Where am I?
Xu Jianlan whipped his head around, eyes snapping open like a startled cat. His vision blurred for a heartbeat, then sharpened… and holy—nothing looked remotely familiar. The walls, the furniture, the curtains—everything screamed aesthetic crime scene.
Curtains. Blinding white. Flat, lifeless, tragically sterile. Furniture. Minimalist to the point of cruelty. Every surface screamed, no taste allowed. The floor? White. The walls? White. Even the faintly off-putting smell of disinfectant in the air seemed like it had been personally designed to assault him.
Jianlan's gut clenched with dire urgency. He needed to leave. Now. Immediately. ASAP. Before he died of aesthetic trauma or existential horror.
Ugh. His head throbbed like a marching band had set up camp inside his skull. Pulsing. Relentless. Painful. Jianlan pressed both hands against it, willing the ache away.
Damn.
Wait.
These… aren't my hands.
He lowered his gaze and froze. The appendages staring back at him were… covered in little squiggles and lines, like someone had tried to decorate them with runes but gave up halfway. Bandages wrapped around the wrists and fingers, tight and purposeful.
No way.
No way.
Did he… did he transmigrate?
Excitement surged through his veins like electric fire. A strange, thrilling jitter. His heart pounded not just from the headache, not just from the sterile horror of the room—but from the tantalizing, impossible truth:
He wasn't himself. Not really. Not in the boring, old, Wi-Fi-deprived dorm way. He was someone else. Someone new. Someone… potentially rich. Potentially powerful. Potentially surrounded by servants who would never let him drink lukewarm tea.
Xu Jianlan's lips curved into a grin so wide it felt criminally inappropriate given his pounding head.
This was it. This was it. His chance to rewrite everything. To fix every mistake, to conquer every injustice, to live the life he had only ever dared to dream of between ramen cups and Wi-Fi outages.
Transmigration, you magnificent curse of the cosmos… let's see what kind of chaos I can cause!!!
Xu Jianlan whipped around in pure, unadulterated excitement, the kind of motion that made his bandaged, squiggled-up hands flap like frantic flags of destiny. He made delighted little wiggles at once.
He sprang to his feet, or, well, attempted to spring, considering his head was still pounding like a drumline of cosmic judgment, and padded softly to the door. Every step was measured, cautious, trembling with the thrill of this brand new, uncharted life.
Just as his fingers grazed the doorknob, the door swung open.
Heart. Stopped.
Right then and there, Xu Jianlan experienced an actual, honest-to-goodness cardiac terror. A pretty lady, perfectly coiffed, radiating some terrifying combination of authority and benevolence, stood in the doorway.
Pretty lady. Could this be… a tsundere maid, bristling with hidden affection and sharp retorts? Or perhaps a sweet sister archetype, the kind who bakes cookies while subtly judging all your life choices?
She smiled.
Not the "gentle, understanding smile" of someone who merely tolerates existence. No. This was the "Do-Not-BS-Me" smile. Razor-sharp yet dazzling, like sunlight filtered through diamond shards, and it cut right through Jianlan's panicked brain.
She spoke. Her voice was calm, smooth, and absolutely confident. "It's wonderful that you've woken up," she said. Just that. Simple. Ordinary words. But in that moment, they might as well have been a decree from the heavens themselves.
Xu Jianlan froze. His brain short-circuited. His hands flailed in the air as he tried (and failed) to process:
Who is she?Am I dead?Am I dreaming?Did she just read my soul?Do I have to be polite or die immediately?Is she a Hashira?
Two minutes later, yes, exactly two minutes, no exaggeration, Jianlan found himself sitting outside the hospital. Not inside. Not heroically commanding his new transmigrated life. Not orchestrating cosmic destiny. Sitting. On the curb. Alone. Waiting.
Uber ETA: who knew? The universe didn't care. The storm had passed. The pretty lady remained a terrifying, perfect memory. And Xu Jianlan? He was reduced to shivering, contemplative, utterly melodramatic chaos, wondering why his life sucked so much.
See. Jianlan had gone through many tough things in his life, very horrible things if he may, and nothing trumped having his exhilarating happiness at being reincarnated cut short by finding out that he was merely loopy from pain-killers at the hospital.
Turns out, getting hit by lightning isn't enough to get reincarnated.
Who knew?
Well, Jianlan knew now.
He pulled up his phone to call his brother, and complain about the absolute indignities of life.
Turns out, Xu Jianlan hadn't reincarnated at all.
No new world. No divine bloodline. No secret clan inheritance waiting just beyond the ugly white curtains. No Sharingan. He had not transmigrated, ascended, nor become the protagonist of anything except his own humiliation.
He was just… loopy on pain meds.
The realization settled over him slowly, like cold rain seeping through cheap shoes. The squiggles on his hands were medical markings. The bandages were, tragically, medical bandages. The pretty lady with the terrifying smile? A nurse. A very competent, very done-with-this nurse.
Now here he was, sitting outside the hospital, wrapped in borrowed disappointment, phone pressed to his ear as he launched into a rant with the passion of someone who had emotionally prepared for a second life.
"I'm telling you," Jianlan said bitterly, staring at the pavement, "for a moment I really thought this was it. New body. New start. No debt. No finals. No lukewarm tea. And then? Boom. Hospital. Again."
Silence.
He continued anyway, words spilling out in dramatic waves. "Do you know how ugly that room was? All white. Like the soul had been vacuumed out of it. If that was my afterlife, I would've demanded a refund."
More silence.
Jianlan frowned. Pulled the phone away. Looked at the screen.
It was 4:03 a.m.
Of the next day.
Oh.
He slowly brought the phone back to his ear, dread blooming. "...Hello?"
A pause. Then a familiar, half-dead voice replied, thick with sleep. "Mmm. Jianlan?"
He groaned, slumping forward, forehead nearly meeting his knees. "I hate my life."
There was a beat. A rustle. A yawn.
Then, his brother replied, sleepily and with devastating confidence, "Impossible. I'm in it."
Xu Jianlan hung up on him.
The night was quiet. The hospital lights hummed. Somewhere in the distance, an Uber approached, entirely uninterested in his suffering.
He tried dialing his sister next.
If his brother wound't listen to his melancholic dramatics about the world wanting to make him its bitch, then maybe his sister would curse at it for him. She was not only the one who would go up and ask for pickles for him when the McDonalds staff forgot it, but she was also the family's shining achievement badge. The early riser. The overachiever. The one who somehow managed to be only two years younger than him and yet kept appearing in the same classes like a recurring nightmare with better grades.
It was frankly insulting.
The call connected almost immediately. Of course it did. Productive people were always awake, always alert, always prepared to witness your downfall in high definition.
Jianlan launched into his rant with practiced misery. He described the storm, the lightning, the laptop, the tea, the white room, the nurse, the almost-transmigration, the crushing return to reality. Every injustice. Every betrayal. Every emotionally significant detail, because sibling code dude.
There was a pause on the other end.
Then she started laughing.
Not a polite chuckle. Not even a restrained snort. Full, unfiltered, hysterical laughter. The kind that suggested she might need to sit down, or possibly frame this moment and hang it on the wall. It was one that made his cheeks heat up in complete embarresmtn.
"I hope you get hit by lightning too, rat." He hissed into his phone. Like the opposite of a rat.
"Oh my god," she managed between gasps. "You know," she said, wiping metaphorical tears, "you should really become an author. Nobody else can come up with stupid BS like you can."
Jianlan clenched his jaw.
"So," she continued brightly, clearly enjoying herself far too much, "how'd the ground taste? Did you have a nice trip?"
That was it.
Without another word, Xu Jianlan hung up on her too.
He stared at his phone, now officially an instrument of betrayal, and exhaled slowly into the early morning air. Somewhere deep inside, a tiny, petty part of him vowed revenge. Or at least literary immortality.
Maybe she was right.
Maybe he would become an author.
And maybe, just maybe, he'd make sure his siblings were written into something truly humiliating.
Xu Jianlan groaned again, this time for entirely different reasons. He'd need a new laptop. Of course he would. The old one was soaked in tea, and honestly, even if it survived, it probably hated him now.
Thinking about the cost, the effort, the endless disappointment that was life itself, he let out a long, pitiful sigh, and sank even deeper into the puddle of failure already pooling around him on the pavement. The concrete was cold, unforgiving, and damp. He squinted at a dark, inky stain nearby and carefully scooted away from it. At least it wasn't puke.
Or so he thought.
A retching sound echoed somewhere off in the distance. Jianlan flinched, eyes darting, heart adding a few unnecessary beats to its symphony of terror. The universe, he realized, was still actively conspiring. Ew. Puke.
Then, salvation (or something like it) appeared. His cab rolled up smoothly, engine purring, lights glowing like a promise of escape. Jianlan immediately jumped in, relief washing over him.
The driver? Invisible. The separator glass was fogged up, giving the front seat a kind of mysterious haze, like a portal to another world, or maybe just a world where he couldn't be judged for sitting in soggy clothes and despair. Whatever. Fine. He didn't need to see anyone. Which was better for him because social anxiety, you know? Stranger danger too.
He pulled the seatbelt across himself, sighed, and sank into the seat. Comfy enough, for now. Silence enveloped him like a blanket, save for the hum of the engine and the faint, awkward retching somewhere behind the hospital walls.
As the car pulled away from the curb, Jianlan noticed another identical cab sitting at the entrance, idly waiting for its own passenger to hurry up.
Perfect symmetry. Perfectly pointless. Perfectly in line with the cruel, melodramatic rhythm of his life. Cool, he thought. It was the same color as his uber. Similar license plate too. At least the first few digits were, he couldn't read the rest.
And Xu Jianlan, wrapped in his seatbelt cocoon, leaned back and let the silence stretch, wondering if maybe tomorrow (or the next ten tomorrows) would bring fewer puddles, fewer accidents, and maybe, maybe, pretty please with a cherry on top, a laptop that didn't hate him.
Sigh.
The taxi kept sputtering.
Shuddering violently at random intervals, rattling in a way that made Xu Jianlan's nerves tingle with something between panic and awe.
Honestly? He was starting to get scared.
What if the car exploded? Or worse… what if the engine just gave up entirely? Would he be stranded here forever, suspended between hospital trauma and the cruel asphalt of reality? The thought made his stomach churn. His stomach also churned from other things too. He'd tried to make healthy instant noodles the other day, and put an egg into it. The thing was, the water wasn't that hot any more, so it was kind of goopy and slimy. He ate it anyways though, since a bowl of noodles is a bowl of noodles.
He kept catching glimpses of the driver's shadow through the foggy glass. Squiggly. Wrong. Distorted. Like some poorly drawn villain in a webcomic. Poor guy, must be having a tough day. Wow, he was really hard of a worker. Up at 4 am in the morning! Dedication indeed. What a great guy.
BAM.
A wet handprint appeared on the foggy glass. It kind of looked like what you'd see in a haunted hospital. Or a haunted church. Or a haunted orphanage. A haunted anything, really.
Maybe the poor driver was frustrated. Maybe he had a bad day and wanted Jianlan to keep the noise down. Fair enough. He could respect that.
Jianlan turned back to look out the window, blinking rapidly.
He sniffed.
The air was a bit stinky. Bit misty too.
He wheeled open the window. It was a bit jammed, but when he tried, it still opened.
Oof. The seatbelt was digging into him. He fumbled and loosened it slightly, grateful for even this small victory.
Then… ew.
A bug scuttled across the floor.
He stepped on it. Hard. One less problem in a taxi already teetering on the edge of chaos.
This car. Oh, this car. Three stars at best. Maybe two if he wanted to be honest. Maybe one if he wanted to be cruel. Too shy to truly punish it, he settled for mental three stars, silent judgment hanging over the driver like an invisible cloud of disapproval. At least the guy wasn't creepy. Small mercies.
Poor guy, maybe that was why he was out at 4 am, making money, if his car was this bad. At least he had a car.
Finally, the cityscape emerged through the rain-streaked window. His building. Salvation. Home.
He leapt out as soon as the taxi stopped, adrenaline and relief colliding in a spectacular mess of limbs.
"Thanks, dude! Have a great day!" he called, voice loud, cheerful, absurdly bright for someone who had just survived the apocalypse-on-wheels.
And he left, whistling.
Behind him, through the foggy glass, the taxi driver slumped against the steering wheel. Completely devastated. Not from Jianlan's behavior. Not from the storm. Not even from the bug massacre.
No. Probably from the crushing weight of a life spent driving terrible taxis for ungrateful, melodramatic passengers.
And Jianlan didn't look back. He had more pressing matters: lukewarm tea, new laptops, and the ongoing existential question of why his life was so thoroughly him.