Yang became aware gradually, like rising through layers of thick water toward distant light. Consciousness returned in fragments. First came sensation, a dull pressure against his back. Then sound, or rather the absence of it, a profound silence broken only by his own breathing. Finally, thought, sluggish and confused, struggling to piece together where he was and what had happened.

  His eyes opened to unfamiliar ceiling beams. Dark wood, rough-hewn, crossed overhead in a pattern that meant nothing to him. The grain of the wood seemed wrong somehow, though he couldn't articulate why. Everything felt wrong.

  Yang tried to move and immediately regretted it. His body responded, but with a delay that made his stomach lurch. He thought about lifting his arm, and several heartbeats later, the arm rose. The disconnect between intention and action was nauseating. This must be what being drugged feels like, he thought distantly. That floating sensation where your body exists separately from your mind, connected only by fraying threads.

  He managed to turn his head, the movement taking far longer than it should. The room swam into view in pieces. Small. Very small. A single narrow bed beneath him, its frame made of the same dark wood as the ceiling. A small table against the opposite wall, its surface cluttered with papers and what looked like writing implements.

  The walls were bare plaster, cracked in places, stained with age and damp. A single small window let in pale gray light that suggested either early morning or late evening. The glass in the window was intact but wavy, distorting the view beyond into abstract shapes.

  Something about the room felt off. It was more structured than anything Yang had seen since arriving in the cultivation world. More refined in some ways, more worn in others. The furniture had straight edges and precise joints that spoke of advanced or expensive carpentry, yet everything was shabby, used, and in poor condition.

  Yang tried to sit up. His body obeyed with that same awful lag, muscles responding a beat too slow, balance all wrong. He swung his legs over the edge of the bed and immediately felt dizzy. The floor seemed to tilt beneath him even though he knew it was level.

  He planted his hands on the mattress to steady himself, and that's when he saw them.

  Wrong.

  The thought exploded through his mind with absolute clarity. His hands were wrong. Too large. Too pale. The fingers too long, the nails shaped differently, the calluses in all the wrong places. These weren't his hands.

  Yang stared at them, his sluggish mind trying and failing to process what he was seeing. He flexed the fingers. They moved when he willed them to, with that same disturbing lag, but they weren't his fingers. The proportions were wrong. The color was wrong. Everything was wrong.

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  Panic began to build in his chest, cold and sharp. Yang raised his hands closer to his face, examining them with growing horror. The skin was smooth in places where his should have calluses from living in the forest. Rough in places where his should be smooth. The veins stood out differently. The bones felt different beneath the skin when he pressed.

  His breathing quickened. Yang looked down at his body, really looked at it for the first time. The chest beneath the rough shirt he wore was broader than it should be. His arms longer. His legs, visible where his trouser legs had ridden up, were shaped wrong.

  This wasn't his body.

  The realization hit like a physical blow. Yang's hands moved without conscious thought, touching his chest, his arms, his face. Everything was wrong. The proportions were wrong. The sensations were wrong. The way the body sat on the bed, the distribution of weight, the length of his spine, all of it fundamentally different from what it should be.

  He was in someone else's body.

  Yang's breath came in short, sharp gasps. His heart hammered against his ribs as he tried to calm himself. He tried to stand, driven by pure panic, and his legs nearly gave out. The lag was worse when trying to coordinate complex movements. He stumbled, caught himself against the table, sending papers scattering.

  His eyes locked onto something on a small shelf beside the table. A small mirror, cracked in one corner, but a mirror nonetheless.

  Yang lunged for it with desperate need, his foreign body stumbling across the three steps separating him from the shelf. His hand, someone else's hand, closed around the mirror's wooden frame. He snatched it off the shelf and brought it up to his face with shaking arms.

  The face staring back at him was a stranger's.

  Blonde hair, the color of wheat in sunlight, hung in disheveled strands around a face Yang had never seen before. Blue eyes, pale as winter ice, stared back at him with his own terror reflected in their depths. The features were sharp where his were soft, angular where his were rounded by his youth. The jawline was different. The nose was different. The shape of the skull beneath the skin was different.

  This wasn't him. This wasn't Yang.

  As he stared into those alien blue eyes, something shifted in his mind. A pressure built behind his temples, growing rapidly from discomfort to pain. The sensation was sharp, piercing, like needles being driven through his skull from the inside.

  Yang gasped, nearly dropping the mirror. The pain intensified, spreading from his temples across his entire head. It felt like his brain was being squeezed, compressed, invaded by something foreign.

  The pain reached a crescendo, a spike of agony so intense that Yang's vision went white. His legs gave out entirely. He felt himself falling, the mirror slipping from nerveless fingers, his foreign body crumpling toward the floor.

  The mirror hit the wooden floorboards first, shattering with a sound like breaking ice.

  Darkness rushed up to meet him, merciful and complete.

  The last thing Yang registered before oblivion claimed him was that he hated mirrors. Hated them with a visceral intensity that came from somewhere deep and primal.

  Then nothing.

  Just blessed, empty silence.