Headlights lit up the dark country road in front of the beat up old station wagon that John Miller was driving. After another busy day he found himself nodding off, barely able to keep his eyes open. Almost nobody took seriously the fact that driving tired was just as dangerous as driving drunk- especially not tired people. Besides, if tired people could choose not to drive tired, they would… but the whole world was tired. Might as well ask people not to work enough to support their families.

Darkness covered his vision. He must have nodded off for a second, because he didn’t notice a small figure run in front of his car. Not until it was too late. On the left side of the road was an oncoming truck… and to the right was a ditch that his instincts told him to swerve towards. Maybe they were right, given the circumstances, but he couldn’t believe he ended up like that. He didn’t even have the presence of mind to wonder who was running across a dark road in the middle of the night. Instead, there was a sharp impact and he fell unconscious.

When he woke up, he knew something was wrong. His whole body hurt. He was groggy, but he knew that his whole body shouldn’t feel like he was being stabbed. He wasn’t dying or anything, but there was no way the hospital didn’t give him any painkillers. He lay there for a while, not even willing to open his eyes. He couldn’t handle seeing what was around him, acknowledging it was real. Maybe he was lucky and he was still dying in the ditch. That way, at least his life insurance could pay out. He simply couldn’t handle more hospital bills… and the rest of his family was even less prepared for that.

His family… was…

John breathed out heavily. It hurt. His lungs burned… though strangely only on the inside. He had to open his eyes. He probably had a concussion or something. Giving up and dying wouldn’t help anybody. A little bit of money might help his family for a moment, but they needed more than that. He was the only one earning money… and he also couldn’t just die on them. They were family, and he couldn’t do that to them.

When he opened his eyes, he found it was much brighter than he anticipated. Not bright exactly, but early morning sun instead of midnight. Was it really possible that nobody involved thought to call the police, and everyone else who passed by hadn’t seen his car in a ditch?

As his eyes adjusted, he saw he was wrong about something. Several somethings, in fact. First, he wasn’t in a ditch. He was in a room. Not a hospital room though. He was lying on his back on hard stone, seeing light stream in through unfamiliar windows. The windows in his training room. That he’d never seen before. But were definitely… his? Or at least, his parents.

He slowly sat up. Did people dream while dying? This was just like a dream. Weird and surreal. He knew he felt pain, but he couldn’t place it. He was able to sit up, even though he should have been dying. He knew things that weren’t true. As he looked down at himself, he expected to see horrible wounds anyway, but he saw very clearly arms and legs and a somebody’s torso. His torso. But also it wasn’t. Neither were the arms and legs. The most noticeable thing was that they were covered in strange clothing. Were those… loose silk? Yes, he knew that. The finest silks in the region, woven from the finest stoneworm silk.

John held a hand to his head. Definitely a dream. But wasn’t he supposed to be able to do something once he was lucid? He could sit up, but nothing around him changed. He looked down to where he would find his t-shirt and jeans… but only saw more silk. What the hell even was a stoneworm? Dreams made no sense. He honestly had no idea what they were… except they produced fine silk. The finest in Marble County. He remembered that. And his body hurt.

He looked over everything he could see. First of all, his hands weren’t what he remembered them looking like. Not that different, but he did know the back of his own hand. His arms and legs were a bit too… muscular? Not chubby. He’d put on a few pounds lately. Even before that, he’d never looked like this. But he couldn’t see a single wound. Yet he hurt everywhere. It was… awful. Strangely, the pain didn’t change with his slow movements. Not significantly, anyway. It was like the pain was inside of him, but not part of his body. Not quite. Where was it then?

The answer came to him quite clearly. It was in his meridians. His mind immediately recoiled at that thought, because it was strange. Weren’t meridians a chinese medicine thing? More importantly… that wasn’t even the same word. He knew it meant the same thing, but… he wasn’t thinking in the same language. English and… whatever the hell Western Trade Dialect was.

He threw up on the ground next to him. Someone was in his head. That was his initial thought, but it was no less unsettling to his stomach when he came to the unfortunately more logical conclusion that he was in someone else’s head. Because he was thinking all the thoughts and summoning all of the memories, but the memories weren’t his. They belonged to… Fortkran Tenebach. Whoever the hell that was. Except when he thought about it, the memories came flooding back to him. The most prominent of those was the very last memory.

He was dead. John… was probably dead. But Fortkran Tenebach was definitely dead. He recalled his final moments, as he was attempting to break through from the Spiritual Collection Phase to the Foundation Phase. He messed up and his meridians shattered. He- John- knew what these things were somehow, but using only his own memories he only had a vague concept of what that might be, besides the obvious. Some sort of levels of power for martial arts related power of some sort. That was the best he could do, especially with his own memories being fuzzy. He hoped they would come back smoothly, but before that he should probably stop dying on the floor of ‘his’ training room.

He shakily stood up. At least his muscles worked. He staggered out of the room barely able to open the door, along through familiar-yet-new hallways towards his room. He saw a few servants and did his best to look like was in better condition than he was. He didn’t know their names… why didn’t he know their names? There were only ten or twenty of them, and they’d been around for years. Was his memory that messed up?

His room was close by, though not immediately adjacent to the training room because of the space requirements. Fortunately, Fortkran remembered where some medicine was. John was slightly surprised to see wrapped paper around little pellets. They looked like kibble, kind of, but apparently they were medicine. Well, sure. This one should be good for repairing damage to meridians. His memories weren’t clear on the exact details of that, but the sinking feeling in his stomach told him it was almost certainly nothing compared to what he had. Completely destroyed and exploded meridians. Enough to kill him, apparently. Well, it was better than nothing… and he didn’t want to see the family doctor right now. Fortkran was habitually stubborn about those things, and John… wanted to avoid people until he could at least slightly sort out his head.

The pill went down easily, and almost immediately he felt the effects. His logical side told him that was the placebo effect. Pills didn’t work that fast. However, the feeling of sort of warm, smooth, comforting liquid being formed inside his stomach only increased. The memories native to this place knew what to do with that, and he was soon sitting down on a small mat in his room. He closed his eyes, concentrating to direct the medicine into his body. Strangely enough, it worked. Just because his memories told him it would didn’t mean he had expected it to actually work. For one thing, the memories of his body didn’t seem… completely reliable. There were gaps that didn’t just seem to be fuzziness, but things never learned to begin with.

The medicine soothed his internal wounds. It dulled the pain from a large mass to more manageable and discrete little pathways. He could feel his meridians, like an extra set of blood vessels going throughout his body. They were… in extremely terrible condition. That much was sure. As he carefully directed the medicine into them it only seemed to stop things from falling apart… though hopefully the recovery would just be slower than the soothing part.

John’s head hurt. Physically less than it had, but the mental stress certainly didn’t help. What should he do next? All he wanted to do was go to sleep. He was in the body of a dead man with his memories- there wasn’t any other trace of him- and in a strange world he barely understood, though he felt like he should have. Was sleeping advisable injured as he was? Absolutely not. Was he going to do it anyway?

Of course. It was better to collapse on a bed than on the floor, and he had no capacity to talk with anyone. He wasn’t even sure if he could speak the language… though he had memories of it, they weren’t his. He was the one in control- as much as anyone could be called in control of a body that barely moved.

He drifted off to sleep- real sleep, not the strange half-sleep he’d experienced while he was probably dead. It was nice and peaceful and he almost didn’t care if he woke up. But he did… at least a little.