Kaelen Ashveil woke up drowning in mud with someone else's memories screaming inside his skull.
This was wrong. This was all wrong.
His face was pressed into something cold and wet. The taste of copper and rotting flowers flooded his mouth. He tried to spit, but his jaw wouldn't respond properly-the muscles felt loose and unpracticed, like wearing a suit three sizes too large.
Move. F**king move.
His hands clawed at the muck. The texture was wrong. Too thick. Too... alive. It squelched between fingers that didn't feel like his-too thin, knuckles too prominent, nails cracked and bleeding. He heaved himself onto his side and immediately vomited black bile.
The sky above him had two moons!
One was silver, normal enough. The other was the color of a fresh bruise, hanging lower, close enough that he could see continents on its surface. Both were too large. Grotesquely large. Like someone had photoshopped them from Temu into the sky without understanding scale.
"This isn't real," he whispered. His voice came out shredded, like he'd been screaming for hours. "This is a dream. I'm still in the ritual chamber. I'm still ..."
The memories hit him like a freight train, but they weren't his.
Before this, he had been Shen Yue, a woman from a dystopian world who had died trying to stop a God-Binding ritual that her own sister was performing. She had been a coder, a linguist, a fighter. Now, she was trapped in the meat of a boy named Kaelen.
The boy's memories flooded in:
A father's fist connecting with his ribs because his meridians were corrupted,
the Elders' cold eyes as they stamped his forehead with the Waste-Mark.
Darius, the clan's golden child, breaking his fingers one by one while his friends held him down in the mud.
Crawling here, to this ditch, because the pain was too much and the knife felt so cold against his wrist.
"Oh no...."
Kaelen - no, Shen Yue in Kaelen's body - stared at his wrists. Two long scabs, still weeping in red barely healed. The original owner of this body hadn't died from the beating but suicide.
Shen Yue was wearing a corpse!
**mixing pronouns as Kaelen is the original body owner. Shen Yue is the reincarnated soul trapped in this body. **
She ,he, forced himself to sit up. This body was a disaster. He could feel the "wrongness" in the chest where Qi was supposed to flow. In this world, the "Flow of Nature" was everything. People used Grimoires to farm, to build, to slaughter. Everything was magical, yet everything was a hierarchy of power. If your meridians were "fucked"- as his appeared to be, you were a slave.
Kaelen looked down. Clutched in his right hand so tight the fingers had gone white was a book.
No. Not a regular book, a strange one Shen Yue only had seen in movies almost like.... a Grimoire!
The cover was black leather but the symbols etched into it made Shen Yue's heart skip. Those weren't just cultivation runes. They were code. Fragments of syntax mixed with ancient seal script.
He opened it. Glowing green text began to write itself across the parchment in real-time:
>>> INITIALIZING...
>>> DETECTING HOST SIGNATURE...
>>> WARNING: UNAUTHORIZED SOUL DETECTED
>>> SCANNING...
>>> HOST PROFILE:
Name: Kaelen Ashveil [DECEASED] / Shen Yue [FOREIGN ENTITY]
Status: CRITICAL (Body Integrity: 8%)
Meridian Functionality: 0.3%
Estimated Time Until System Collapse: 71:42:18
>>> EMERGENCY PROTOCOLS ENGAGED
Kaelen stared at the words until they burned into his retinas.
"What the hell is this?" he breathed.
The text continued scrolling:
>>> ANALYSIS: The Ashveil Clan's cultivation methods are 87% inefficient. Their "ancient techniques" are bloatware running on corrupted legacy code. You're a developer from a world of logic. You know how to debug.
>>> QUEST UNLOCKED: [Survive the Night]
Objective: Repair 1 meridian pathway before dawn.
Reward: Life.
Failure: Deletion.
Kaelen tried to focus. Shen Yue's mind was analytical, literate in a world where knowledge was selectively hidden by Royals. She saw the "Extinct Language" in the book and realized it wasn't magic-it was a programming language.
He stared at his hand. Overlaid on reality, a HUD appeared:
OBJECT: Hand_L_Kaelen
Status: [Malnourished] [Fractured]
Qi Flow: BLOCKED (Syntax Error in Row 4)
"I can see the code," Kaelen whispered. A laugh bubbled up from his chest high-pitched and unhinged. Shen Yue was a girl in her past life, but she didn't have time to mourn her gender or her world. She had a clock ticking.
He flipped through the Grimoire. Most sections were locked, but one was glowing a deep, bloody red:
[EMERGENCY SKILL TREE - FORBIDDEN]
Necromancy Protocol (Stage 0)
Blood Manipulation (Stage 0)
Soul Devouring (Locked)
"The forbidden paths," Kaelen muttered. The memories of this world told him that those who used these powers were hunted by the Light Palace ,the top-tier royals who lived in seclusion.
Suddenly, footsteps splashed through the mud.
Kaelen shoved the Grimoire under his tunic and tried to stand. His legs buckled. A figure appeared at the top of the embankment, backlit by a torch. It was a young woman, her voice dripping with contempt.
"Oh. You're still alive."
It was his "sister" - not Shen Yue's sister, but Kaelen's. She looked disappointed.
"The Elders are summoning the waste-ranks," she snapped. "The Collectors need fresh bodies for tomorrow's dungeon run. Try not to die before you get there. It's a waste of paperwork."
She walked away, the torchlight fading into the gloom.
The Collectors. Kaelen's memories supplied the horror: they were the miners who raided dungeons for the King. They were human shields for the powerful warriors. For a "waste" like Kaelen, it was a death sentence.
The Grimoire pulsed against his chest.
>>> QUEST UPDATED: [Survive the Collectors]
>>> Estimated casualty rate: 78%
>>> What's it going to be, Administrator?
Kaelen looked up at the violet moon. He thought of Shen Yue's sister, the God-Binding ritual and the parallel world he had been ripped from.
"I'm a developer," he whispered, his eyes hardening with a cold, feminine ferocity trapped in a boy's broken frame. "And developers don't accept l errors. We debug them."
Kaelen watched the torchlight vanish, the silhouette of his "sister" swallowed by the gloom. He was alone in the mud, but he wasn't alone in his head.
"Wait," he croaked, a sudden, jagged memory piercing through Shen Yue's logic.
In the vision, the sister wasn't walking away. She was standing over Kaelen's dying body, holding a knife that glowed with the same violet hue as the second moon. She hadn't been disappointed he was alive - she was terrified.
A new prompt flickered in the dark, pulsing a deep, warning red:
[CRITICAL SYSTEM ERROR]
HIDDEN TRUTH DETECTED: You did not just occupy a corpse.
STATUS: You were murdered to provide a vessel.
QUERY: Would you like to know who performed the 'Hand of God' protocol?
**There might be confusion, the body is Kaelen while soul is of Shen Yue but part of Kaelen's soul still alive. Basically, Kaelen's body has two entities, two souls: I would clarify in later chapters**[1]
[1] **There might be confusion, the body is Kaelen while soul is of Shen Yue but part of Kaelen's soul still alive. Basically, Kaelen's body has two entities, two souls: I would clarify in later chapters**