The world returned to Wu Muming as a brutal shock of absolute cold.
One second, he was consumed by the blinding, searing heart of a chemical inferno—the metallic tang of ozone and vaporized reagents filling his final lungful—the next, he was waking up to a penetrating, bone-deep freeze. It was the kind of cold that didn't just chill the skin but seemed to aggressively seek out the deepest marrow of his soul, a cold that tasted of earth and rot.
He was a male, 21st-century bio-engineer; he awoke as a female, 1980s orphan.
He was sprawled upon a patch of ground that was less floor and more perpetually damp, muddy stone. He lay within what was clearly a subterranean laundry or storage room in some decrepit institution.
The air was a viscous soup of dust motes, the heavy, sweet-and-sour stench of mildew, and the faint, acidic memory of cheap lye soap. His only visible companions were a splintered, mold-caked wooden barrel in one corner and a sodden, filthy doormat crawling with a colony of black fungus in the other.
A deep, soul-shaking agony erupted from the core of his being as he attempted to move. It wasn't muscle pain; it was the psychic trauma of two realities colliding, of two lives—two souls, perhaps—grinding against each other like stone teeth. He trembled violently, the pain radiating out, making him feel as though every nerve ending were being fed through an invisible meat grinder.
He gasped, sucking in great, desperate draughts of the foul, cloying air. The rush of breath was immediately met with a savage, hacking cough that resonated painfully in his chest. But even as the coughing fit seized him, the primitive, animal need for oxygen began to win. His muscles gradually warmed, his shivering lessened, and with the oxygen came the blinding, torrential flood of fragmented memories.
The original Wu Muming—or rather, the Tierra Wu who now owned this frail, small body—had perished here. The memories were brutal: the sterile, brightly-lit modernity of the 21st-century lab explosion contrasted violently with the gray, oppressive hopelessness of the 1980s London orphanage.
Wu Muming, the scientist, had been a sharp, ambitious young man working late on a promising, if volatile, experiment. His death was instantaneous and absolute—a floor collapse caused by an explosion upstairs, followed by a one-ton, ultra-low-temperature refrigerator plunging onto him. No pain. No struggle. A flash of light, and then nothing.
The death of Tierra Wu, however, had been slow, miserable, and profoundly unfair.
He sat up, leaning heavily against the clammy stone wall, and ran a shaky hand over his face, noting the delicate bones, the lack of stubble, and the thinness of his/her frame.
Tierra Wu. June 28, 1980. Same parents. Same face, slightly softer geometry.
The memories explained the terrible, suffocating cold. Tierra's family had immigrated to England during a wave of hopeful migration, only to be shattered when her father was shot dead in a dark alley just a week after landing. Tierra, orphaned and alone, was quickly shunted into the oppressive, underfunded British orphanage system.
The 1980s were a harsh landscape. Discrimination against Chinese immigrants was not subtle. It was systemic, and among the blonde, blue-eyed orphans, Tierra was the single, easily targetable oddity. The bullying had begun small—stolen toys, minor shoves—but escalated to constant harassment, beatings, and, finally, a cruel joke. They had doused the already frail girl with cold water and locked her in this unheated, sub-level storage room.
She had died of exposure—hypothermia—barely an hour ago.
The chilling finality of that detail galvanized Wu Muming. His scientific mind snapped into focus, overriding the emotional trauma. He needed data. He needed to survive.
He placed his right hand on his left wrist and, using the focused breath control he'd learned in his past life, silently counted a full minute.
"Pulse steady. Rate slightly elevated, likely due to adrenaline. Body temperature rising slowly," he muttered, the new, high-pitched voice feeling alien in his throat.
As he checked his pulse, his fingers brushed against something foreign on his left ring finger. His eyes, still adjusting to the near-total darkness of the sunless pit, fixed on a strange accretion of material.
"What in the hell is this?"
The ring was large, too large for the child's finger, carved from what felt like porous, ancient bone. It was uneven and irregular, covered not in standard jewelry markings, but in dense, minute patterns that looked less decorative and more like the eroded script on an archaic tombstone.
In the suffocating dark, Tierra's other senses sharpened. Tapping the ring, the hollow, brittle sound it made was strangely unsettling. He traced the patterns with his thumb, and as he did, his rational mind rejected the information while his subconscious screamed for attention. The patterns were words, impossibly distorted, like English spoken underwater and backward.
He focused, isolating sounds, using his training in linguistics and pattern recognition from his old life.
"...th...mer...el...eas...gol...la...ei...lin..."
It took several tense minutes of trial and error, his breath shallow, before he realized the patterns were fragments of a sentence, a chaotic mnemonic phrase. He pieced the syllables together, mentally assembling the fragments of what seemed to be a crude, foreign invocation.
He whispered the phrase, his thin voice breaking on the final syllable.
"The eternal sleep awaits."
The moment the last sound left his lips, the blackness of the laundry room was utterly, violently negated.
The world shattered.
It wasn't a flash of light; it was an erasure. The dank, moldy room vanished as if wiped clean from reality by an immense, unseen eraser. Tierra felt nothing but raw, nauseating momentum—a sensation of being stretched thinner than light, then compressed smaller than a nucleus, a five-dimensional roller coaster ride of pure, cosmic displacement. Every cell in her body protested, screaming against the violation of known physics.
With a gasping, retching heave, Tierra materialized and collapsed onto a floor of smooth, polished obsidian.
"Ugh…"
The sound that escaped her was a pained, guttural moan. Her stomach was empty, but her body spasmed in violent dry heaves, the nausea overwhelming. It took what felt like an eternity, lying helpless on the cold, hard floor, before the dizziness subsided enough for her to roll over onto her back.
Then, she looked up.
Her scientific objectivity, which had survived a catastrophic lab explosion and a soul fusion, nearly fractured under the strain of the vista above her.
She was in a library, but calling it that was an insult to the word. Above her, a ceiling of unimaginable height stretched into a glittering, star-like void. Beneath that impossible roof, vast, meticulously carved stone walls stretched out in concentric circles, stacked higher and higher, like the stepped, impossible tiers of a pyramid turned upside down.
Tierra was on the lowest, widest floor, which spanned an area easily the size of a modern football pitch—five hundred square meters was a vast understatement. The inverted pyramid shape meant the upper levels, though seemingly infinite in number, gradually decreased in size, a geometry that made the mind ache trying to trace its lines. Each shelf was roughly half a man's height, and every tier was hollow, packed tight with books, scrolls, and leather-bound tomes whose sheer volume mocked human history.
This place is impossible. The structural load, the geometry, the sheer scale... none of it makes sense. It's an architectural paradox, her engineer mind insisted, even as her newly acquired soul trembled with primordial dread.
She slowly pushed herself into a sitting position. Beside her, contrasting sharply with the impossible stonework, was a shockingly plain wooden table holding a stack of scrolls and a bizarre, silent stone table lamp that glowed with a sickly, internal green light.
Driven by a detached curiosity—the scientist needing to analyze the anomaly—Tierra crawled to the table and sank onto a heavy wooden chair.
The scrolls were haphazardly piled, some torn, some crumpled like discarded thoughts. She picked up a piece of dried parchment, her fingers brushing against the dense, distorted script that covered it. It looked almost English, but her brain couldn't process the characters.
The moment her skin made contact, however, the text was irrelevant.
A tidal wave of information, cold and alien, bypassed her eyes and flooded directly into her consciousness. It was a terrible, concise message, delivered with the absolute certainty of revelation.
"...Among all the universes and all living beings, no being can compare to them except the gods and their descendants created by the Great Mother Goddess herself..."
Tierra gasped, snatching her hand back as if burned. The sudden influx of alien concepts felt like an icy, physical violation, a forced intrusion into the deepest, most shielded recesses of her mind.
She stared at the text, shaking. It was meaningless to her sight, but terrifying to her soul. Hesitantly, she reached out and touched another scroll, a smaller, thinner one.
This time, the information was more mundane, if still unsettling.
"...peel the Manli fruit that fell during the storm, dry it, crush it and take two spoons..."
A recipe. An ancient, occult herbalist's recipe. The sheer disparity between the two texts—cosmic revelation and mundane apothecarial instructions—was dizzying. She was sure she did not recognize these words, yet the information they contained flowed into her mind as if dictated by a malicious voice.
A horrifying realization dawned, chilling her more effectively than the London weather.
This is not a library of books. It's a library of knowledge.
With a grim, heavy expression, Tierra rose and walked toward the nearest, highest shelf visible in the green-tinged light. Her hand, now trembling not from cold but from fear, gingerly traced the spines of the leather-bound tomes.
One after another, titles—curses, prophecies, and blasphemies—flowed into her mind without having to read a single letter:
The largest and thickest, bound in stitched, dry skin: The Book of the Dead.A thin, ordinary textbook, its cover worn smooth: The Anonymous Book of Sacrifice.A long, slender tome wrapped in an unknown, hard, segmented shell: R'lyeh Text.
As her fingers moved, one book suddenly reacted. With a soft, windless whoosh, a thin, ancient-looking volume bound with simple cotton thread flew off the shelf. It spun silently in the air before landing before her, the pages automatically unfolding.
It was written in Chinese.
Tierra's heart froze. She could read this. This language was hers, intrinsically familiar from her past life. Until this moment, she had never considered her native tongue could be terrifying, disgusting, or profoundly wrong.
The moment her eyes met the two-page spread of characters, a chaotic, immediate scream of incomprehensible images and primordial knowledge bypassed her defenses. The sheer familiarity of the script made the forced, cosmic transmission worse.
Goosebumps erupted all over her body, thick and painful, but they did not stop there. They swelled, fusing together to form clear, sticky, weeping blisters that bubbled up under her skin—a visceral, physiological rejection of the alien, madness-inducing knowledge that the Old Ones had kept hidden beneath the fabric of reality.
Tierra had been saved from a cold death only to be thrown into a war against sanity itself. She had been reborn, and her new adventure was the terrifying, immediate flight from what she now knew.