He woke on stone.
Not clean stone, not the cool, polished kind in university hallways. This stone was rough and uneven, with grit pressed into his cheek and a smell like damp straw that had been sweated through and never properly dried.
Yuan He opened his eyes and saw darkness, broken by thin slats of gray light. For a moment, his brain supplied the wrong image: the basement corridor, the white-blue flare, the way the world had gone weightless. He tried to inhale and felt air enter his lungs with a sting that made him cough.
The cough turned into a fit. Something metallic rose in his throat. He spat reflexively and saw a dark smear on the floor.
Blood.
He blinked at it, not yet afraid, because fear required a stable frame of reference and he didn't have one.
His ears caught other sounds: a man's snore, a whispered argument, the scrape of cloth, the distant clack of something wooden against stone. Someone groaned in their sleep, then muttered words he did not recognize.
Language, his mind noted, and then revised itself mid-thought.
No. Language he did recognize. The words were strange, but he understood them anyway, as if comprehension had been poured directly into his skull.
He tried to sit up. His arms trembled. His ribs ached as if he'd taken a blow. The motion made his stomach roll.
He froze.
That nausea was not from smoke or concussion. It was deeper, like his body was insisting it had lived a different night than his mind remembered.
He pressed his fingers to his temple.
There were two sets of memories.
One was his own: the lecture hall, the slides, the warning banners, the taste of fear and ozone, the interlock cabinet open under his shaking hands. His adviser shouting. The isolation shutter dropping, inch by inch, and the moment he knew he had traded his life for other people's.
The other memories were not his, but they were inside him with the weight of truth. A young man's exhaustion. Cold mornings. Hunger that never fully went away. A name whispered in contempt. An outer sect dormitory that smelled like mildew and cheap incense.
Yuan He.
He almost laughed at that, because it was too neat. His own name had followed him.
Then he remembered something with a lurch.
On Earth, he had been Yuan He the person. Here, he was Yuan He the disciple, and the second Yuan He was not a PhD candidate. He was a bullied nobody in a world that did not care about credentials.
He forced himself to breathe slowly. In through the nose. Out through the mouth.
The dormitory came into focus.
It was a long, low room with a cracked stone floor and wooden bunks pressed against the walls like an afterthought. Bedding was thin and mismatched. Some had blankets, some had only straw stuffed into cloth sacks. A faint haze hung in the air from a smoldering brazier in the corner, more for keeping insects away than for warmth.
A half-dozen bodies lay in various states of sleep and discomfort.
He did not recognize their faces, and at the same time he did. The other memories labeled them for him in impressions rather than names: the one who stole other people's sandals, the one who cried quietly at night, the one who pretended not to see anything.
He touched his own face. His jaw was slimmer than he remembered. His hands were calloused in the wrong places. His nails had dirt under them.
He swallowed and tasted stale water.
This is real, he told himself. It is happening. Panic will not change the variables.
The thought steadied him, because it sounded like the version of him who had lived in labs and deadlines. Then another thought followed, colder.
I am dead.
He waited for grief to hit like a wave. It didn't. Not yet. His body was too busy negotiating survival. His mind was too busy taking inventory.
He closed his eyes and let the two sets of memories settle.
On Earth, he had been on the edge of a career. He had been exhausted, arrogant in the way only people in their twenties could be, and stubborn enough to think he could outrun the consequences of one skipped calibration suite.
Here, the other Yuan He had been… a cheap target.
Outer sect disciples in Azure Cloud Sect were not disciples in the heroic sense. They were bodies. They were labor. They were the low rung of a ladder everyone else stepped on.
He knew this because the second Yuan He had lived it. But it was not only memory. It was information, as if the world came with a manual everyone pretended not to read.
Azure Cloud Sect. Mid-tier. Orthodox. Merit bureaucracy. Peaks and halls and rules so thick they could choke a person without ever touching their throat.
He opened his eyes again and stared at the slats of light.
If I'm here, I can't go back, he thought. The conclusion was simple, and it landed without drama.
There was a rawness under it, though. A thread that would turn into grief later, when he had the luxury to be alone.
He wiped the blood on his palm onto his trousers, then regretted it because the cloth was already thin and the stain would draw attention.
Attention gets you hurt here, the other memories reminded him.
He eased himself upright, careful of his ribs. He glanced around for his belongings.
There was a small bundle near the edge of his bunk: a cloth pouch with a few copper coins, a chipped wooden bowl, a pair of sandals with the straps worn to the point of betrayal. Nothing else. No phone, no ID, no laptop, no proof that he had ever been anyone.
The dorm door creaked.
A young man stepped in, shoulders hunched against the morning chill, carrying a bucket that sloshed. He paused when he saw Yuan He sitting up.
His eyes flicked, quick and cautious, like a small animal deciding whether a movement meant danger.
"You're awake," he said.
Yuan He searched the other memories for a name and found none, only a vague label: someone who kept his head down. Someone who would not help if it cost him.
"I'm awake," Yuan He answered, and his voice came out rougher than he expected.
The young man set the bucket down. "Water. Don't waste it."
Then he hesitated, as if the next sentence was optional.
"They're posting tasks soon," he added. "If you miss the board, you'll get the worst one."
Yuan He nodded. He watched the young man's eyes slide away, watched the conversation end without any formal end.
Outside, the air bit him. The outer sect yard was a stretch of worn stone and packed earth, enclosed by low buildings and a few leafless trees that had been pruned back too hard. Beyond, in the distance, peaks rose into clouds like indifferent gods.
Somewhere up there, the real disciples lived.
Down here, people lined up in front of a wooden board nailed to a post. Names and tasks were written in ink that looked too neat for this place. A steward stood nearby, hands tucked into sleeves, watching as if the crowd were a nuisance he had been assigned to tolerate.
Yuan He joined the back of the line.
He listened.
Not to gossip, but to data.
"Merit's tight this month," someone muttered. "Merit Hall cut rations again."
"They say it's because the Beast Peak needed more feed," someone else replied. "Always something."
"Who cares?" a third voice sneered. "If you're worth anything, you can earn merit. If you're trash, you starve."
The last line was said loudly enough that it was not just a comment. It was a declaration.
There was laughter, thin and mean. A few people glanced toward Yuan He without turning their heads fully, like predators pretending they weren't watching.
He recognized the pattern. The dorm hierarchy extended into daylight.
When the steward called his name, it did not sound like "Yuan He" so much as "problem."
"Yuan He," the steward said, eyes sliding over him. "Herb garden. Alchemy support. Sorting and watering."
Yuan He stepped forward. "How many points?"
The steward's lips twitched, amused by the audacity of the question. "If you do it right, two merit points. If you do it wrong, you do it again for free."
Yuan He nodded. He did not argue. The other Yuan He would have argued and gotten punished for it. This Yuan He was learning faster.
He took the wooden token the steward tossed him. It had a simple mark on it and smelled faintly of ink and sweat.
Two merit points.
On Earth, two was a rounding error. Here, it was food, it was paper, it was time.
He turned away from the board, token warm in his palm, and felt the first true pressure of this new life settle on his shoulders.
In the lab, he had lived under deadlines and expectations. Here, he lived under a simpler law.
Earn, or be eaten.
He looked up at the distant peaks again.
If the world ran on merit, then merit points was a kind of energy. It flowed through channels. It could be stored. It could be stolen. It could be gated by people who claimed the gates were fair.
He had spent years thinking about confinement, about stability, about making something violent and chaotic behave inside constraints.
Maybe that was the point, he thought, and a strange calm entered him.
Maybe I'm still doing the same work.
Just with a different reactor.
He closed his hand around the task token and started walking toward the herb gardens, ribs aching, blood drying at the corner of his mouth, and a plan beginning as a quiet shape in the back of his mind.
Not a plan to win.
Not yet.
A plan to stop dying slowly.