My nose woke first, snuffling at a faint but delicious aroma. By the time I opened my eyes and sat up, the smell was gone, and I realized my nose wasn’t mine.
It didn’t end there.
My face wasn’t mine, either. I ran my hands down my neck. Not my hands. Not my neck. My entire body wasn’t mine. The weight, length of my limbs, width of my shoulders, and hammer of my heartbeat were all so…wrong!
I jerked upright and tried to calm my breathing.
This must be another experiment.
There was no need to freak out.
I ran my hand along the familiar smooth stone that formed my cubic cell. The windowless grey walls and sterile air of the facility were almost comforting after all these years.
There was a grey stone slab on one side with thin sheets that served as a bench, table, and bed. A faucet dripped in the corner beside a hole that served as a toilet. The dripping was how I knew seven days had passed since I woke. That unending counter was my only companion.
His name was Drippy.
I wish I could say I didn’t know where I was, but I did. I’d spent years in this facility, and one more day was just… one more day.
I waited, but nobody came to check on me. Nobody fed me through the slit in the door. Usually, after waking from an experiment, one of those damned masked cultivators would come and conduct some tests. There was a rhythm to this place as predictable as the rise and fall of the sun.
Nobody came to my cell.
No one even walked down the hall.
I paced back and forth and heard nothing but my own footsteps. It was just me, Drippy, and the empty nozzles of the Cleansing Flame Formation embedded in the walls, floor, and ceiling like an omnipresent, omnidirectional guillotine.
I stopped.
Maybe… maybe nobody came to check on me because the experiment failed?
I watched the formation’s nozzles with mounting dread as I waited for the rinsing fires to end it all — but either the cultivator in charge was too cowardly — or too lazy — to activate the array.
Which made no sense.
Because the bastard cultivators running this facility weren’t cowards, and they certainly weren’t lazy. They did everything from the monstrous to the mundane with a cold, clinical enthusiasm that sent shivers down my spine.
Every day was a routine of eating, sleeping, and hoping that whatever they wanted to do to you in the laboratory at the end of the hall wouldn’t kill you. There was a fine line to walk between what you could get away with and what you couldn’t. The cultivators were always swift to punish those who acted out, which is why I couldn’t figure out why they were leaving me alone.
Nobody came to explain what they did or what they wanted, or to bear their knives and cut samples of my flesh. No, they just let me pull myself up from the dried puddle of blood on the floor and crawl into the cot where I tried — and failed — to fall back asleep.
The light formation embedded in the ceiling kept a constant glow, and Drippy kept dripping. In my first days in the facility, the light and water formations amazed me. It was rare for a non-cultivator like me to encounter something like that. But as the days became months, and the months became years, the wonder faded.
Humans can get used to just about anything.
So, as I lay there, face down on my thin mattress, I settled into the strange body. It might not be mine, but I was wearing it, after all. I thought that moment of acceptance might signal the arrival of the cultivators, and I glanced toward the door.
It remained still.
After two whole days of white-knuckled waiting and staring at the closed doors, I snapped. Call it frustration, claustrophobia, or boredom, but I needed to do something. So, I marched over to the door and started punching the thick glass that served as the viewport out of my cell.
My fist cracked against the glass and left it untouched.
I expected only pain to come from this stupidity, but my reward was a surprise.
No pain.
Not even discomfort.
Blood dripped from my battered knuckles, but instead of dribbling to the floor, it oozed in long strands from my hand toward the unscratched window. It resembled the webbing that might come from an insect’s ass, except it was bright red.
Even suspended in the air, my blood remained a liquid. It flowed from my hand to the glass and back again.
Still alive.
Still beating.
I freaked out when I saw that, only natural, but when I freak out, I go still. My previous outburst against the window not counting, I’d learned in the facility that a controlled anger was far more useful than the alternative.
So, I examined the bloody strands, walking toward the glass, and my eyes widened as the blood spooled back into the wound. The closer I got to the window, the more the blood flowed into my hand.
It looked like a leak in reverse, and I was fascinated.
When I pressed my palm against the cool glass, the last of the blood drained into my flesh, and the torn skin healed before my eyes.
I couldn’t explain the phenomenon, but at least now I knew what those bastards had done to me. They’d done… something.
Yeah, definitely something.
Of that much, I was certain.
I flexed the fingers on my healed hand as Drippy counted time, and a hopeful thought entered my mind: maybe the experiment awoke my qi?
In the stories, cultivators could survive wounds that would kill a normal, mortal human. Had they… turned me into a cultivator?
It might explain my blood, but I didn’t know how to tell.
In all the stories, cultivators spent hours, days, even years in meditative poses. So I climbed onto my bed, crossed my legs, closed my eyes, and focused on my breathing.
I tried to send my mind into myself, deeper than thoughts, to search for the qi that links all living things, to find the spark of my power.
Everyone described qi differently: light, fire, water, roots, destiny — qi was all this and more, and cultivation was the path toward the heavens!
My mind searched, but I found nothing.
Just faint pink light shining through my eyelids, the ever-dripping tap, and an empty stomach that wasn’t even hungry.
It took a long time for me to open my eyes to the disappointment of the cell.
I wasn’t a cultivator.
I was the same mortal I’d been when they knocked me out and took me to my last surgery… whenever that was.
But there was definitely something extraordinary happening to my blood.
Since the cultivators hadn’t come with their masks and their blades, and my cell remained free of Cleansing Fire, I started experimenting.
I cut my hand open with another punch and began testing my limits.
Very quickly, I learned that my blood remained connected to me within six feet, but any more than that, and it went limp and splashed to the ground. I could still suck spilled blood into my body if I was close enough, but I couldn’t call it from a distance.
The closer my blood, the stronger the connection, and the more influence I could exert. When the blood was only a few inches from my skin, I could make it dance.
I spent a few hours making blood loop around my fingers with a joy I hadn’t felt since I was a kid on the East Wind Grasslands playing with sticks in the warm summer sun.
The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.
That was a good memory, but it made me frown.
The East Wind Grasslands lay along the Dragonfire Coast, and I’d never been there in my life.
My frown grew, building into a headache.
I’d never been to the grasslands because I grew up in the slums of Shadowlight City running errands for low-tier cultivators… right?
Or… wait…
No.
I spent my childhood swaddled in furs at my father’s side as his caravan travelled the northern kingdoms. He bought and sold agricultural supplies and knick-knacks, teaching me so I could take over the business someday.
But… was any of that right?
I paused, my head pounding.
Surely I couldn’t have three separate memories of my own childhood? That didn’t make any sense. Which only begged the question of where these memories came from.
Each one felt as real as the others, but they couldn’t all be true… could they?
I tried to remember a specific memory — my coming of age — and the confusing mess of overlapping nostalgia sloshed into a splitting headache that left me twitching on the floor.
I lay there curled up for over an hour, if Drippy was to be believed.
But I didn’t pass out, as much as the hammering pain made me long for sleep.
Maybe I couldn’t lose consciousness, I wasn’t sure. But, eventually, the pain dulled and my mind sharpened, and I picked myself up off the floor.
There was definitely something wrong with my head, and after three days without contact, I was done waiting around.
Time to bust out.
My only tools were my unmarked gray robes, my bedsheets, and my blood.
It took another day of trial and error, but I found that if I spilled my blood onto my sheet, I could manipulate the soaked fabric as though it were a puppet.
My control was weak and my range was limited, but it was enough to give me an idea.
Around midnight of day four, I huddled in front of my cell door. Usually, I would be watching the slit in the door and waiting for food, but now I stared with a different expectation.
“What do you think, Drippy?” I asked the tap. “This gonna work?”
“Drip.”
“Ah, fuck off, you pessimist.”
I fed the blood-soaked sheet through the slit in the door where my food should have come out. As I fed the slit, it occurred to me that I should be tired and hungry — dead on my feet — but the only thing close to discomfort came from having so much blood outside my new body.
The discomfort wasn’t even lightheadedness like you would expect from massive blood loss, but more a lopsided feeling like walking around with only one shoe.
Which was a strange thought considering I’d always gone barefoot on the farm in the grasslands… of Shadowlight City…? No, I always wore insulated leather boots while the blizzards raged in the long Northern winters…
But I’d never left the city.
Memories of multiple pasts flickered before me in a loop.
A farm in the grasslands that I never left —
An iron door in the dark alleyway I walked past every day —
But I —
Never —
“Drip, drip, drip.”
I blinked, looking at the tap gratefully.
“Thanks for pulling me out of that, bud.”
“Drip.”
I nodded and took a moment to look at my hands. They were slowly becoming familiar, and I wasn’t sure if that was weird or not. Did I even remember what my old hands looked like?
Various memories of scars, rings, and tanned fingers overlapped for a second before I shook my head.
Nope, no more headaches.
It was time to put Plan A into action.
My skin paled as blood flowed into the sheet, and once enough of it was out of the slit, I forced it to move. Unable to see through the narrow opening, I guided the blood-soaked material blindly. My ears strained, listening to the wet slither of fabric against the metal door. The cloth wormed toward the handle, and once it was wrapped around tightly, I yanked with all the force my mind could summon.
It wasn’t much.
Still, the handle turned, and the unmistakable sound of a locked door was like a dagger to the heart.
I pulled and tugged with the sheet, desperate to free myself. My willpower strained like a burning muscle until, with a resigned sigh, I abandoned my plan and reeled the sheet back through the slit.
Part of the fabric caught on the slit’s edge, and in my impatience, I yanked the sheet. It tore, and I fell back onto my ass as a small, blood-soaked scrap of fabric plopped onto the ground outside the door.
The instant the scrap separated from the sheet, it disconnected from my mind.
I didn’t like that feeling. It was too much like dropping a shiny coin in the street and watching it bounce and roll into a sewer drain.
As a former street rat, that stung.
“Drip.”
“Shut up.”
Taking a moment to refresh my willpower, I leaned against the door and yanked at the bloody scrap with my mental control. It twitched on the other side of the door, and I pulled again. Slowly, one spasm at a time, the scrap inched closer. It bunched up against the bottom of the heavy metal door. The fabric wouldn’t fit under, so I tried to pull it up. My willpower strained, and I let out a groan of effort, but no matter how hard I tried, my manipulation ability wasn’t strong enough to fight gravity.
“Drip.”
“Not now.”
“Drip, drip.”
“I’m not in the mood.”
I paced, trying to figure out what I could do, and eventually sat on the bed.
“Drip.”
“I’m serious, I don’t —”
“Drip.”
“Wait, say that again?”
“Drip. Drip, drip, drip.”
“Ok, that’s actually genius.”
I walked over and kissed Drippy on the tap. A good idea is a good idea.
I lay down by the door and pressed my cut hand to the floor. The gap under the door was barely thin enough for air, but it was enough.
The rag on the other side blocked the light, but I wasn’t after the fabric anymore. Instead, I reached for what was inside, the part of me I needed returned.
“Come on,” I whispered.
My blood answered.
Slowly, over the course of an hour, my blood wrung itself from the rag and trickled toward me. Once it touched my hand, I sucked it back inside. My skin healed over, and I lay on the ground in my well-lit cell with all my blood inside my body.
Even if the plan didn’t work, I still felt a sense of accomplishment.
“Don’t say it, Drippy.”
“Drip.”
“Bastard,” I said with a smile.
I think I would have gone crazy if I didn’t have someone to talk to.
So, Plan A failed.
My blood manipulation was barely strong enough to turn the handle, even if it wasn’t locked.
Drippy suggested flooding the lock with blood to pick it open. The problem was, I couldn’t steer the fluid with that much dexterity, especially not if I was working blind. If I could harden the blood… but no matter how much I concentrated, it remained a liquid.
Even if I tried to destroy the lock’s internal mechanism, that would probably seal me away forever rather than open the door. It was depressing, but even though the cultivators built this facility with simple designs, they didn’t use stupid ones.
That left Plan B.
I eyed the window.
I’d clobbered it pretty hard before, but it hadn’t even creaked. It was certainly made from powerful, qi-charged material.
A mortal like me had no chance of breaking it open.
Though I wasn’t really just a mortal anymore…
“Do you know what I am, Drippy?”
“Drip.”
“Hilarious.”
I didn’t know what I was. All the stories of cultivators I’d heard, all my memories from Shadowlight City, none of them matched what I was experiencing.
Still, Plan B.
I wrapped the sheet around my fist and punched the glass. My hand crunched with the impact. I winced, but when the flood of pain failed to come, I peeled back the fabric to inspect my battered hand. Bruises formed across my knuckles, and blood welled at my split skin. I found it easy enough to keep the blood from flowing out.
I’d definitely broken a finger — two fingers — but when I waggled them, they felt fine. I knew they were broken, but it didn’t affect anything.
When I lifted my hand to my ear, I heard a faint crackling like rice grains pouring into a silo.
I watched and waited with fascination and a dopey smile.
Blood withdrew. Skin closed. Bones clicked into place, and my knuckles popped back into shape.
It wasn’t just my blood that had changed — my entire body could truly heal.
That settled it.
Onwards with Plan B!
With a grin, I lashed out at the window.
My punches started focused, but after a few minutes without results, my hits grew sloppy from frustration. The crack of my blunted fist against the glass drowned out the drips. I kept going. When my wrist snapped, I even tried scratching the glass with the exposed bone. Even without pain, the vibrations that ran up my arm almost made me puke — except it had been six days now since I’d eaten anything at all.
There was nothing to puke.
At least six days, anyway. Who knew how long I was out before I woke up?
I’d destroyed my hand, but there wasn’t a single mark on the window.
I slumped down to the ground with a sigh.
Plan B failed, and I couldn’t do anything until my hand was back together.
It took hours for my ruined appendage to heal, and I spent the time talking to Drippy.
He asked about my past and helped me work through the mess of answers each question stirred up.
With his help, I learned to sense the headaches that preceded the overlapping memories, and if I was careful, I found I could sieve through the multitude of childhoods without migraines tearing me apart.
We didn’t get to the bottom of it, but there seemed to be three main backstories: that of a travelling merchant’s son in the northern kingdoms, a farmer from East Wind Grasslands, and a street rat from the sprawling slums of Shadowlight City.
We could only find two facts that connected them.
- All three lived in the Heavenly Phoenix Empire, though in different kingdoms.
- They all shared one memory.
Their last memory of freedom, where one life ended and the facility began: a black sack dragged over my head, cold metal locked around my throat, and then the void.
After that…
This cell.
Drippy, it turned out, had always been a prison cell tap. He was one of those simple sorts who was happy with the lot life threw him, and, to be honest, I envied his contentment. It would be nice to be satisfied with what I was born into, but that was another throughline in all my memories: I’d wanted more.
Day eight arrived, and my hand was completely healed. I still hadn’t slept — wasn’t even tired — so Drippy and I started on Plan C.
This one would work.
Plan C, baby!
I was confident, but if I thought about it too long, I knew I would back out. So, with Drippy’s encouragement, I steeled my nerves, took a deep breath… and prepared to set myself on fire.