Leo Mann, age twenty-eight, was an expert in the art of being invisible. His life was a carefully curated collection of unremarkable things. His apartment was painted in a shade of beige that absorbed light and personality. The corporate cubicle where he verified data was a slightly different, more depressing beige. He was a ghost in the machine, a name on a payroll, and the most exciting part of his week was when the office vending machine was restocked.
He wasn't unhappy, not exactly. He was simply… un-everything. Unfulfilled. Uninspired. Unseen. His only rebellion came in small, quiet bursts. He owned a magnificent pair of headphones, a treasure he used to flood his beige world with the sprawling, chaotic colors of psychedelic rock. On his windowsill, a jungle of vibrant houseplants grew in defiance of his colorless apartment.
And on rare, solitary Saturday nights, he took journeys. Not on a plane or a train, but on the wings of psilocybin. For Leo, it was a form of exploration. In a life that offered no new frontiers, a few dried mushrooms could peel back the veil of the mundane, turning the popcorn texture of his ceiling into a swirling star map. These trips were his only source of novelty, the only times he felt his consciousness expanding rather than contracting under the weight of his routine.
This particular Tuesday was a masterpiece of mediocrity. After a morning of ensuring numbers matched other numbers, his grand ambition for the evening was trying a new brand of oat milk he'd just purchased. Trudging from the supermarket, he wrestled a shopping cart with a wobbly wheel when he paused. The sun was warm, the air smelled of hot asphalt, and the sky was an offensively, perfectly clear blue. It was a beautiful day, and he felt absolutely nothing.
A sudden stillness fell. The distant hum of traffic vanished. The squeal of the cart wheel cut off. Goosebumps erupted on his skin as he looked up into that vast, cloudless expanse.
And then reality tore open.
A searing, violet-white line of energy ripped through the empty blue. It didn't descend; it simply burst into being, a jagged scar aimed with cosmic precision at him. There was no thunder, just a blinding flash and the impossible sensation of being unmade. His world of spreadsheets and oat milk dissolved into a kaleidoscopic tunnel of screaming, geometric colors. He felt his consciousness, his very sense of "Leo Mann," stretching like taffy, thinning into a fragile thread. It was terrifying, but for one insane moment, it felt profoundly familiar—like the chaotic peak of one of his trips, amplified a million times over.
Then, the thread snapped.
He awoke with a gasp, the feeling of silk sheets a shocking surprise against his skin. The air was different, thick with the scent of sandalwood and strange, sweet blossoms. He wasn't on hot asphalt. He was in a massive, ornate bed, the wooden frame carved with images of coiling dragons. Sunlight, tinted a soft crimson, streamed through a circular window. Outside, he could see the swaying branches of a colossal weeping willow, its leaves a shocking scarlet.
Panic began its icy crawl up his spine, but it was cut short by a pain that erupted behind his eyes, dropping him back into the plush pillows. It wasn't a simple headache; it was an invasion. A lifetime that was not his flooded his mind.
He saw through the eyes of a boy growing up in this very room. He felt the sting of a father's disappointed gaze, the open mockery of an older brother who could shatter boulders with a single punch, the pitying whispers of servants in the hallways. He experienced the crushing shame of failing every test of spiritual aptitude, his body's meridians hopelessly blocked.
Names and places cemented themselves in his new consciousness. Verdant Creek City, a major stronghold in the vast Empire of Feng. The House of Lei, a respected noble family known for producing powerful cultivators. And his own name… the name of this body.
Lei Man. The youngest son. The family's greatest shame. The "Trash of House Lei."
He remembered the final moments of the original Lei Man. Fifteen years old and desperate, he had been in the family's courtyard during a freak dry lightning storm. While others ran for cover, he had stood his ground, defiantly trying to force a spark of spiritual energy—any energy—into his useless body. It was a final, pathetic act of defiance against his fate. A fate that was sealed not by his own power, but by a direct hit from the heavens.
The flood of memories receded, leaving Leo panting in the silk sheets, his head throbbing with a dull ache. He looked down at his hands. They were slender and pale, the hands of a boy who had never known a day of hard labor, yet they trembled with a frustration he had only just inherited.
The cosmic irony was staggering. He, Leo Mann, had escaped a life of being a nobody in a cubicle only to be thrust into the body of a very well-known nobody in a mansion. He was no longer an invisible man in a beige world. He was a visible failure in a world of crimson and gold, a world where power was everything, and he had none. He was an imposter in a dead boy's body, and the trouble he was in had just begun.
The door to his chambers was thrown open, not pushed. It slammed against the interior wall with a crack of splintering wood, a sound of pure, entitled arrogance that shattered the quiet of the afternoon. Lei Jiao strode in, his emerald-green silk robes a slash of vibrant color that seemed to suck the life from the room's muted crimson light. His handsome face, a celebrated feature of the Lei family's main branch, was a mask of contemptuous impatience.
"I heard the servants say the lightning didn't kill you," he began without preamble, his voice cutting through the room like a shard of ice. He stopped at the foot of the massive, dragon-carved bed, looking down at Lei Man as if he were an insect that had inconveniently crawled into his line of sight. "A pity. It would have saved the family a considerable amount of embarrassment. But, since you're still breathing, you can pay me back my five hundred silver for the Jade Breath Dew."
Lei Man, his mind still a fragile merger of a defeated fifteen-year-old and a dislocated twenty-eight-year-old, felt a familiar, inherited wave of dread wash over him. The debt. The impossible, soul-crushing sum that the original Lei Man had believed would be his salvation, but had only been another link in the chain of his failure.
"I don't have it," Lei Man whispered, the words tasting like ash and failure in his mouth.
"Of course you don't," Lei Jiao sneered, a cruel, mocking smile twisting his lips. He took a step closer, the subtle, spiritual pressure of his cultivated body making the air feel heavy and thick, harder to breathe. "You have nothing. You are nothing. But I want my silver." He leaned forward, his shadow falling over Lei Man like a shroud, his voice dropping to a menacing hiss that was for Lei Man alone. "I'll be in my study this evening, reviewing the family accounts. Bring it to me by then, or I will personally see to it that the word 'Trash' is officially added to your name before I have you thrown out of the family grounds myself."
The ultimatum—tonight—wasn't just a threat; it was a key turning a rusty lock in the depths of his mind. The pressure from his cousin, the sheer, cliff-faced impossibility of the demand, became a physical weight that pressed down on his chest. The crimson light from the circular window began to pulse, a slow, sickening throb that matched the panicked beat of his own heart.
Lei Jiao's face started to distort. The edges of his sneer stretched like melting wax, his eyes seeming to multiply and swim in their sockets. The refined scent of sandalwood in the room soured, twisting into the acrid, gag-inducing smell of years-old cooking oil burning in a filthy pan, the stench of utter decay. The world frayed at the edges, then dissolved into a screech of sensory overload.
He was in a kitchen. An endless, hellish kitchen that stretched to an infernal, smoke-choked horizon. The noise was a physical assault: the constant, deafening, metallic clatter of a thousand falling cleavers; the furious, wet hiss of steam that smelled of regret and boiled cabbage; the guttural, echoing screams of unseen chefs being subjected to unimaginable torments.
He was barefoot on a greasy, grimy floor slick with things he didn't want to identify. In his trembling hands was a single, filthy sponge. His task, communicated not by words but by a crushing, instinctual knowledge that filled every fiber of his being, was to scrub the infinite floor clean. He worked with a frantic, pointless energy, scrubbing at a single tile. The moment he wiped a patch of grime away, a fresh, foul layer of filth would instantly bubble up from below. It was a nightmare of absolute futility, the perfect landscape of his own soul.
Then, a shadow fell over him, a patch of cold in the searing heat.
He looked up, and his blood turned to ice. A figure towered over him, impossibly tall, his form blocking out the hellish light of the kitchen fires. He wore chef's whites woven from pure, searing light, and his face was a mask of divine, terrifying fury—a face carved from granite and judgment, a face he knew from a thousand screens in a life he'd left behind. The God of this Hell had arrived.
The towering chef leaned down, his face inches from Lei Man's, the sheer force of his presence silencing the entire kitchen. The screams, the clatter, the hissing—all vanished. There was only the sound of his own frantic, rabbit-like heartbeat. The chef's voice was not a sound, but a force that shook his very soul, a roar that was both a question and a condemnation.
"WHAT ARE YOU?!"
The question demanded an answer. In this place of epic failure and futility, stripped of his name, his past, and his future, there was only one truth left. The answer rose from the deepest, most pathetic part of his being, the only identity he could claim in this nightmare. He wasn't speaking with a mouth, but with his very essence, a confession of the soul.
"An idiot sandwich."
The moment the admission formed in his consciousness, the towering chef's face exploded into a supernova of pure, furious, validating light. The shockwave of the blast hit him, not with pain, but with a sense of total, blissful annihilation that shattered his consciousness into a billion pieces.
…He blinked.
The world snapped back into focus with a jarring, nauseating suddenness. The acrid smell was gone, replaced by the heavy scent of expensive ink and old bamboo scrolls. He wasn't in his room. He was standing in a lavishly decorated study, the shelves lined with books, the air cool with the night. Pale, silver moonlight, not crimson twilight, streamed through an open window, illuminating the dust motes dancing in the air.
Across a polished mahogany desk, Lei Jiao was seated, weighing a heavy, bulging pouch of silver in his hand. The soft, metallic clinking of the coins was the only sound in the room.
Lei Man looked down at his own hands. In them, he held the limp, empty cloth bag that the silver had clearly just come from. He had no memory of leaving his room, of the sun setting, of gathering anything to sell, or of walking across the estate to his cousin's study. The last thing he remembered was the exploding chef. The intervening hours were a complete and utter void.
Lei Jiao finished his appraisal and tossed the pouch onto the desk with a heavy, final thud. He looked up at Lei Man, his expression not of fear, but of bored, mildly surprised annoyance.
"About time," Lei Jiao said, his tone flat and dismissive. "I was beginning to think you'd run off like a coward, leaving me to clean up your mess." He gestured with his chin at the empty bag in Lei Man's hands. "I don't know what pathetic family trinkets you had to grovel to sell, and frankly, I don't care. The debt is paid."
He stood up, straightening the immaculate lines of his robes. "Our business is concluded. Now get out of my sight. The sight of you is ruining the atmosphere of my study."
Numbly, Lei Man turned and walked out of the study, his mind a roaring blank. He stumbled through the manicured courtyards of the Lei estate, their serene beauty lost on him as he moved under the cold, indifferent light of the moon. The empty bag was still clutched in his hand, a tangible piece of a puzzle with a gaping hole in its center. How?
When he finally reached his own quiet courtyard and pushed open the door to his room, the moonlight provided the answer. It streamed through the circular window, a silver spotlight on the polished wooden floor. And on that floor were three distinct, empty spaces. Two circular outlines in the dust where a pair of priceless antique vases had stood for decades. And a rectangular space where a small, intricately carved side table had once been.
The truth hit him like a physical blow. I did this. His body, operating on some bizarre, psychedelic autopilot, had solved a problem his conscious mind could not. He had looted his own room, walked into Verdant Creek City, found a buyer, sold the items for the exact right price, and paid the debt, all while his conscious mind was being terrorized by a cosmic chef in a metaphysical kitchen.
He stumbled to his bed and collapsed onto it, overwhelmed by the terrifying implications. He was a passenger in his own body. A ghost in the machine.
As the panic began to subside, he reached for the only other thing he could remember from the chaos. He closed his eyes, searching for the feeling that came with the chef's furious, annihilating explosion. He focused inward, past the fear, past the confusion, searching the familiar, cold, stagnant void in his core.
It was no longer completely empty.
In the center of that darkness, a single, tiny pinprick of warmth flickered with a gentle, defiant light. It was impossibly small, a solitary ember in a cold, dead universe.
He was still the Trash of House Lei. But something fundamental had changed. He had no control over his new, terrifying ability, but he couldn't deny its result. In a moment of absolute self-abasement, a spark had been born from the ashes.