honed. The muscles felt withered, the frame narrow, as though whoever lived here before him had starved themselves, neglected themselves, abandoned the discipline that kept flesh resilient.
A foreign, unnatural sound escaped him—choked, broken thing. He pressed his lips together, tasting salt and something metallic. His throat burned. The more he tried to move the more the confusion increased.
He forced himself upright, bracing on one trembling arm. The movement sent a sharp, foreign pain lancing through his lower back. He hissed, twisting to look—
And froze.
A tail.
White. Fluffy. Leopard-spotted. It twitched, as if alive, then recoiled when he reached for it, curling away from his touch like a startled animal.
What in the—?
His mind reeled. His body, however, had other plans.
A wave of heat rolled through him, starting in his gut and spreading outward like molten lead. His skin prickled. His muscles locked, then spasmed. A whimper clawed up his throat before he could stop it.
No. No, this isn't—
His back arched off the ground. His fingers dug into the dirt, nails scraping against something buried beneath—bone? Plastic?—as his body convulsed. The heat was unbearable, a fever dream of need and pain, his vision swimming, the ceiling above him blurring into streaks of grey and purple.
Why am I not human anymore?
The realisation should have terrified him. But the fear was distant, drowned beneath the tide of whatever this was—this rut, this fever, this thing that had his hips jerking, his thighs pressing together, his body moving in ways he didn't understand, didn't control.
A sound cut through the haze.
A whine.
It took him a long, humiliating moment to realize it was coming from him.
He clamped his jaw shut, teeth grinding. Control yourself. But his body didn't listen. It never had, not really—always a traitor, always betraying him with tremors and tears and needs he couldn't name.
The heat crested, then ebbed, leaving him shaking. His skin was slick with sweat, his clothes—what clothes?—clinging to him in damp strips. He was wearing rags. Tattered fabric, barely more than strips, tied haphazardly around his waist and shoulders. His fingers trembled as he touched the material. Not mine. None of this is mine.
He forced himself to breathe. To think.
He wasn't in his office.
He wasn't in his body.
He might not even be on the earth he once knew.
The silence pressed in, thick and suffocating. Just the creak of metal settling somewhere in the distance, the occasional clatter of debris shifting seeped in.
Did he die, then get reborn?
Jinyue swallowed, the motion raw in his throat. His tongue was dry, lips cracked. A faint fever shimmered in his skull, heat sinking into marrow. He clenched his jaw. He knew illness. He had endured injury. But this—this weakness—was foreign.
He tried to stand. The attempt ended with his knees buckling, sending him crashing back onto the broken floor. Stone bit into his palms. He hissed softly, eyes squeezing shut against the dizziness that rolled over him in waves.
Jinyue stayed on his knees, chest heaving. He listened. Nothing. No footsteps, no murmur of voices, not even the rustle of trees or the hum of insects. The silence was entire.
With effort, he dragged himself forward, one hand after the other, until he reached a jagged gap in the wall. Light streamed in—thin, pale, unyielding. He braced against the stone and pulled himself upright enough to see.
He was greeted by a wasteland.
Endless grey sand, rocks jutting like broken teeth, and a sky too vast, its colour somewhere between white and ash. No birds wheeled above. No rivers cut through the dust. The horizon itself seemed distant, unreachable, as if the world stretched further than any mortal could endure.
It was clear that the place was a graveyard of broken things. Twisted metal jutted from the ground like skeletal fingers. Shattered glass glittered in the dim light, catching the sickly glow of the stars. The air smelled of ozone and rust, of things long dead and half-buried.
A desolate place. That much he could gather.
And he was alone.
His throat tightened, a cough rattling through his chest. The fever flared higher, a fire licking along his spine. Sweat dampened the collar of his thin robe. He pressed a hand to his forehead and felt the heat pulse beneath his skin.
He did not understand why he was here, though.
The memories of this body were absent, or perhaps too fragmented to answer. All he knew was that the last occupant had left him in ruin, frail and hollow, a vessel already at the edge of collapse.
Jinyue leaned his head against the wall. The stone was cool, though it did little to soothe the heat in his veins. His breaths came shallow, ragged. Every joint ached, every muscle trembled. He felt caught between sickness and hunger, yet neither satisfied by water nor food.
He closed his eyes. The silence pressed harder.
A thought came, bitter in its simplicity: So, this is my personal hell. Poisoned at dinner, only to wake in a dying body on a dead world.
The irony almost made him laugh. Almost. His throat was too dry for sound.
Hours passed—or perhaps only minutes; time slid oddly in the emptiness. He crawled from the ruin into the open. Dust swirled weakly at his steps, clinging to his bare skin. The sun—or what passed for it—burned dim and colourless overhead, giving no warmth, only a pale glare that made the horizon blur.
He stumbled, fell, and rose again. His body did not obey cleanly. Fever muddled his vision; the ground seemed to tilt and shift. At times, he thought he saw shapes in the distance—figures, shadows, water glinting. When he drew closer, there was nothing.
Illusion. Or madness.
By the time he collapsed beside a stone outcropping, his body convulsed. His breath dragged in and out, shallow. He curled onto his side, arms drawn against himself, the fever tearing him from within. He knew he needed something but didn't know what exactly, and he was suffering dearly for it.
He could not name it...this state, this strange affliction. The last owner of this flesh might have understood, but their negligence had left him blind. All Jinyue knew was that it hollowed him, left him half-senseless, trembling in the dust.
He pressed his face into the crook of his arm, fighting the dry heave rising in his throat. His vision pulsed with black spots. He thought briefly of Ming Yin, her pearls, her smile as she poured. Hatred tightened his chest, but even that fire felt dim now, smothered by fever.
The wasteland did not answer him.
Above, the pale sky stretched forever. Around, dust whispered faintly with each faint stir of wind.
His stomach continued to rumble, a sharp, vicious twist. He pressed a hand to his abdomen, his fingers sinking into the hollows of his ribs. When was the last time I ate? He couldn't remember.
He spotted a rusted canister half-buried in the dirt a few feet away. His body moved before he could think, lurching forward, fingers scrabbling at the metal. It was empty. Of course, it was empty.
He hurled it away, the clatter echoing too loudly in the silence.
Calm down. Assess.
He was alive. That was something.
He was not human. That was… less ideal.
And he was sick. Or in suffering. Or something. His body still thrummed with the aftershocks of whatever had just happened, his skin too sensitive, his nerves raw.
He needed shelter. Water. Food.
He needed to understand.
He took a step. His legs wobbled, but held. Another step. Then another.
Somewhere in the wreckage, there had to be something.