Consciousness returned like a lover's caress—if the lover was made of broken glass and the caress involved a cheese grater.
The first sensation Zǔ Zhòu registered wasn't sight, sound, or even thought. It was pressure. Specifically, the resistance of cartilage beneath his fingers, the precise amount of force required to compress a human windpipe without crushing it entirely. Muscle memory, apparently, transcended dimensional barriers.
His eyes—no, this body's eyes—snapped open.
Below him, a servant's face had achieved an interesting shade of purple. Not quite eggplant, but approaching it with admirable determination. The man's eyes bulged like a toad that had just received shocking news, vessels bursting in tiny crimson fireworks across the sclera.
"Too quick," was Zǔ Zhòu's first conscious thought in his new existence. "Death should be savored, not gulped down like cheap wine."
His hands—young, soft, uncallused hands that had clearly never done honest work—were positioned with an amateur's enthusiasm. All pressure on the windpipe, none on the carotid arteries. The servant would die, certainly, but it would take minutes of graceless thrashing. Where was the artistry? The precision? The careful orchestration of oxygen deprivation that could stretch a single death into a symphony of suffering?
Without conscious thought, his grip adjusted.
Thumb and forefinger found the carotid arteries with the precision of a master painter selecting brushes. The pressure shifted—less crushing, more selective. Blood flow to the brain decreased to a trickle while allowing just enough air to keep consciousness flickering like a candle in a drafty room.
The servant's expression changed. The panic was still there, but now it mixed with confusion. Why did dying suddenly feel... different? More deliberate? As if his death had transformed from accident to art piece?
"There we go," Zǔ Zhòu murmured, his voice strange to his own ears. Higher pitched than he remembered. Younger. The vocal cords of someone who had perhaps seen sixteen summers, maybe seventeen. "Much better. Now, let's see what vintage of terror you're fermenting."
He studied the servant's face with the detached interest of a sommelier examining a particularly promising wine. Fear, obviously—that was the base note. But there were subtleties. Confusion at the young master's changed technique. Hope, flickering and dying as oxygen deprivation set in. And underneath it all, a delicious thread of betrayal. This servant had trusted his master, clearly. Had perhaps even felt affection for the spoiled young lord.
How delightful that his last experience would be that trust curdling into horror.
While maintaining the precise pressure needed to keep the servant balanced on the knife's edge between life and death, Zǔ Zhòu took inventory of his new vessel.
Body Tempering, Third Stage. Pathetic. The spiritual channels were barely opened, meridians still clogged with impurities. The dantian was like a teacup trying to contain an ocean—no wonder the original owner had been stuck at such a miserable level. The boy had probably thought himself impressive for reaching even this much.
Physical condition: soft. Muscles present but decorative, like painted fruit. The kind of body that resulted from halfhearted training between feast days and wine tastings. Flexibility was acceptable—youth's gift—but strength was laughable. He could probably lift, what, perhaps twice his body weight? Three times if he strained?
"Disappointing," he mused, watching the servant's eyes begin to glaze. "But workable."
The servant made a sound—not quite a gurgle, not quite a wheeze. His hands, which had been clawing at Zǔ Zhòu's grip, began to relax. Not from acceptance, but from the simple mechanical failure of oxygen-starved muscles.
"No, no," Zǔ Zhòu chided, easing the pressure just slightly. "Not yet. We're only at the second movement of this particular symphony."
Blood flow resumed—barely. The servant's eyes focused again, hope and horror warring in their depths. His mouth worked, trying to form words. Pleas, probably. They usually were.
While the servant struggled to remember how breathing worked, Zǔ Zhòu continued his assessment. The body's cultivation was garbage, but the foundation wasn't entirely worthless. The meridians, while clogged, were actually quite numerous. The previous owner had been blessed with decent talent, just too lazy to properly utilize it.
The spiritual roots were... interesting. Triple attribute—Fire, Wood, and surprisingly, Shadow. Not darkness, but Shadow specifically. A rare variant that most righteous cultivators would have tried to suppress. No wonder the boy had stagnated. He'd probably been following some orthodox manual that treated his shadow roots like a embarrassing disease.
"Your young master was an idiot," Zǔ Zhòu informed the dying servant conversationally. "Shadow roots in a world where no one understands their true potential. Like using a masterwork blade to spread butter."
The servant's eyes flickered. Recognition? Or just random neural firing as his brain began its final shutdown sequence? Hard to tell. But Zǔ Zhòu chose to interpret it as understanding, because that made it funnier.
"Oh yes," he continued, adjusting his grip again to draw out the final moments. "Liu Wei could have been genuinely powerful. Instead, he spent his time strangling servants for petty slights. No vision. No ambition. Just small cruelties performed without artistic merit."
The irony wasn't lost on him. Here he was, also strangling a servant. But there was a crucial difference—he was doing it well.
The servant's life began to gutter out properly now. Not the crude snuffing the original Liu Wei had intended, but a carefully orchestrated dimming. Each system shutting down in sequence, consciousness fragmenting into smaller and smaller pieces, awareness scattering like leaves before an autumn wind.
Zǔ Zhòu leaned closer, studying the exact moment when hope transformed into acceptance, when the survival instinct finally acknowledged its futility. There—that precise instant when the servant understood not just that he would die, but that his death was merely morning exercise for something far worse than his young master had ever been.
"Beautiful," Zǔ Zhòu whispered, and meant it.
The servant's final breath wasn't a rattle or a wheeze. It was a sigh, almost musical in its resignation. His eyes, still open, reflected nothing. The purple fade from his face, leaving behind the waxy pallor of the recently deceased.
Zǔ Zhòu released his grip and sat back, examining his handiwork. The bruising was artful—a perfect print of fingers and thumb, positioned with anatomical precision. Any half-competent investigator would recognize the marks of someone who knew exactly what they were doing.
Good thing this world didn't seem to have competent investigators.
He flexed his fingers experimentally. The joints popped—too much time spent in one position. The body would need conditioning. Real conditioning, not the play-acting at training the previous owner had indulged in. But first...
Zǔ Zhòu stood, noting the body's balance, the way weight distributed across unfamiliar bones. Everything felt simultaneously right and wrong—like wearing a suit tailored for someone else who happened to share your exact measurements.
The room came into focus properly for the first time. Opulent, in that particularly tasteless way that suggested new money trying to look like old money. Silk hangings in azure and silver—the Liu family colors, apparently. Furniture that cost more than most people's houses, positioned without any understanding of flow or function. Art that had been selected based on price rather than aesthetic merit.
"No wonder you were so pathetically evil," he told the corpse at his feet. "Look at this environment. It practically screams 'mediocre sadist with delusions of grandeur.'"
The servant hadn't been alone. A tray lay overturned nearby, tea pooling on what was probably a priceless carpet. The original altercation, Zǔ Zhòu deduced. The servant had spilled tea, or brought the wrong blend, or committed some other trivial offense that Liu Wei had decided warranted death.
"Such a waste," Zǔ Zhòu sighed. "You could have trained him to make perfect tea through fear alone. Could have created a servant so terrorized by the thought of disappointing you that he would have achieved tea-making enlightenment. Instead, you just..." He gestured at the corpse. "This."
Still, he supposed he should be grateful. If Liu Wei hadn't been in the middle of murdering someone, the soul displacement might have been more complicated. Nothing like active violence to loosen a soul's grip on its body. The boy had practically rolled out the welcome mat for possession.
Zǔ Zhòu walked to the nearby mirror—of course there was a mirror, probably several, vanity being another of the original's petty sins—and examined his new face.
Young. Handsome in that generic way that suggested good breeding rather than character. Features that would mature into classical beauty if properly maintained. Dark hair worn slightly too long, dark eyes that probably practiced "brooding" and "mysterious" in this very mirror.
"Well," he said to his reflection, "it's no immortal emperor's divine physique, but it'll do."
The reflection smiled back, and for just a moment, reality seemed to shiver. Because the smile didn't belong on that young face. It was too wide, too knowing, too amused by jokes that mortal minds weren't meant to comprehend.
Somewhere in the distance, thunder rumbled despite the clear morning sky.
Zǔ Zhòu's smile widened.
The game could begin.