Lin Mei opened her eyes and immediately regretted it.
The world smelled of wet iron and pine needles. Her tongue tasted copper—actual blood, not the faint metallic memory of a paper cut. Her throat burned like she'd swallowed hot gravel. Somewhere very close, a crow made a sound that was half scream, half laughter.
She tried to sit up.
Her arms didn't listen the way arms should. They were too thin, wrapped in torn silk the color of old moonlight. When she finally managed to prop herself on one elbow, the world tilted and a long strand of ink-black hair fell across her face like a curtain she hadn't ordered.
This wasn't her apartment.
No IKEA bookshelf crammed with dog-eared paperbacks.
No half-dead pothos plant she kept forgetting to water.
No distant traffic hum from the ring road.
Instead: moss-slick boulders, a narrow dirt path disappearing into fog, and the unmistakable reek of a fresh corpse about ten meters away.
The body wore patched leather armor and still clutched a chipped sabre. Flies were already holding a committee meeting on the open eyes.
Lin Mei whispered, very carefully, "What the actual fuck."
Her voice came out higher than expected. Younger. Softer. The kind of voice that gets dismissed in meetings.
She looked down at her hands again. Small. Callused in places that didn't make sense for a thirty-one-year-old who spent most days shelving returns and arguing with the library's ancient catalog software. There was a thin silver bracelet on her left wrist she had never owned, and on the middle finger of her right hand—
—a jade hairpin.
It was the color of frozen river water, carved with tiny thorn-like vines that seemed to move when she blinked. The moment her gaze settled on it, the hairpin warmed against her skin.
Then it spoke.
Not with sound. With pressure. With flashes behind her eyes like someone flicking through an old photo album at machine-gun speed.
A girl—no, she—sixteen, maybe seventeen—kneeling in a marble hall while white-robed elders read a verdict.
Exile.
Traitor's blood.
No return until the shame is burned clean.
The memory ended as abruptly as it began. Lin Mei sucked in air through her teeth.
"Okay. Transmigration. Got it. Classic. Very classic." She laughed once—short, shaky. "At least give me a truck, universe. Or a heroic last stand. Not… library closure anxiety and then poof, murder woods."
She touched the hairpin again, half expecting it to bite.
It didn't.
Instead another memory slid into her skull, gentler this time. Muscle memory, not event memory.
Her right hand moved before her brain caught up—fingers curling, wrist turning in a perfect drawing arc. There was no sword in her grip, but the motion felt correct, like she'd done it ten thousand times. The phantom blade would have ended exactly at throat height.
Lin Mei stared at her own hand like it belonged to someone else.
"Great. I'm possessed by a discount sword saint and I still don't have a weapon."
A twig snapped behind her.
She spun—too fast, too gracefully—and nearly fell over her own borrowed feet.
A girl stood at the edge of the clearing.
Sixteen, maybe. Short-cropped ash-brown hair, travel-stained cloak, a battered wooden box slung across her back like a turtle shell. In her right hand: a small herb-gathering sickle. In her left: nothing, but her fingers twitched like she was ready to throw something anyway.
The girl looked at the corpse. Then at Lin Mei. Then back at the corpse.
"You kill him?" she asked. Accent soft, rural. Wary.
Lin Mei raised both hands, palms out. International sign for please don't stab me.
"No. Found him like this. I just woke up here."
The girl tilted her head. Studied Lin Mei's torn noble robes, the blood already drying at the corner of her mouth, the hairpin that was starting to glow very faintly.
"You look like someone the Black Lotus Sect would pay to see dead," she said matter-of-factly.
"I don't even know what the Black Lotus Sect is."
A long pause.
Then the girl snorted—small, almost fond.
"Congratulations. You're officially more fucked than I am." She took one step closer, boots silent on the moss. "Name's Sùyīn. Traveling healer. Sort of. You got a name, noble girl who wakes up in murder forests with no sword?"
Lin Mei opened her mouth to say Lin Mei, hesitated, then remembered the flashes from the hairpin.
The name that belonged to this body felt heavy. Official. Poisonous.
"Call me… Mei," she said finally. "Just Mei."
Sùyīn considered that. Then nodded once, like she'd passed some private test.
"Alright, Just-Mei. You're bleeding from the scalp and you've got qi deviation written all over your meridians. If you don't want to die before sunset, sit down and let me look at you."
She patted a flat boulder like it was a doctor's examination table.
Lin Mei stared.
This was it, then.
No tutorial.
No status window.
No kindly old master with a white beard.
Just a sharp-eyed runaway healer, a talking murder-hairpin, and a frontier forest that clearly wanted her dead before breakfast.
She sat.
The jade hairpin pulsed once—warm, almost approving.
Somewhere deep inside her new ribcage, something that wasn't quite hers anymore whispered:
Begin.