Li Wei's eyes snapped open.
The wooden floor pressed hard against his side. The vessels of water sat within reach. The open chest gaped against the wall. His heart pounded rapidly, and his breathing came in short gasps.
The wound in his chest burned with renewed intensity, pulling him fully back into the present moment.
What was that? What were those images?
The memories lingered in his mind with unusual clarity. Two sets of them, two completely separate streams of experience that had nothing to do with each other. One was his, undeniably his. Li Wei.
His room with the white ceiling and the isolation in a world of technology. He remembered it clearly now, remembered being someone who lived alone in a small apartment, who worked from home, who ordered food online and barely spoke to anyone for days at a time.
That was my life. That was me before this. I was Li Wei, living in a modern world with electricity, internet and delivery services.
But the other memories weren't his at all. The field and the dirt and the physical labour and the community and the woman with the bread.
Those belonged to someone else entirely. Someone whose hands knew the feel of soil, whose back knew the weight of the sun, whose life had been defined by agricultural cycles and village relationships.
Kael. Those were Kael's memories. This body's memories.
The certainty came without explanation or justification. This body had belonged to someone named Kael before Li Wei woke up in it.
Someone who'd worked fields and lived in a village and known his neighbours in ways that Li Wei had never known anyone. Someone who'd died in the square with everyone else when the raiders came.
How do I have his memories? How is that even possible? Memories are stored in the brain, in neural pathways and chemical connections. If I'm somehow inhabiting this body, why would I have access to its previous owner's experiences?
Li Wei stared at the ceiling of the abandoned house, trying to make sense of what had just happened. He had a complete, clear recollection of being Li Wei. Of living an entire life in a world that was fundamentally different from this one.
A world with computers and phones and modern conveniences. A world where cultivation and essence and spiritual power were the stuff of fiction, not reality.
But he also had fragments of Kael's life now, sitting in his mind alongside his own memories like unwelcome guests. Not complete memories, not organised or linear or fully accessible. Just pieces. Emotions tied to images. Sensations without full context.
The feeling of dirt under nails without remembering specific days of work. The warmth of community without being able to recall individual names or faces clearly.
Did I die? Did Li Wei die in that room and somehow end up here when Kael died? Did my consciousness transfer to this body through some mechanism I don't understand?
The questions multiplied rapidly, each one spawning more questions. If he'd died, he had no memory of it. His last clear memory as Li Wei was of being in his room, lying in bed, staring at the ceiling while the monitor glowed in the darkness.
Then nothing. No transition. No tunnel of light or moment of judgment or sense of crossing a threshold. Just a blank space where awareness should have been, followed by waking up in agony in the square.
Is this actually Kael's body? Am I inhabiting someone else's corpse? Did I somehow steal his life, replace him, overwrite whatever was left of him?
The thought made something twist in his chest that had nothing to do with the wound. If Kael had still been alive somehow, still been present when Li Wei arrived, what did that make him? What kind of violation was that?
What kind of cosmic injustice allowed one person's consciousness to displace another's?
But the body was dead. I'm certain of that. The sword had already been there. The wound was already fatal. Kael died with everyone else in the massacre.
That felt true, felt right in a way he couldn't quite articulate. But if Kael was completely dead, why did Li Wei have his memories?
Why could he feel phantom sensations of a life he'd never lived? Why did the smell of sun-warmed soil trigger emotional responses that belonged to someone else?
Maybe some part of him was still there when I arrived. Maybe consciousness doesn't disappear instantly. Maybe there was overlap, a moment where both of us existed in the same space, and some of his memories transferred to me in the process.
Or maybe this was something else entirely. Something that had no explanation in either the modern world Li Wei came from or the cultivation world Kael had lived in. Some mechanism of transfer or rebirth or possession that operated on rules he didn't understand and couldn't begin to guess at.
Which one am I? Am I Li Wei who somehow ended up in Kael's body? Am I some fusion of both? Something new created from the combination?
He didn't know. The memories of Li Wei were stronger, clearer, more complete and accessible. He felt like Li Wei when he thought about himself.
His internal voice, his patterns of reasoning, his fundamental sense of identity all belonged to the person who'd lived in that room with the white ceiling.
But Kael's memories were there too, undeniable and present, colouring his understanding of this world in ways he couldn't fully articulate or control.
Two lives. Two sets of experiences. One body that had died and somehow continued functioning with a foreign consciousness animating it.
The grey light continued filtering through the doorway. The vessels of water sat within reach, proof that he'd accomplished something during his time here. The wound in his chest throbbed with steady, persistent pain, proof that he was still alive despite everything that should have killed him.
I don't know what I am anymore. Don't know if I'm Li Wei or Kael or something in between. But I'm here. I'm conscious. I'm surviving in a body that shouldn't be functional.
That would have to be enough for now. At least until he could find answers to questions he wasn't even sure how to properly ask.