"Mummy, mummy, please stop crying."
A little trembling voice called out.
That was the first thing Feng Liang heard as he slowly opened his eyes, regaining consciousness. The words reached him before anything else did — before the light, before the pain, before the smell. Just that small voice, cutting through the dark, and somewhere beneath it the sound of a woman crying. Quietly.
He lay still and listened for a moment without moving.
Then the smell hit him.
He tried opening his mouth. It felt like a rat had died inside. He breathed slowly, inhaling a dense smell of alcohol that sat heavy in the air around him and heavier still inside him — in his skin, his throat, the lining of his chest. His mouth was sour from the taste, his throat raw and thick, every breath carrying something stale and rotten up from somewhere deep. He swallowed once and wished he hadn't. His stomach turned over and settled uneasily.
He looked up at the ceiling.
Morning light was filling the room, pale and flat, falling across walls that had nothing on them. No pictures. No shelves. Just bare plaster with a water stain spreading from one corner like something that had been ignored long enough to become permanent. It looked completely different from anywhere he knew. He lay still for a moment longer, staring upward, letting his eyes adjust, not sure where he was or why his head hurt so much. The pain was deep and dull, settled behind his eyes like something that had been there for a long time and was in no hurry to leave.
He tilted his head sideways.
There, two figures stood far away from him across the room. A young woman and a little girl holding her hand, the girl's small shoulders still moving with the last of her crying. A mother and her daughter. They were standing close together, the girl pressed into the woman's side, and neither of them was moving. They were watching him the way people watch something they are not sure is going to stay still.
He grunted — just a small sound, barely anything.
The two of them flinched at the same time. Their bodies pulled back the same fraction, the same instant, like a reflex so well-practiced it had stopped requiring thought. He could see the fear in their eyes clearly from where he lay. Wide and fixed on him. Waiting to find out what came next.
Feng Liang looked at them and said nothing.
He couldn't understand this situation at all. Who were these two, and why were they looking at him as though he were some kind of monster? He hadn't done anything. He had barely moved. He pushed his hand down against the floor and levered himself upright, getting a proper look at the room around him for the first time.
The whole place looked like a junkyard.
Trash scattered across every surface, across the floor, piled in corners — the accumulated evidence of someone who had stopped caring what anything looked like and kept going anyway. A window with no curtains, bare and open to the flat morning light, doing nothing to make the room feel less exposed. A small wardrobe pushed against the wall with one handle hanging loose off its door, the door itself sitting at a slight angle like it had been hit and never straightened.
His eyes landed back on those two.
The woman. The little girl.
Then it all came back without warning.
Two different memories came clashing down at once inside his head, colliding with a force that had no business being contained inside a single skull — his own life, sharp and clear and ruthless, and another life, formless and sour and full of damage — and the collision was total. Before he could hold himself together, before he could find the edge of it and grip it, it swallowed him completely.
He let out a scream.
The two figures immediately cowered, moving back hard against the wall. The little girl buried herself into her mother's side and went completely silent. The woman's arm came around her, fast and practiced, pulling her in.
Feng Liang pressed his hands against his head and breathed.
In. Out.
In. Out.
Slowly, the inside of his skull stopped splitting. The two lives settled — not reconciled, not resolved, but stacked on top of each other, one bleeding into the other at the edges. He sat with it. His breathing evened out. He lowered his hands.
He looked at the two in front of him.
And he understood now. He understood why they flinched at a grunt. Why they pressed themselves against the wall at a scream. Why the little girl had stopped crying the moment he first stirred — stopped completely.
*Rage* boiled in his heart.
This body. The original owner of this body deserves death a thousand times.
*The last thing I remember was drinking wine and going to bed. That doesn't matter for now*, Feng Liang thought, his jaw tight.
"Hmm… water," he said.
His voice came out rough, stripped of everything. He heard it land in the room and watched them react to the sound of it — the slight tightening, the held breath.
*What am I even thinking. These two are probably too scared to even speak to me right now.*
He looked at them. A silence stretched out across the room.
Then from across it, a trembling voice answered anyway. Small and careful. A hand lifted and pointed in the direction of the restroom.
Feng Liang pushed himself to his feet. His stomach twisted hard as he rose, a sick rolling feeling that climbed from his gut up into his chest and sat there. He moved past the two of them, giving them the full width of the room as he went, and walked toward the restroom.
He walked in. He turned on the tap. The water came out cold and he brought it up with both hands and pressed it hard into his face — once, twice, washing the sleep and the stench away by degrees. He rinsed his sour mouth. Spat. Did it again. Stood there with the water still running, both hands resting on the edge of the basin, head down, letting the cold finish the work.
Then he straightened up.
He looked at the mirror.
A different man was looking back at him.
Li Feng.