Kaelen woke up drowning in mud with someone else's memories screaming inside his skull. This was wrong. This was all wrong.
His face was pressed into something cold and wet. The taste of copper and rotting flowers flooded his mouth. He tried to spit, but his jaw wouldn't respond properly-the muscles felt loose and unpracticed, like wearing a suit three sizes too large.
Move. F**king move.
His hands clawed at the muck. The texture was wrong. Too thick. Too... alive. It squelched between fingers that didn't feel like his-too thin, knuckles too prominent, nails cracked and bleeding. He heaved himself onto his side and immediately vomited black bile.
The sky above him had two moons. One was silver, normal enough. The other was the color of a fresh violet hue , hanging lower and close enough that he could see continents on its surface. Both were too large, grotesquely large. Like someone had photoshopped them from Temu into the sky without understanding scale.
"This isn't real," he whispered. His voice came out shredded, like he'd been screaming for hours. "This is a dream. I'm still in the ritual chamber. I'm still ...alive?"
The memories hit him like a freight train but they weren't his. The memories were so overwhelming that he collapsed on the ground in pain while holding his head.
"Get out of my head! I don't want this! Please leave me alone!"
Pain exploded at the back of his brain white-hot and surgical, like someone was carving his skull open from the inside. The boy's consciousness fractured under the weight of it, splintering into a thousand screaming pieces. His vision tunneled to black. The violet moon above blurred into nothing. And then, mercifully, Kaelen Ashveil stopped. The body convulsed once. Twice. Then went still.
For three seconds, there was only the sound of mud settling and distant night creatures calling to each other across the wasteland. The corpse , because that's what it was now, a shell without a pilot, lay motionless in the filth.
Then the fingers twitched. The chest heaved with a gasping like someone learning to breathe for the first time. The body jerked upright with mechanical precision, movements too controlled, too aware for someone who'd just been unconscious. Hands thin, male, wrong, came up to touch a face that didn't belong to her.
Shen Yue stared down at herself. No. Not herself but him. At the narrow chest, the flat planes where curves should have been, the angular shoulders, the hands that were too large and calloused and male. Her breathing, his breathing came faster, panicked, each inhale feeling like drowning in someone else's lungs.
"No," she whispered, and the voice that came out was ruined and rough and masculine. "No, no, no ..."
Her hands flew to her throat, feeling the Adam's apple bob under unfamiliar skin. She looked down at the wrists and saw the fresh scabs, the failed suicide attempt, the evidence of a boy who'd given up. The God-Binding ritual. Her sister's betrayal. The blinding light. [1]She was supposed to be dead. She'd felt her heart stop, felt her soul tear free from her body. But instead of oblivion, she'd been shoved into this meat of a ...
A scream ripped from Kaelen's throat, high and keening and almost inhuman. It echoed across the wasteland, sending night-birds scattering from the reeds. Shen Yue screamed until the boy's abused vocal cords gave out, until the sound turned to ragged sobs, until the horrible truth settled into her bones like poison. She was a woman who despised men, who'd spent her life fighting in a world that tried to erase her, who'd died on her own terms and now she was wearing one. Trapped. Imprisoned in the meat of a suicidal boy whose memories were bleeding into hers like an infection she couldn't cut out.
The body that wasn't hers trembled in the mud and somewhere deep inside, buried under her horror, she felt something else stir: A faint, fragile whisper of the boy whose corpse she'd stolen.
...please... don't leave me alone...
She forced himself to sit up. This body was a disaster. She could feel the "wrongness" in the chest where Qi was supposed to flow.
hurts... everything hurts...
The whisper came from somewhere deep in the back of her skull ; faint, child-like, barely more than static. The boy's soul, clinging to existence like a drowning man clutching driftwood. Shen Yue shoved the voice down.
Not now. I need to think.
In this world, the "Flow of Nature" was everything, she knew that much from the boy's fragmentary memories bleeding through. People used Grimoires to farm, to build, to slaughter. Everything was magical, yet everything was a hierarchy of power. If your meridians were "fucked" as his appeared to be, you were a slave.
Shen Yue looked down. Clutched in his right hand so tight the fingers had gone white was a book. No. Not a regular book, a strange one Shen Yue had only seen in movies, almost like... a Grimoire!
The cover was black leather but the symbols etched into it made Shen Yue's heart skip. There were strange symbols. She could tell they were culticin nature as they were the same she had seen in her sister's strange Manuscripts before being trapped in another world.
don't touch it... it's cursed... father said...
The boy's voice again, trembling with inherited fear. Shen Yue ignored it and opened the book. It was blank! Aren't grimoires supposed to have something?
Am among the cursed. I don't have abundant magic like everyone else. That's why am always despised. I had eased my pain by leaving all this but you...
The faint voice of the body came.
Shut up, she thought viciously. I'm not you.
She tried to focus. Shen Yue's mind was analytical, trained in a world where knowledge was power and logic was survival. She checked the blank grimoire again and hurled it away. Instead of falling into the ground. It disappeared in thin air.
A laugh bubbled up from his(the body's, the boy's)chest—high-pitched, unhinged, edged with hysteria. It was Shen Yue's laugh, but filtered through a boy's ruined vocal cords it sounded like madness.
please stop laughing... they'll hear...
The boy's fear bled through again, instinctive, bone-deep. Shen Yue clamped down on the laughter, forcing it into silence. She didn't have time to mourn her gender or her world.
''Never mind ...''
The memories of this body told her there were Forbidden Powers in this world, that those who used these powers were hunted by the Light Palace, top-tier royals who lived in seclusion, maintaining their monopoly on "acceptable" magic with executioner's zeal.
mother screamed when they took her... the Light Palace doesn't ask questions... they just burn...
A flash of memory: a woman with the boy's eyes dragged into the courtyard, her Grimoire aflame in an Elder's hand. The smell of burning paper and burning flesh.
Shen Yue's jaw clenched. The boy's trauma was bleeding into her thoughts, contaminating her logic with emotion she couldn't afford.
"Listen," she whispered into the darkness of their shared skull. "I don't know if you can hear me properly. I don't know what the hell we are now. But if you want to survive, if we want to survive, you need to let me work."
Silence.
Then, so faint she almost missed it:
okay... but please... don't let them hurt us again...
The voice was small. Broken. The ghost of a boy who'd chosen death over another beating. Shen Yue felt something twist in her chest, pity? Guilt? She wasn't sure anymore where her emotions ended and his began.
"I won't," she promised, surprising herself. "But you have to trust me."
I don't trust anyone...
"Then trust yourself," Shen Yue said quietly. "Because whether you like it or not, we're the same person now."
Shen Yue's attention snapped to the book still clutched in Kaelen's right hand. Even through the boy's fragmented memories, she understood the gravity of it.
In this world, grimoires were everything. The original Kaelen's memories provided the framework, though the reality only made her head ache. Every human was born with a dormant grimoire bound to their soul. At age twelve, during the Awakening Ceremony, those books finally opened.
The number of glowing lines on the pages decided your fate. Seven lines meant you were average: a citizen who could farm with magic or enhance their body for labor. Nine lines meant you were gifted. The kingdom's scouts would take you from your family to train you as a warrior or administrator. Twelve lines meant you were divine and only a handful of people in a generation awakened twelve lines, becoming Paladins of the Light Palace, living symbols of holy power.
But then there were the lines that shouldn't exist. A child's terror surged through her mind: his mother kneeling in a courtyard, her grimoire burning not with white light, but with violet shadow. These were Cataclysm Lines. Forbidden. The Light Palace's verdict was absolute: anyone born with them was executed publicly to "cleanse the rot."
Kaelen's mother had hidden her secret for years, but the ceremony eventually stripped all secrets bare. They made young Kaelen watch her burn. He was only seven, standing in the crowd as his mother screamed and the priests chanted hymns of purification.
That memory explained the wrist scars and the suicide attempt. It explained why this body had been left to die in the mud before Shen Yue arrived.
Looking at the grimoire now, Shen Yue finally understood Kaelen's ultimate despair. When his book had first manifested, it was blank. Completely, utterly blank. In a world where magic was life, zero lines meant you were a "Hollow." You were an empty vessel, an expendable body sent into dungeons as bait because your death didn't matter.
Kaelen had been marked for death twice: first by his bloodline, then by his lack of power.
But something had changed.
Shen Yue looked closer at the pages, and her breath caught. The book wasn't blank anymore. Three jagged lines had appeared in chaotic, dark ink—the forbidden mark of his mother. Below them were seven faint, glowing lines—the standard array Kaelen should have had from birth.
Then there were five more. These looked wrong. They weren't dark like the forbidden lines or bright like the holy ones. Instead, they shimmered with a digital, artificial quality, like lines of scrolling code. Fifteen lines total.
"This isn't possible," Shen Yue whispered, her voice hoarse from Kaelen's damaged vocal cords.
You're cursed, the boy's fading consciousness whimpered in the back of her mind. Father said the book would kill anyone who touched it. That's why I was going to die anyway.
Shen Yue ignored the ghost of the boy. Her modern mind, trained in systems and logic, saw a pattern. The grimoire hadn't been blank; it had been dormant like a door waiting for the key it couldn't find in this world. When her soul crashed into Kaelen's dying body; when foreign code met a native system—the book had glitched and had evolved.
She now possessed a grimoire that shouldn't exist, in a body that should be dead, with powers that meant immediate execution if discovered. A corner of her mouth quirked up. This was terrible!
Suddenly, footsteps splashed through the mud. A figure appeared at the top of the embankment, backlit by a torch. It was a young woman, her voice dripping with contempt.
"Oh. You're still alive."
It was his "sister" - not Shen Yue's sister, but Kaelen's. She looked disappointed.
"The Elders are summoning the SaoYu," she snapped. "They need fresh bodies for tomorrow's dungeon run. Try not to die before you get there. It's a waste of paperwork."
She walked away, the torchlight fading into the gloom. The Grimoire pulsed against his chest. Shen Yue looked up at the violet moon. She thought of her sister, the God-Binding ritual and the parallel world she had been ripped from. Kaelen watched the torchlight vanish, the silhouette of his "sister" swallowed by the gloom. He was alone in the mud but he wasn't alone in his head.
"Wait," he croaked, a sudden jagged memory piercing through Shen Yue's logic.
You occupied my corpse. I don't know how you did it but I have heard of this in tales. Its called "The Hand of God". Its more like a vessel.
Hand of God? Shen Yue, still in the mindspace wondered.
Pain exploded behind the body's eyes like a railroad spike driven through his skull. It wasn't Shen Yue's pain. It was Kaelen's. The original boy's soul, dormant until now, screamed to life inside their shared meat suit.
DON'T! DON'T LOOK! IF YOU LOOK, SHE'LL KNOW YOU REMEMBER!
The voice was raw and primal still soaked in a terror that tasted of iron and bile. Kaelen's hand ; no, their hand spasmed.
"Shut up, shut up, SHUT UP!!"
Shen Yue's consciousness wrestled for control, her analytical mind forcing the boy's panic down like drowning a feral dog. Calm. Assess. Survive. We need information not hysteria. But the original Kaelen clawed back with the desperation of someone who had already died once.
You don't understand! The sister. She....she's not....she isn't....
The thought fragmented into static. Whatever memory he was trying to surface dissolved like salt in water, leaving only a radioactive residue of dread. They sat there in the mud, gasping body a battlefield between two ghosts arguing over one rotting corpse. Eventually, the original soul retreated, whimpering, back into the dark recess of their shared mind.
Shen Yue forced their body to stand. The legs wobbled. She couldn't afford to waste time on mysteries. Not yet. Survive first. Unravel the conspiracy later.[2]
[1] No need for early spoilers!!
[2] **There might be confusion, the body is Kaelen while soul is of Shen Yue but part of Kaelen's soul still alive. Basically, Kaelen's body has two entities, two souls: