Chen Yu's eyes snapped open to unfamiliar darkness. Above him was rough wood, old and cracked, with gaps letting thin streams of morning light through.
Dust floated in the air. Outside, birds he didn't recognize sang their morning songs. He blinked several times.
The last thing he remembered was a truck horn blaring, his phone screen showing the latest chapter of "Immortal Emperor's Ascension," and the sickening realization that he'd stepped into the crosswalk without looking up.
There should have been pain, then darkness, maybe nothing.
Instead there was this—a cramped wooden shack that smelled like dirt and old straw, with walls so thin he could hear leaves rustling outside.
When Chen Yu tried to sit up, his arms looked wrong. Thinner. Less muscular than before. The skin smoother despite calluses on his palms. His heart started racing as he scrambled to his feet, swaying when dizziness washed over him. The shack barely contained a thin sleeping mat, a rough wooden table with one chair, and a clay pot in the corner that he somehow knew held water.
A piece of polished bronze hung on the wall, the closest thing to a mirror in this place. Chen Yu stumbled toward it on shaky legs.
The face staring back wasn't his. A youth of perhaps sixteen looked back with wide, startled eyes. Sharper cheekbones. A stronger jawline. Black hair falling past his shoulders in an unkempt mess that looked like it hadn't been combed in weeks.
"What is happening to me?" His voice cracked. Even the sound pitched slightly different from what he expected.
Something shifted within his consciousness. It started as a trickle, then became a flood. Memories that were not his own began pouring into his mind. He gasped and gripped the edge of the wooden table as images and sensations integrated themselves into his awareness. Like his brain was being stuffed full.
The original owner of this body had also been named Chen Yu.
This younger Chen Yu had lived in this shack with his parents until a year ago, when tragedy struck. His father and mother had been hunters, skilled enough to venture into the dangerous forests that surrounded their remote home in search of game and valuable herbs.
They would sell their findings in the nearby town, earning just enough copper coins to keep their small family fed and clothed through the seasons.
But the forest was unforgiving. One day, his parents ventured out for their hunting trip and simply never returned. The young Chen Yu had searched for days, calling out their names until his voice grew hoarse and raw, but he found nothing.
With no strength more than that of an ordinary teenager, he'd been forced to accept their loss and survive alone. He began making the grueling two-hour walk to the nearest town several times a week, offering his labor for whatever odd jobs were available, hauling heavy buckets of water for households, sweeping the floors of shops and inns, loading wagons with goods for traveling merchants.
The work was backbreaking, and the pay was meager at best. Just a handful of copper coins that he used sparingly to buy rice, salt, and whatever other necessities he could afford to survive another week.
The memories continued to flow, bringing with them the crushing loneliness and quiet desperation of the past year.
Just the night before, as the original Chen Yu had been walking back from town along the narrow forest path, exhausted from a particularly long day at the docks, he had heard something unusual echoing through the trees. Sounds of combat. the distinct clash of metal on metal, strange whooshing noises like wind being cut by something sharp, and guttural cries that seemed inhuman. He had frozen completely on the path, his survival instinct screaming at him to turn around and run.
But curiosity and perhaps a dumb hope of finding something valuable had kept him rooted near the treeline.
The sounds had continued for what felt like an eternity, growing more intense before suddenly cutting off into an eerie silence that somehow felt worse.
For a full hour, Chen Yu had waited nervously, pressed against the rough bark of a large tree trunk, barely daring to breathe. When he finally convinced himself that whatever violent confrontation had happened was truly over, he had crept cautiously toward the source.
He knew the forest was deadly, especially at night when predators emerged to hunt, so he moved with extreme caution, never venturing too far from the main path.
What he found in a small clearing bathed in pale moonlight was a dead body. A man dressed in strange robes of fine material that looked far too expensive for anyone from these parts lay sprawled awkwardly on the forest floor, his face pale and eyes staring sightlessly up at the stars.
Chen Yu had approached slowly with his heart hammering in his chest, checking to see if the man still breathed, but there was no pulse in his neck, no warmth remaining in his skin.
On the man's belt, partially hidden under the folds of his robe, he had spotted a small leather pouch. After a short moment of internal struggle, he had taken it with trembling hands, his fingers clumsy on the worn leather strap.
As Chen Yu had turned to flee back home with his questionable find clutched tightly, something had moved suddenly in the bushs. Before he could even react, searing pain exploded in his ankle as fangs sank deep into his flesh.
He had caught only a brief glimpse of the serpent, the sleek body covered in dark scales and eyes that seemed to glow with an eerie, malevolent intelligence then his survival instinct took over completely.
He started runing desperately, crashing through the forest not caring about the noise he made or the branches that hit at his face. He could already feel the venom beginning its work as his leg grew progressively heavy and numb, his vision started to blur at the edges.
Driven by pure adrenaline, he had made it back to his shack. But the very moment he stumbled through the doorway into the familiar space, his strength had finally given out.
The venom had spread rapidly through his bloodstream, and he collapsed heavily in the center of the small room, the rough floorboards scraping his cheek as he went down, his consciousness fading quickly as his body convulsed from the poison coursing through his veins.
That should have been the absolute end of the original Chen Yu's short, difficult life.
And yet, as the present Chen Yu stood there in the shack absorbing these foreign memories, he realized the body had survived the night. Maybe the act of transmigration itself had somehow purged the poison from his system.
His ankle still bore the clear marks of the bite, two puncture wounds that were already scabbed over with dried blood, but there was no lingering pain, no burning sensation, no trace of venom that he can feel.
Chen Yu took a long, deep breath.
Just then the world around him seemed to shimmer and fade at the edges, as though someone had pulled aside an invisible curtain. He felt a strange pulling sensation centered right behind his navel, insistent and growing stronger, and then suddenly his perspective shifted in a way that made no sense.
He was somehow looking down at his shack from high above, seeing clearly through the walls and roof as though they were made of transparent glass.
His consciousness had separated from his physical body somehow, giving him what could only be described as a god's-eye view. The sensation was very disorienting but also thrilling, and while awareness continued to expand outward in ripples, he sensed something else calling to him, a space that existed within him, or maybe beyond him, accessible only to his consciousness.
Chen Yu's awareness rushed eagerly toward this mysterious space. It felt natural, like water flowing downhill.
He found himself standing or maybe floating it was hard to tell, in a small void that was completely empty in every direction. There was nothing but darkness stretching out endlessly, except for one single thing.
There, suspended in the emptiness as though floating peacefully in perfectly still water, was a body that looked exactly like him.
His body. His original body from Earth. It lay there peaceful and still, eyes gently closed, looking exactly as he must have appeared at the precise moment of death back in his original world when that truck had hit him expect without any injury.
He was even dressed in the same casual clothes he had been wearing while crossing that street. His favorite worn jeans and the graphic t-shirt with the faded Avengers logo on it. Chen Yu curiously controlled himself to float closer to his body…