Chapter Text
Consciousness returned like a tide lapping against the beach, slowly eating away at the darkness that surrounded Dan Feng.
The first sensation was wrongness, different than pain or scale molting or the strange hollow that accompanied the shedding of accumulated lifetimes. There was a resonating discord between what his awareness expected and what his senses reported: his lungs expanded too shallowly, the weight of his limbs distributed incorrectly against the surface beneath him, and even the quality of shadow behind his closed eyelids felt foreign and different than his usual meditation.
This is not my body.
The thought arrived with crystalline certainty. He avoided panicking; panic wouldn’t solve anything and he was certain he’d woken to worse situations before. He’d inherited centuries of memories of accumulated crises, each previous incarnation's response patterns layered beneath his own consciousness, holding him together even as the foreign feeling chewed at his mind. Instead he felt alarm and the recognition that a variable in the equation of his existence had been altered without his consent.
He focused on cataloging; his training over centuries as High Elder had instilled the discipline of observation before action, assessment before reaction.
Scent came first, bypassing his closed eyes and carrying a layer of information on the wind. First he smelled the particular staleness of recycled air that suggested it was being reventilated, and beneath that the acrid tang of engine lubricant, sharp enough to catch at the back of his throat.
However he could also smell something that made his lip curl in distaste even before his conscious mind could name it…the sour notes of decomposition and organic waste…
Trash.
The word surfaced with a spike of indignation. Where in the celestial hierarchy had he fallen that the first thing to greet his waking was the smell of refuse?
Next thing, he could hear a deep mechanical hum, likely the background drone of a vessel in motion. Pipes creaked with the minute adjustments of heated water and somewhere distant, footsteps rang against metal grating with a hollow echo.
A ship, then. He was aboard a ship, but which ship and under whose command?
Touch brought the most distressing information. The surface beneath him was not the cool jade platform of his meditation chamber, nor even the firmness of a military bunk, but rather some manner of narrow, cushioned pallet, the fabric worn enough that the synthetic weave had developed an unpleasant slickness against his…
…against skin that did not quite respond as his own.
His fingers flexed and the movement obeyed his intention but the feedback was fractionally delayed as if the neural pathways had to translate through unfamiliar territory. He registered the length of the digits and the particular distribution of calluses along the palm. A spearman's hands, he noted with detached precision, but the calluses were in slightly different positions than his own and the muscle memory didn’t seem to match the forms he had drilled into his body over decades.
Whose hands are these?
The question carried a weight of dread that finally cracked through his analytical composure because there was only one explanation that made any sense, only one possibility that whispered on the edges of his mind…
Reincarnation.
But this was wrong, the hatching rebirth was meant to be a total, complete dissolution of the previous self as memories scattered like morning mist, all to ensure the new incarnation was born innocent and unburdened. He should not be aware, he should not remember who he had been, what he had done or why those actions had lead him to the cold sentencing of forced rebirth.
…Unless something had gone catastrophically wrong with the process itself.
He opened his eyes.
The ceiling above him was metal, glowing softly with emergency lighting strips and utterly devoid of the ornamental beauty that had characterized even the most utilitarian spaces of the Luofu. He turned his head slowly, fighting the strange resistance of muscles that didn't quite obey his command, and took in his surroundings.
The Archives.
The recognition came with a jolt of memory that felt like someone else's thought intruding on his own. He observed the rows of shelving units, some holding physical data pads and bound volumes, others featuring holographic storage matrices that cast pale light across the narrow space. A desk sat pressed against the wall, cluttered with half-sorted materials with a single chair half-pulled out, a coat strewn across the back in a messy way that Dan Feng never would have done, and beyond, a doorway leading into a dimly lit corridor where the mechanical hum grew louder.
The Astral Express. Guard and archivist. Himeko's offer. The red-haired lady. A new life. The shackles of the past…
He gasped, the sound sharp in the enclosed space and pressed the heels of his hands against his temples as if he could physically force out the intrusion.
These were not his memories. They carried a different emotional signature, younger and rawer, touched with a desperate hope he had not felt in lifetimes and attached with sensory impressions he’d never personally experienced: the smell of Himeko's coffee, the particular creak of the Express's floorboards, the weight of Cloud-Piercer, his own spear gripped in hands that were not his own.
Dan Heng's memories.
Understanding crashed over him with the force of a tidal wave. He was not experiencing some aberration of his own rebirth, he was occupying the body of his own reincarnation, the one who should have been born free of him, who should have walked unburdened into a future unmarred by the Sedition of Imbibitor Lunae.
He had somehow been thrust forward in time, inhabiting the physical form of the very innocence he had been sentenced to create.
The irony would have been poetic if it were not so viscerally horrifying.
Dan Feng pushed himself upright, the movement clumsy and looked down at himself. The clothing was simple, dark and practical, designed for ease of movement rather than ceremony. No elaborate robes, no symbols of rank, and the hands that gripped the edge of the narrow bed were unadorned by the jade rings he had once worn, the nails trimmed short in a way he had never preferred.
…and yet, undeniably these were Vidyadhara hands; the faint trace of scales on the back of his hands, the faint luminescence visible at certain pulse points, these could belong to no other bloodline. The dragon's heritage ran in these veins as surely as it had in his own.
What have the Preceptors done?
A creeping unease drifted over him. If this was their doing, some experimental manipulation of the rebirth process, then the political implications were staggering. If this was not their doing, if some other force had reached across time or consciousness or the membrane between incarnations to place him here…
…then he was trapped in a situation for which even his accumulated lifetimes of experience provided no basis of understanding.
He needed information, context, an understanding of when and where and why he had been deposited into this borrowed existence.
Dan Feng stood, swaying slightly as he adjusted to the different proportions of this frame and moved toward the desk. His reflection caught in a darkened data screen and he stopped to stare at the face that looked back at him.
It was both his face, and not.
The bone structure was identical, the legacy of Imbibitor Lunae carried its architecture through each rebirth with stubborn fidelity, but this version was softer, the angles not yet sharpened by age and accumulated grief. The eyes, when he forced himself to meet them, were the same shade of blue-green but they held none of the weight he remembered carrying. This face had not yet learned to hide everything behind a mask of aristocratic composure.
This is what I would have looked like if I had been allowed to be young.
The thought arrived with a pang of something dangerously close to grief so he crushed it immediately. Sentiment would not serve him here, only analysis would.
He turned away from his own reflection and began to methodically examine the archives, looking for anything that might indicate the current date, the Express's recent destinations or the nature of the crew who had taken his reincarnation in.
It was during this search as his attention focused on parsing a navigational log that he heard it: footsteps in the corridor outside, approaching with a particular rhythm, quick, uneven, accompanied by the faint rustle of fabric and a sound he could not immediately identify. Chewing, perhaps?
The door slid open.
Dan Feng looked up to see the girl who would shatter every assumption he had about the depths to which his reincarnation had fallen.