The quarterly report was due at 9:00 AM. That was the last thought Lin Feng had before the darkness took him.
He remembered the specific texture of the office carpet—synthetic, dusty, smelling of stale coffee and ozone. He remembered the crushing pressure in his chest, like a hydraulic press squeezing his ribs together. He remembered the flickering fluorescent light above his cubicle, buzzing like a dying insect.
Cardiac arrest, his analyst brain had supplied helpfully as he hit the floor. Stress-induced. Probability of survival: Low.
Then, there was nothing. No tunnel of light. No pearly gates. Just a silence so absolute it felt heavy.
He expected the silence to last forever.
Instead, it was broken by the sound of wind.
Not the gentle hum of the office HVAC system, but a feral, screaming gale that tore through the silence like a knife through canvas.
Lin Feng tried to inhale. The air that rushed into his lungs wasn't the lukewarm, recycled oxygen of the city. It was a solid block of ice, sharp with the scent of pine needles and rotting wood. It burned his throat, shocked his alveoli, and kick-started a heart that felt terrifyingly weak.
His eyes snapped open.
He was not in a hospital.
He was lying face-down in a snowdrift. Above him, the sky was a bruised, hematoma purple, the sun sinking behind jagged, unfamiliar peaks that looked like the teeth of a dragon.
"What..."
The word came out as a rasping croak. He tried to push himself up, but his arms trembled and collapsed. They were not his arms.
He stared at the hands clutching the frozen dirt. They were rough, calloused, the skin cracked and bleeding from chilblains. Dirt was impacted deep under the jagged nails. These were the hands of a laborer, a man who clawed his living from the earth. Not the soft, pale hands of a data analyst who typed for twelve hours a day.
Hallucination? Lin Feng thought, his mind sluggish. Dying neuron firing? Is this the brain's final coping mechanism?
He managed to roll onto his back. The movement sent a spike of agony through his ribs. He was wearing rags—layers of coarse hemp stuffed with dry straw. The straw was wet now, freezing into a stiff, icy shell against his skin.
A bundle of firewood lay scattered next to him in the snow. A rusted iron hatchet, the handle wrapped in greasy leather, was half-buried nearby.
The data presented itself cold and hard:
He was freezing to death.
He was in a body that was not his own.
He was alone.
"Transmigration," he whispered. The word felt ridiculous on his frozen tongue. He had read the web novels, back on the subway commutes when he was too tired to think. But those stories were power fantasies. The protagonist woke up in a golden bed, or with a magical ring, or surrounded by beautiful women.
Lin Feng looked down at his legs. One boot was missing. His foot was blue.
This isn't a fantasy, he realized with a jolt of grim clarity. This is a disposal.
He had worked himself to death in one life, only to wake up in the dying moments of another. The cosmic joke was so cruel he almost laughed, but he didn't have the breath for it.
The cold was winning. It started in his extremities, a numbness that crept inward like a rising tide. Then came the sleepiness. The seductive, warm promise that if he just closed his eyes, the pain would stop.
So this is it. Two deaths in one day. That has to be a record.
His vision began to tunnel. The purple sky faded to grey, then to black.
As the darkness swallowed him, a sensation bloomed in the center of his chest. It wasn't physical. It was... emotional?
A wave of profound, crushing loneliness washed over him—but it wasn't his loneliness. It felt like an echo from a vast distance.
...where are you...
A voice? No, not a voice. A feeling. A desperate, silent scream.
In the fading grey of his vision, a silhouette flickered. A woman. She stood in the snow, though she left no footprints. She wore robes of white silk that rippled in a wind he couldn't feel. Her face was a blur, obscured by a mist, but he could feel her gaze. It was heavy with a sorrow that transcended time.
She reached a hand out toward him.
Lin Feng's dying mind grasped at the image. An angel? A reaper?
"Take me," he murmured. "I'm tired."
The figure seemed to recoil, her hand trembling. She didn't come closer. She couldn't.
The connection snapped. The woman vanished.
Lin Feng's heart stopped.
The silence returned.
And then, the universe rebooted.
[ SYSTEM DETECTED ]
The text seared itself across his vision, glowing a harsh, neon blue that had no business existing in this ancient, frozen forest. It looked like a command-line interface from the 1990s.
CRITICAL ERROR: HOST BIOLOGY FAILING. SUBJECT: LIN FENG (ID_UNDEFINED). STATUS: CLINICAL DEATH.
Lin Feng's consciousness hovered in the void, reading the text with the detached curiosity of a ghost. A status screen? Now?
SEARCHING FOR BACKUP POWER... ERROR: CALORIC RESERVES AT 0%. ERROR: GLUCOSE LEVELS CRITICAL. SCANNING ENVIRONMENT...
A pause. The text blinked rapidly.
ANOMALY DETECTED: HIGH CONCENTRATION OF UNKNOWN ATMOSPHERIC RADIATION. ANALYSIS: COMPATIBLE WITH BIO-ENERGY CONVERSION PROTOCOLS. INITIATING EMERGENCY ABSORPTION.
Atmospheric radiation? Lin Feng thought. Great. I'm in a post-apocalyptic exclusion zone.
ZRRRT.
A sensation like a defibrillator paddle slammed into his chest.
It wasn't electricity. It was heat. Pure, liquid heat. It poured into the top of his head, rushed down his spine, and exploded in his gut.
PROTOCOL: CELLULAR REBOOT. HEART: RESTARTED. TEMPERATURE: STABILIZING. PAIN RECEPTORS: DAMPENED.
THUMP.
His heart kicked against his ribs with the violence of a trapped bird.
Lin Feng gasped, his eyes flying open. The world rushed back in 4K clarity. The snow was brighter. The wind was louder. The numbness in his limbs was replaced by the excruciating pins-and-needles of rapid thawing.
He curled into a ball, groaning as the blood forced its way back into frozen capillaries. It felt like being set on fire.
A new window popped up, hovering in the air about two feet from his face. It was translucent, tracking his eye movements.
WELCOME, USER 001. SYSTEM INITIALIZED: VERSION 1.0 (ALPHA). CURRENT OBJECTIVE: SURVIVE. REWARD: VITALITY +0.1.
Lin Feng lay shivering in the snow, staring at the blue light. He reached out a trembling hand to touch it, but his fingers passed through the hologram.
"Hallucination," he wheezed, his voice stronger now. "Hypothermia-induced psychosis. The brain creates a... a UI... to make sense of the trauma."
He clung to that explanation. He was a man of logic, of spreadsheets and quarterly goals. Magic didn't exist. Systems didn't exist. But delusions? Delusions were scientifically documented.
If I'm going to hallucinate, he thought, gritting his teeth and forcing his frozen legs to move, I might as well hallucinate something helpful.
WARNING: CORE TEMPERATURE STILL CRITICAL. ADVISORY: SEEK SHELTER IMMEDIATELY. COUNTDOWN TO SYSTEM SHUTDOWN: 14 MINUTES.
"Fourteen minutes," Lin Feng muttered. "Deadline established."
He grabbed the rusted hatchet. The handle was ice-cold, but his grip was surprisingly firm. The "Cellular Reboot" had given him just enough ATP to move his muscles.
He stood up. The world spun, then steadied.
He looked down the mountain path. Faintly, through the swirling snow, he could see the dull glow of firelight from a cluster of huts in the valley below.
He didn't know this was the Realm of the Ten Thousand Swords. He didn't know the "Atmospheric Radiation" was the Spiritual Qi of Heaven and Earth. He didn't know the woman in his vision was the Empress of the Nine Provinces, currently waking up in her palace with tears she couldn't explain.
He just knew he had fourteen minutes to get to a fire, or he would miss his deadline.
And Lin Feng never missed a deadline.
He took a step.
MOVEMENT DETECTED. GAIT ANALYSIS: INEFFICIENT. OPTIMIZING MOTOR FUNCTION...
He took another step. It was smoother. The tremor in his knee vanished.
Lin Feng laughed, a dry, jagged sound in the empty forest. "Fine. Let's play the game."
He began to walk into the dark, dragging his second life behind him.