Prologue

I woke up with a headache from hell.

The first thing I remembered was staying up too late again, bouncing between strategy games and another mind-numbing martial arts novel, the kind where the protagonist always gets some ridiculous cheat skill and a harem of jade beauties. Just background noise to help me fall asleep, same as always.

But something was wrong.

The second thing I noticed was a deep, bone-weary ache in my lower back. The kind of pain that comes from decades of sitting on hard wooden beds and thin meditation cushions. I’m twenty. I shouldn’t have a bad back.

My eyes snapped open.

This wasn’t my room.

The ceiling above me was rough wooden beams, dark with age and coated in dust. The air smelled like old incense, mildew, and something I couldn’t identify. My room didn’t smell like anything except takeout containers and unwashed laundry.

I sat up too fast, and my head swam. My body felt heavy in a way that was completely alien; slower, stiffer, like I’d suddenly aged fifty years overnight. My heart started hammering against my ribs. What the hell was happening? Was this a dream? A prank? Had someone drugged me and dumped me in some rural ren faire?

I swung my legs over the side of the bed. A plain wooden frame with thin, threadbare blankets, and my feet hit cold dirt floor. Dirt. Floor. Who the hell has a dirt floor?

There was a bronze mirror on a rickety table across the room, tarnished and covered in dust. I stumbled toward it, my legs almost giving out underneath me like I’d forgotten how to walk in this heavier, older body. I had to see. I had to know.

I grabbed the mirror and wiped my sleeve across its surface.

The face that stared back wasn’t mine.

It was some stranger. Some old stranger. Thin face, deep lines around the eyes and mouth, streaks of gray at the temples. A face that had lived through decades I couldn’t remember. I stared, and the stranger stared back, and I felt my breath start to come in short, sharp gasps.

This wasn’t my face. I was supposed to have a chubby, pimply twenty-year-old face that still broke out if I ate too much greasy food. Not… not this.

My vision started to tunnel. I could hear my own pulse roaring in my ears. This couldn’t be happening. This was some kind of nightmare, some fever dream, I was going to wake up any second in my own bed with my phone buzzing somewhere—

And then the memories hit.

Not mine. His. A lifetime’s worth, crashing into my skull like a tidal wave. Decades of training. Meditation. Fighting. Loss. An orphan boy taken in by an old man with kind eyes and calloused hands.The previous Sect Leader of the Coiling Dragon Sect. Years of grueling cultivation, pushing through bottlenecks, finally breaking through to Foundation Establishment. The old Sect Leader dying of age, passing the burden to his most talented disciple. Twenty years of leading a sect that was already dying. Twenty years of watching disciples leave, resources dwindle, hope fade.

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Twenty years of failure.

I stumbled backward and collapsed onto the bed, the mirror falling from my hands and landing in the dirt with a dull thunk. I pressed my palms against my temples, trying to stop the flood, but it kept coming.

Lu Chen. His name was Lu Chen. My name was Lu Chen. The same name as mine in real life. What were the odds? What kind of cosmic joke was this?

I looked around the room again, really looked this time, with his memories overlaying my own. The cracked walls. The single wooden chest in the corner with my—his—robes folded inside. The incense burner on a small altar to ancestors I never knew. The patched curtains over a window that looked out onto gray morning light.

This was the Sect Leader’s quarters. The Sect Leader of the Coiling Dragon Sect. And the Coiling Dragon Sect was a joke.