One year until graduation, and Yan Ye couldn't breathe.
Not metaphorically. His lungs had decided, somewhere between the third hour of ceiling-staring and the cold sweat soaking through his sheets, that oxygen was optional.
His stomach had knotted itself into something small and vicious. His throat locked. Each breath became a manual thing. Inhale. Exhale. Like if he forgot for even a second, he'd just stop.
I don't want this.
The thought had teeth.
I don't want to be a lawyer. I don't want to sit in an office for forty years pretending I care about contract disputes. I don't want to see Mom's face when I tell her.
She'd already told everyone. Every dinner, every gathering, every phone call with relatives he barely remembered. "My son, the lawyer." Said with that glow in her eyes like she'd already framed the diploma.
That pride was a tattoo he never asked for.
Can I just leave? Passport. One-way ticket. Some country with beaches and no expectations.
The faces killed it before it could breathe. Dad's quiet disappointment. Mom pretending to understand while her eyes went glassy.
No. Can't do that to them.
His heart slammed against his ribs. Not the normal kind of fast. The kind that hurt. The kind that made him press his palm flat against his chest to make sure the muscle was still working.
Thump. Thump. Thumpthumpthumpthump—
The ceiling started spinning. Slow at first, then faster. The walls blurred. His vision tunneled into a single shrinking point.
I'm going to pass out. I'm actually going to—
The thought didn't finish.
Everything just... stopped.
What the fuck?
He blinked. Couldn't see anything. The world felt sideways.
Why am I on the floor?
Pathetic. Twenty-one years old and he'd rolled off the bed mid-panic attack. Nice one, Yan Ye. Real smooth.
At least nothing hurt.
Wait.
He didn't even feel himself fall.
The disorientation hit all at once. The familiar ache of his back against his mattress? Gone. Instead: hardness. Cold. And... damp? A sour, thick smell clogged his nostrils. Rotten. Choking. Like something had died, rotted in a wet corner, and then something else had died on top of it.
And his body felt wrong. Not sore-wrong or sick-wrong. Heavy-wrong. Like someone had poured concrete into his bones while he was unconscious.
Did the ceiling collapse on me? Did I black out and shit myself?
He tried to inhale deeper and immediately regretted it. The smell punched straight down into his lungs.
Pitch black. Couldn't see a damn thing.
If this is some elaborate prank involving actual sewage, I'm going to murder someone. Or die trying. Jail might honestly solve half my problems.
Okay. Get up. Simple. One push.
Thud.
"Ah, fuck!"
His muscles gave way before he could even straighten his arms. Shoulder hit the floor. Knee followed. That hard, cold surface was right there to remind him he was back to square one.
What the hell? Why do I weigh a ton?
Again. Focus. One, two, three—
He pushed harder, straining. Arms trembling. Something in his chest wheezing like a broken accordion.
He made it upright. Barely. His breath came in ragged gasps, lungs burning like he'd sprinted a kilometer instead of performing the basic human function of sitting up.
Standing was worse. The darkness made the vertigo ten times more vicious. He spread his arms and legs wide, swaying like a tripod made of jelly, half-certain the floorboards were going to crack under whatever ungodly weight his body had become.
"Now I just need to find the light and figure out what the hell is—"
A thin line of brightness. To his left. Window.
He moved toward it.
The floor was a minefield. Bags. Clothes. His feet couldn't take two steps without finding something new. Fabric giving way under his weight. Plastic bags crunching. One with something metallic inside that went crunch and stopped being metallic.
Empty soda can. Probably.
He froze.
If there was one, there were more. Step on one wrong, slice his foot open, end up in the ER. That'd be the cherry on top.
New strategy. Mummy mode.
Arms straight out. Hands groping air. Feet shuffling millimeter by millimeter.
Didn't help.
Bam.
"FUCK! My pinky toe!"
Pain detonated up his leg. Sharp. Bright. The kind that makes eyes water instantly.
"Since when is there furniture here?!"
He grabbed his foot, hopping uselessly in place. Tears blurred his vision even in the dark.
"Son of a bitch. Perfect. Just perfect. Now I get to limp around for the rest of the day. Amazing. Really top-tier luck."
Still hopping, still cursing, he kept going toward the window. One thought wormed through the pain: why so much junk? His dorm was messy, sure. But this was hoarder-level. Had someone broken in and redecorated with trash?
No. If they'd robbed him, things would be gone. Not redistributed.
Window first.
Fingers found wall. Then cords. He yanked.
Sunlight punched through the glass.
His eyes slammed shut.
"Shit—"
White burned through his eyelids. He stood there, blinking, hand up like a visor, cracking his eyes open bit by bit.
And his brain stopped.
Pain? Gone. Smell? Gone. Panic? Gone.
Because outside that window—
"Wow..."
The word slipped out on its own.
Green. Not park green or campus-lawn green. Endless green. Trees the size of apartment buildings, trunks so thick he couldn't see around them, canopies vanishing into clouds. The air beyond the glass looked clean in a way that felt impossible.
"What a beautiful— wait. Wait wait wait."
Something shot between two trunks. Fast. Sleek. Metallic. Another followed. Then three more.
Flying.
"Are those... flying cars?"
His gaze dropped lower.
On what looked like a moss-covered road, someone was riding a lion. Not a metaphor. A golden-furred lion the size of a truck, muscles rolling under a mane that shimmered like it had its own light source. The rider sat casually. No saddle. Like it was just another morning commute.
No one on the street was running. No screaming. No chaos.
"My God... this isn't my dorm."
The words came out thin. Hollow.
"Where am I? Am I going crazy?"
The panic that returned wasn't the same as before. Not the slow, grinding anxiety about law school and disappointed parents. This was immediate. Present. The kind that tastes like metal.
Can't be a dream. The pain in my foot was too sharp. The smell was too real. Dreams don't do weight like this.
Weight.
He looked down.
And the ground fell out from under the last shred of normal.
Hands that weren't his. Swollen. Pale. Fingers like overstuffed sausages. A stomach that wasn't just soft, it was a shelf. A vast, quivering continent of flesh hanging over grey sweatpants stretched to their absolute limit. He couldn't see his own feet. Just rolls. Layers. A landscape of body extending into the distance.
"I'm..."
He swallowed.
"I'm in someone else's body."
The words hung in the air, absurd and undeniable.
Close to 200 kilos. At least 180 centimeters tall, which is the only reason this body can walk at all.
His breathing picked up again. Faster.
Okay. Okay. Think.
Head injury?
Coma?
Maybe he'd blacked out and this was some hyper-real hallucination. A subconscious fever dream. The brain could fabricate entire worlds, right? He'd read that somewhere. Or maybe it was a Reddit post. Not exactly peer-reviewed.
Or I got wasted and—no. I had instant noodles and watched YouTube videos about passive income streams last night. That's not a blackout recipe.
Going insane?
Unlikely. If his brain were broken, he probably wouldn't be analyzing the situation this clearly.
Not that he understood how brains worked. At all.
Which left one option.
The stupid one.
The one born from years of reading trash webnovels during the classes he should've been paying attention in.
His breath caught.
No way.
Am I... did I...
He looked at the trees. The flying cars. The lion.
Don't be an idiot, Yan Ye. Don't be a fucking idiot.
But what if?
What if it was exactly like those stories?
He licked his dry lips. His heart hammered against ribs that didn't belong to him.
"System?" he whispered.
He felt stupid the moment the word left his mouth.
For a second, nothing happened. The apartment stayed silent. The junk stayed on the floor. The world outside the window kept being impossible.
Then—
A chime. Clear. Crisp. Not from outside.
From inside his skull.
[DING!]
A pale blue light flickered at the edge of his vision. Semi-transparent. Like a hologram that hadn't decided whether to fully exist.
— Initializing System...— Loading User Profile...— Synchronizing memories...— Memory Recovery initiated.
The flood hit without warning.
Not his memories. Someone else's.
Images. Names. Places. An entire life compressed into a torrent that slammed into him so hard he staggered back and caught himself against the wall.
The body's original owner.
Yán Yè.
Same name. Same black hair. That was where the similarities ended.
The memories came like a film on fast-forward. Facts without feeling. Events stripped of emotion. A planet called Blue Star. Almost identical to Earth once, until it expanded twenty-three times its size four hundred and eighty-six years ago. Energy converted to matter. Continents ripped apart. Dungeons appeared. Monsters poured out. And the Global Awakening System manifested for every intelligent being on the planet.
Classes. Levels. Skills. A path of evolution that could turn a normal human into something extraordinary.
He saw the boy's parents. Brief flashes. Smiling faces in photographs that existed only as memories now. Dead in a dungeon break when the boy was twelve. He saw the move to a new city. The grandmother who smelled like jasmine tea and spoke in patient sentences. The food. So much food, eaten not for hunger but to fill something that couldn't be filled. The school where he was invisible except when test scores were posted. The grandmother's face in a hospital bed. The funeral. Three days without sleep.
A heart that finally quit.
Dead at seventeen. A hundred and eighty kilos of grief in a school uniform.
The memories were still syncing, incomplete, but Yan Ye had seen enough.
He slid down the wall and sat on the floor among the trash bags and empty cans.
This is real.
Or I'm in a coma and my brain is doing the most elaborate hallucination in medical history.
He stared at the pale blue interface still hovering in front of him. A row of tabs stretched across the top.
Main Panel / Quests / ??? / ??? / ??? / ...
The question marks pulsed faintly. The dots at the end suggested more beyond them.
He didn't tap anything yet.
Because one thing was already clear from the memories he'd absorbed. The Global Awakening System, the one every person on this planet received, was simple. A basic semi-transparent interface. Attributes. Skills. Proficiency. That's it. No tabs. No sections. No hidden question marks. No "Quests."
Whatever was floating in front of him right now was something else entirely.
His foot still throbbed from the furniture. The smell of the apartment hadn't gotten any better. The body he was sitting in wheezed just from the effort of existing.
And somewhere between the panic and the absurdity, a thought settled in that he couldn't shake.
I don't know if this is real. I don't know if I'm awake, or dreaming, or dying in a hospital bed on Earth right now.
But if this system is different from what everyone else has...
Then whatever the hell is happening to me isn't random.