Prologue
Consciousness returned in a lurch. I opened my eyes and saw not the familiar gray ceiling of my rented apartment.
Stone.
Rough, dark stone, granite-like, right in front of my face — and not just in front of it. I was sitting on it.
What the…
I tried to stand. Nothing. Tried to jerk my arm. Silence. Move a leg? Emptiness. I was paralyzed.
Panic flared in my chest. What had happened while I was sleeping? Did the ceiling cave in? Was I kidnapped? Why the hell was I paralyzed, and why was I not in a hospital but in some kind of… cave?
I tried to calm myself, to take a deep breath — and achieved the opposite. My breathing obeyed. My body, however…
I couldn't FEEL it.
And no, it wasn't simply that I couldn't control it. It felt as though only my head remained, floating in the dark, while everything else — arms, legs, torso — had simply ceased to exist.
But… no. There was one sensation.
Something long and fur-covered twitched behind my back.
A tail.
Hold on. What the hell kind of tail?
I was an ordinary person. I'd trained as a mechanic, worked at a garage, helped my aging mother. I had never had a tail, and there was no reason I ever should.
But I felt it. And unlike my arms and legs, I could move it.
No, no, no… This is a dream. Of course — just a stupid, realistic dream. I'd dreamed of flying before, even flapped wings in my sleep. This is the same thing. I just need to wake up and it'll all be over. Yes, definitely…
I instinctively twitched my ear, trying to listen.
And the sound… shifted. I felt it distinctly — the ear at the top of my head rotating, swiveling toward a distant rumble.
An ear. Also not mine. One hell of a crazy dream.
Alright. I needed to calm down.
Pull yourself together…
What… what the hell is my name?
Memory stirred — and delivered a flash. An image, and then a name.
Tai Lung.
What? No. Nonsense. That wasn't my name. I was… I…
My memories of my past life — the mechanic, the apartment, my mother — suddenly dimmed, grew distant. But the name "Tai Lung" burned bright, hot, and heavy. And with it came a wave of foreign emotions flooding my mind: rage scorching like fire, icy resentment, and a despair so deep and black it knocked the breath out of me for a moment.
These were not my feelings. But they were inside me.
Tai Lung… That was a character from a children's cartoon. The one where the hero was a huge fat panda who became the Dragon Warrior…
The moment that thought took shape, a foreign pride inside me roared. *A stupid fat panda — the Dragon Warrior?!* Even acknowledging it felt like a personal insult. Like a slap across the face.
No, no, no — this can't be real. I just went to sleep in my own home. I couldn't have ended up inside the body of… the villain from a cartoon I watched as a kid. I couldn't have.
Could I?
Suddenly, something cracked. Chains rattled. The groan of heavy machinery filled the air.
"Well now, pussycat — looks like you're not in a great mood today either."
A rough male voice. I flinched instinctively.
Mustering everything I had, I managed to lift my head slightly — and my eyes focused on…
An enormous, muscular man with an elongated snout and an actual, honest-to-god horn. A rhinoceros man.
The sheer wrongness of what I was seeing yanked me out of my spiral, out of my desperate attempt to figure out who I even was. In his right hand the stranger held a torch burning with a strange, steady red flame, and in his left — a heavy leather bag.
I twitched my ear again, and the world exploded with sound. My hearing had amplified to a staggering degree: I could hear the creak of mechanisms somewhere above, the rustle of his armor, and a quiet, sinister metallic clinking coming from inside the bag. Goosebumps crawled across my skin.
"Still not talking, huh?" the rhino said with a smirk. He wore some kind of armored skirt and shoulder guards. He set the torch in a wall bracket and started toward me.
*A jumped-up weakling. No warrior at all…* The contemptuous thought drifted through my head. It belonged to me — and to someone else at the same time.
"That's fine. Keep quiet. I'll drag a sound out of that throat of yours eventually, Tai Lung." He chuckled nastily and circled around behind me. "Your little Chi works beautifully, I'll give it that. You've actually recovered. And I wasn't even holding back yesterday…"
He set the bag down and drew something out of it.
"Well then. All the worse for you."
And then hell began.
I won't describe it in detail. My human mind simply could not withstand it. But I felt it.
I felt something sharp — like daggers — driving into muscle, sending it into convulsing agony. I felt red-hot pliers tearing out chunks of flesh, leaving smoldering wounds. Steel claws raking across skin. Scalding needles coated in something caustic driving under fingernails… and then those fingernails being ripped out.
The pain was unbearable. The body still felt distant and muffled, but the pain — the pain erased thought, erased the world, erased my very self. My human part wanted to scream, to thrash, to beg. I was certain that even a tenth of this would have shredded my voice.
But I was silent.
Only a contemptuous snort escaped my throat at the worst moments.
This was not my will. It was his. A core of pure, unbreakable pride refused to let me — let us — give this bastard the satisfaction.
*This worthless piece of filth doesn't deserve my reaction. He is no warrior.*
The thought rang through my head, cutting across the agony.
At last, just as I had begun to… adjust… the rhino stopped.
"Excellent, pussycat. Until tomorrow." The satisfied torturer ran his tongue over dry lips. He was enjoying this. Scum.
I said nothing. Consciousness was already slipping away, unable to cling to reality any longer — but just before I fell completely into the dark, the body reacted on its own.
I felt something warm. An inner energy — *Chi* — flowing instinctively toward the wounded places, dulling the pain.
And then — silence.