I was twenty-eight years old. British. Unremarkable.

  I never had many close friends, never quite managed a relationship that lasted. I told myself I was searching for a spark — something that made life feel intentional — but if I’m honest, I think I was afraid of committing to anything I couldn’t control. It was easier not to try than to watch something collapse in my hands.

  Looking back, the only times I ever felt whole were when I travelled alone. No expectations. No history. Just movement and the quiet relief of being no one in particular.

  The night I died, I was on my way to another dead-end job — the kind that drains you before your shift even starts. I wore my standard-issue customer service smile like armour and walked towards the shop, which from a distance seemed oddly quiet.

  I slipped a hand into my travel bag — compact, over-organised, familiar. I pulled out a cigarette. They’d started packing them tighter these past few years; tug too fast and you’d split the paper. I’d performed more than one desperate 3 a.m. surgery with a Rizla to salvage the damage.

  The lighter sparked. A flame bloomed to life.

  In that small circle of light, I noticed the cold. It clung to the air unnaturally. Mist drifted inward from every direction, folding toward me as though I were its centre.

  I exhaled smoke and muttered, “Jesus, it’s getting cold. I half expect to turn around and see some old-school detective tailing me under the streetlights.”

  I took another drag and stepped toward the shop.

  That’s when the world fractured.

  An engine roared. Tyres screamed. Someone shouted. A horn blared with frantic insistence.

  Across the road, a man cupped his hands around his mouth. “Lady! Move! Now!”

  I heard him. I recognised the shapes of the words. But meaning wouldn’t connect. Every voice around me dissolved into noise — like England had just made the World Cup semi-finals and the entire country had collapsed into drunken hysteria.

  The car didn’t slow.

  It swerved.

  Toward me.

  It hit the kerb. The tyres burst on impact, the front of the vehicle launching upward in a grotesque imitation of flight. For a suspended second, the world held its breath.

  Then gravity reclaimed it.

  Metal came down.

  So did everything else.

  When awareness returned, it came in fragments. Faces hovered above me — pale, horrified, distorted by shock. My manager burst from the shop, pushing through the gathering crowd.

  “Oh God. I’ve called the police. An ambulance is coming.”

  She dropped to her knees beside me, horror shifting into something raw and frantic.

  “Heather? Heather, can you hear me? Stay with me. Please. Stay with me.”

  Her tears fell freely now. Through broken breaths and mucus-thick sobs, she muttered, “You know I’ll have to dock your pay for being late. You don’t want that. You’ve been saving for months for that trip.”

  Even then, something inside me stirred.

  I looked at her — really looked — and felt an unexpected warmth beneath the spreading cold.

  “I suppose not everything about this job was awful,” I thought. “You were a good boss. I hope you know that. Not many people would argue with death just to keep you on payroll.”

  A laugh escaped me — soft, brittle.

  The crowd winced at the sound.

  And just like that, I died.

  One final terrible joke to punctuate the long-running punchline of my life.

  I can’t claim it was a life well lived.

  But it was mine.

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  And I lived it.

  What felt like a split second later, my eyes snapped open.

  “I thought I died.”

  The words came out hoarse.

  I pushed myself upright and took in my surroundings. The room was unfamiliar — a strange fusion of East and West. The architecture clearly drew from Asian design: sweeping rooflines visible through carved lattice windows, heavy stone pillars rising like ancient sentinels. Yet the furnishings were distinctly Western in aesthetic — understated, deliberate, almost minimalist in their luxury.

  The walls were polished stone, seamless and immaculate. Massive pillars of the same material rose from floor to ceiling. They looked impossibly heavy — heavy enough to fracture the foundation — yet the floor beneath them was pristine. No cracks. No strain. As though gravity had been politely asked not to interfere.

  “I’m losing it,” I muttered. “That’s it. Concussion hallucination. Coma dream.”

  My body felt wrong. Not injured — just… diminished.

  “I need a mirror.”

  The effort it took to sit upright startled me. Weakness pooled through my limbs, unfamiliar and disorienting. I swung my legs over the side of the bed and stood slowly, bracing for dizziness.

  Across the room, in the far-left corner, stood a vanity table. It was elegant without being gaudy — carved dark wood, clean lines, subtle gold inlay. Resting atop it was a mirror framed in intricate metalwork. It didn’t scream wealth. It implied it. Quietly. Confidently.

  Each step toward it felt unsteady, as though my body and mind had yet to agree on terms.

  When I finally reached the mirror, I looked up—

  —and inhaled sharply.

  “I’ve turned into an old woman.”

  The face staring back at me was mine and yet not. The structure was familiar, but time had rewritten it. Fine lines webbed across my skin. My cheeks had hollowed slightly. My eyes, though still sharp, were framed by decades I did not remember living.

  I looked down at my hands.

  Wrinkled, yes — but not frail. The skin bore age yet retained an unnatural smoothness, a faint lustre that made it seem almost preserved rather than decayed.

  “I look like I’ve been asleep for fifty years,” I whispered. “I’m not twenty-eight anymore. I’m… seventy-eight.”

  Shock settled slowly, deliberately, etching itself into my features.

  “This doesn’t make sense.”

  My gaze flicked back to the mirror, to the posture of the woman reflected there.

  “If I’d been in a coma for decades, my muscles would’ve wasted away. Severe atrophy. Contractures. Bone density loss. We don’t even have medical tech capable of preserving someone intact for that long without deterioration.”

  I flexed my fingers experimentally.

  The weakness wasn’t the frailty of age.

  It was something else.

  Something… depleted.

  And that terrified me far more.

  I gripped the side of my head.

  Pain detonated behind my eyes.

  Memories — not mine — crashed through me in a relentless torrent. Eighty years of another woman’s life unfurled inside my skull, compressing themselves into ten unbearable minutes. Her history did not arrive gently; it unfolded like a travel pamphlet flipped too quickly, page after page snapping past before I could properly absorb them.

  This world was not Earth — yet it mirrored it disturbingly well.

  The continental shapes were similar. The general layout felt familiar. But the scale… the scale was monstrous. The planet was easily a thousand times larger. Mountain ranges stretched for thousands of miles without interruption. Forests sprawled across territories larger than Africa. Oceans swallowed horizons whole.

  And then there were the veins.

  The world had veins running through it.

  They were not metaphorical. They were not superstition or spiritual conjecture. They were tangible — vast, luminous arteries of energy that pulsed beneath the crust of the planet. On Earth, such things would have been dismissed as ley lines, debated by fringe believers and mystics. Here, they were measurable. Usable.

  Essential.

  When the history of the world receded, the memories narrowed.

  They became personal.

  Her life.

  My life.

  I was — or had been — an average Foundation Realm cultivator. Three spiritual roots. Nothing exceptional. Nothing disgraceful. A middling existence in a world that rewarded only the extraordinary.

  My husband — my Dao Partner — had been an Elder of a local sect: Clear Water Sect. After receiving formal approval, he established a residence within the sect’s outer territories, far enough for privacy, close enough for protection.

  The day after our wedding, he commissioned an artefact.

  His biological brother — the sect’s refining elder — forged it personally. He poured decades of expertise, affection, and ambition into its construction.

  A twelve-storey pagoda.

  An artefact capable of manifesting an entire courtyard complex upon activation — living quarters, defensive formations, cultivation chambers — all contained within a spatial matrix far larger than its outward dimensions suggested.

  I remembered him laughing as he showed it to me.

  “I’ll fill every floor with children,” he had promised, eyes bright with reckless devotion. “We’ll build a supreme sect — our own lineage. Twelve floors. Twelve generations.”

  A smile ghosted across my lips as those memories settled. She had loved him.

  No.

  We had loved him.

  He had loved us just as fiercely.

  Then came the war.

  Twenty years ago, Myriad Beast Pavilion declared open conflict against the Clear Water Sect.

  The reason had seemed almost absurd at first. An Elder of Clear Water had encountered a mysterious beast — one that granted power rivaling the inherited techniques of the Beast Pavilion, a sect that had dominated its domain for over five centuries through exclusive beast contracts.

  Power threatened monopoly.

  Monopoly answered with blood.

  For fifteen years, the two sects clashed.

  Battles scarred mountains. Spirit veins were corrupted. Entire valleys were reduced to wastelands. Yet neither side secured decisive victory. They were evenly matched — attrition without conclusion.

  So the Myriad Beast Pavilion sought outside intervention.

  They called in a favour from a superior power.

  Three days after that favour was invoked, it ended.

  There was no grand battle. No heroic last stand.

  Just a presence.

  A single figure descending from the sky.

  My husband, the Elders, the disciples — the entirety of the sect’s upper echelon — were erased with a casual flick of the wrist.

  Not defeated.

  Erased.

  As though they had never possessed the right to exist.

  The memory of that moment hollowed my chest.

  The pagoda had survived.

  I had survived.

  But the sect — and the man who promised to fill twelve floors with laughter — had been reduced to dust in less than a breath.