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, shuddering breath that sounded wrong, 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. 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 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. Those weren't just cultivation runes. They were code. Fragments of syntax mixed with ancient seal script—programming logic wrapped in mystical nonsense.
(...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.
Glowing green text began to write itself across the parchment in real-time:
INITIALIZING...
HOSTNAME...
ERROR...[INVALID HOST.]
SCANNING...
HOST PROFILE: Kaelen Ashveil[DECEASED]/Shen Yue[FOREIGN ENTITY]
STATUS: Critical
ESTIMATED TIME TILL COLLAPSE:72:56:18
MERIDIAN ALIGNMENT:0.3%
Shen Yue stared at the words until they burned into his retinas.
"What the hell is this?" he breathed.
(...seventy-one hours... that's how long I lasted before... before I...)
The boy's memory surfaced unbidden: the cold edge of the knife, the relief as the blood flowed, the certainty that death would be kinder than another day of this. Shen Yue's hands clenched involuntarily, knuckles whitening.
Shut up, she thought viciously. I'm not you. I'm not giving up.
The text continued scrolling:
OBJECTIVE: Repair one meridian before dawn
QUEST UNLOCKED: Survive the night
REWARD: Life
Failure: Death
She tried to focus. Shen Yue's mind was analytical, trained in a world where knowledge was power and logic was survival. She saw the markings in the grimoire which she could not even understand a word
She stared at his hand where the grimoire laid flickering, like augmented reality bleeding through dimensional barriers.
A laugh bubbled up from his chest—high-pitched, unhinged, edged with hysteria. It was Shen Yue's laugh, the one she'd perfected after too many sleepless nights debugging impossible systems, 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. She had a clock ticking.
Seventy-one hours. Three days to fix a broken body before it collapsed entirely.
She flipped through the Grimoire with trembling fingers. Most sections were locked behind gray barriers, inaccessible, but one glowed a deep, bloody red:
''Never mind ...''
The memories of this body told her 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."
Suddenly, footsteps splashed through the mud.
Shen Yue shoved the Grimoire under his tunic and tried to stand. His legs buckled. 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 Collectors. Kaelen's memories supplied the horror: they were the miners who raided dungeons for the King. They were human shields for the powerful warriors. For a "waste" like Kaelen, it was a death sentence.
The Grimoire pulsed against his chest.
Shen Yue looked up at the violet moon. He thought of her sister, the God-Binding ritual and the parallel world he had been ripped from[2].
"I'm a developer," Shen Yue whispered, his eyes hardening with a cold, feminine ferocity trapped in a boy's broken frame. "And developers don't accept l errors. We debug them."
Shen Yue 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.
In the vision, the sister wasn't walking away. She was standing over Kaelen's dying body, holding a knife that glowed with the same violet hue as the second moon. She hadn't been disappointed he was alive - she was terrified.
A new prompt flickered in the dark, pulsing a deep, warning red:
HIDDEN TRUTH DETECTED: You did not just occupy a corpse.
STATUS: You were murdered to provide a vessel.
QUERY: Would you like to know who performed the 'Hand of God' protocol?
Kaelen stared at the crimson prompt floating in his vision, his breath hitching in his throat.
[ YES ] / [ NO ]
His finger, trembling, muddy and barely his own ,hovered over the phantom "Yes" button.
Then, the world tilted.
Pain exploded behind his 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, slapping at the air to scramble away from the prompt as if it were a viper.
"Shut up..." Shen Yue hissed through clenched teeth, clutching his temples. "Shut up, shut up, SHUT UP!!"
The Grimoire snapped closed with a sound like breaking bone and the prompt vanished as if it was never there.
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.
Shen Yue sat there in the mud, gasping his body a battlefield between two ghosts arguing over one rotting corpse.
"Fine," Shen Yue muttered aloud, her-his voice hoarse. "We don't click the scary button. Happy now?"
The original soul retreated, whimpering, back into the dark recess of their shared mind.
Shen Yue forced their body to stand. The legs wobbled.
[TIME LEFT UNTIL COLLAPSE: 71:04:12]
The countdown ticked in the corner of his vision like a death watch. She couldn't afford to waste time on mysteries. Not yet. Survive first. Unravel the conspiracy later.
**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: I would clarify in later chapters**[3]
[1] No need for early spoilers!!
[2] Its Shen Yue who is in the main control f the body but can at times get knowledge from Kaelen's memories since they share same body. Kaelen consciousness is minimal and only surfaces time to time. So at times mixing pronoun he and she
[3] **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: Shen Yue soul's is the dorminant oneand Kaelen's regain consciousness time to time. I would clarify in later chapters**