Do it.Kaelen's mental voice broke on the word. So just... just save us. I don't care what it costs.
But how am I supposed to do it. Come on. This isn't a fantastical stuff that happens in movies. Shen Yue screamed in her mind to the bird-brained boy.
But before she could roast his intelligence further, their mindscape echoed with the weight of the contract law, which in this world was a powerful binding as any signature on paper. This was consent given in extremis but it was consent nonetheless.
Shen Yue, who had died in a different world and trapped into a hopeless body with a depressed soul, who had been reborn into someone else's flesh without asking, who had become a passenger of a sinking ship, made her choice.
Inside the mindscape, everything stopped. Shen Yue stood before the pilot's seat, the throne of consciousness that determined who controlled their shared body. Kaelen stood beside her, his spiritual form flickering like a dying candle in a draft.
"I'm giving you permission," Kaelen said again. His voice was steady, despite the terror bleeding through their connection. "Take full control. Whatever it takes."
"You don't understand what you're asking," Shen Yue said. Her form was solid, grounded in a confidence the boy lacked. "If I take the seat now, while the grimoire is active... you might get pushed back and be locked away."
"It might be permanent," Shen Yue warned. "I don't know if it can be reversed in future."
"I don't care." Kaelen stepped away from the controls, his form becoming more transparent with every second of indecision. "Look at them."
Through their shared vision, the horror was vivid: Chan'er crying, the Plague Hound lunging, death only a heartbeat away.
"I'm fourteen years old," Kaelen continued, his voice cracking. "I've never fought anything. I've never won anything. I spent my whole life being afraid. But you... you know how to fight."[1]
His translucent hands gripped Shen Yue's shoulders.
"So please. Take my body. Take everything. Just save her."
In the physical world, the Plague Hound's jaws descended. Shen Yue looked at this boy, this broken traumatized child who was offering her the one thing he had left: himself.
"I promise," she said quietly. "I won't let you disappear completely. When this is over, when we're safe, I'll find a way to share the body again."
Kaelen stepped aside as Shen Yue sat down. The grimoire understood immediately. In the real world, Kaelen's body convulsed as the pages erupted with light. It wasn't the holy white light of divine cultivation but a digital, neon-blue script that scrolled across the air.
CONTRACT UPDATE: [Visual reconstruction from cite: 212]
SUMMONER: Shen Yue (Foreign Soul)
BOUND ENTITY: Kaelen Ashveil (Original Soul)
RELATIONSHIP: Master -> Servant
STATUS: Active
PERMISSIONS: Full body control granted to summoner.
The words burned in the air for a nutshell, long enough for both souls to read them before vanishing.
Inside the diagram of the mindscape, the lights shifted. The spark representing Kaelen dimmed, sequestered into a sub-layer while Shen Yue's light flared bright and dominant in the center. Kaelen watched as invisible walls rose around him. It wasn't a prison exactly but a partition. He could still see though not everything, still feel the body's sensations and hear its thoughts but the controls were dead.
"I'm sorry," Shen Yue whispered into their shared space as her consciousness locked into the neural pathways.
"Don't be," Kaelen replied, his voice already fading. "You're keeping your promise. You haven't deleted me."
His form sank deeper into the mindscape, drifting down to the subconscious level where dreams lived.
"I'll bring you back," Shen Yue promised again. "When it's safe. When we're not fighting for our lives every second. I swear."
"If you do," Kaelen's voice echoed from the depths, "I'll consider this a good trade. Save Chan'er. Please."
Then he was gone and Shen Yue was alone in the driver's seat.
When Kaelen's eyes snapped open again, they held a different weight, a foreign intelligence peering through borrowed windows. The body remained his, every scar and callus intact, but the presence animating it had changed. It was a master wearing flesh like an ill-fitting glove, neural pathways still sparking with resistance as her consciousness ruthlessly overwrote his motor controls, his memories, his very identity compressed into a corner of what had once been entirely his own mind. For the first time there was no lag, no resistance, no second-guessing. Kaelen's body responded to her commands with perfect synchronization. Just her, her will directing this flesh.
Where summoners and cultivators typically drew beasts forth to serve, this contract inverted as the master's consciousness dived like a falcon into prey, not to command from without but to inhabit from within. This was acknowledging a terrifying anomaly: the "Summoner" was the intruder and the boy was merely the high-grade beast being claimed. The grimoire accepted her spiritual signature and overwrote his own, effectively sealing him within his own flesh as a vessel while she took the helm, turning the boy into a human-shaped guardian beast under her total command..
The entire possession—the shattering of will, the binding of contract and overwriting of Kaelen's helm had consumed barely two heartbeats. Two seconds of eternity compressed into the space between one breath and the next.[2]
The attacking beast was still mid-lunge, jaws stretched impossibly wide, backward-jointed legs coiled for the killing strike. Chan'er had squeezed her eyes shut, small hands still gripping Kaelen's arm in futile desperation waiting for the wet crunch of teeth through bone. But when she forced her eyes open, everything had changed.
The beast hung suspended in air with its grotesque body muscles locked in mid-contraction as if someone had frozen time itself. Then its head snapped sideways with a sickening crack as its fungal growths along its spine shriveled inward, spores ceasing their toxic cascade. As it slummed on the ground, its pupils that were previously feral and mindless, suddenly dilated to pinpricks. It was dead!
Chan'er stared; mouth agape, her small hands finally releasing Kaelen's arm. The boy's body stood differently now—weight distributed with predatory grace he'd never possessed, head tilted at an angle that suggested something studying the world through unfamiliar eyes. When she spoke, the voice was no longer Kaelen's submissive voice but feminine vocal cords shaped around cadence that had never been his.
"Are you okay?"
"The Summoner's contract saved us! It killed the Wényì Quǎn!" Little Chan'er who was hopeless a few moments ago was overjoyed her face radiant with smile.
"What is Wényì Quǎn?" Shen Yue asked in genuine concern.
"Come on Kaelen. Don't you know how we call Plague Hounds, that beast over there." Chan'er said while pointing at it.
"Oh I see. How did Summoner's contract save us?" She tried pressing further.
"Kaelen! You are acting dumb today. Summoner's contract law protects the summoner while summoning their beasts and cannot be harmed by any attacker. It usually...Wait a minute! Wait! What's happening here? Did you really... You had no beast to summon so why did it protect you? And has your voice changed?"
"What?"
Shen Yue suddenly realized what had happened after the contract between her and Kaelen. Had the boy consciousness vanished ?
"Kaelen! Are you in there? Talk to me if you can still hear me. Hello..."
She was panicking and didn't realize she had voiced her mental voice out loud that Chan'er stared at her with genuine interest.
"Are you okay gege Kaelen?" Chan'er asked holding Shen Yue's hand.
Shen Yue walked over to the dead Plague hound and kneeled beside to study its features. She was feeling a bit free adjusting to this boy's body, not as shared space but as sole owner; not probably the legitimate one. She didn't understand why she had sudden urge to consume something. She didn't care for the howling voices far inside the cave where Lord WuJi was fighting; not even the SaoYu, including Gu Tian who had already fled leaving them behind. Shen Yue stretched one hand and touched the hound. She felt it relieving.
The sensation was indescribable. Imagine swallowing grave dirt. Now imagine that dirt is alive, squirming and it's mixed with liquid lightning that freezes instead of burns. Imagine feeling it slide down your throat; feeling it because you're hyper-aware of every nerve ending suddenly and into your stomach where it doesn't just sit. It turns into something solid and a foreign object that your body recognizes as fundamentally incompatible with life.
Her heart stuttered.
Thud.
Heavy and mechanical.
Thud.
Steady and deliberate. The same rhythm.
The pain was exquisite. Every nerve ending lit up simultaneously sending signals that overwhelmed her brain's ability to process them. It was hot, cold, empty, pleasurable, and feeling of agony all at once, contradicting each other with each sensation as real and intense as the others.
"Kaelen?" Chan'er's voice was thin, distant, barely audible.
But Kaelen couldn't answer and neither could Shen Yue who was the current Kaelen.
"Kaelen! Wake up! It's Chan'er!" A distant voice suddenly pulled Shen Yue back to consciousness.
Shen Yue rolled her new shoulders testing range of motion. The muscles were weak and malnourished. The body carried the physical legacy of fourteen years of poverty and recent weeks of torture but it would do. Bodies were just vehicles and people could steal vehicles and learn to drive.
The legs that had been stumbling in blind panic moved with purpose. She turned , facing the darkness behind them where howling and chittering still echoed, where shapes moved in the shadows with too many legs.
"Kaelen?"
Shen Yue smiled. It was the wrong smile. It belonged on a corporate strategist who'd just cornered a market, not a terrified fourteen-year-old boy running for his life.
"Not anymore , Chan'er." Shen Yue's voice came out of Kaelen's throat. "You can call me Yue now."
[1] Kaelen could read Shen Yue's mind too and got some of her previous life errands she used to run
[2] I hope you noted the soul binding contract took place while the beast was still attacking them. It seems eternity in the mindspace but it was barely two seconds in real world. Chan'er was holding her hand all along