I didn’t remember dying. The last memory I had was of being in my room, preparing for my test as my mind drifted on random thoughts as I procrastinated my time away.

But now I found certain memories drifting forth as I floated within the darkness. Faded blurring images came to me. Of screams, and of fire.

I heard a loud explosion and a burning hot sensation embedded in my gut. I remember looking down, feeling numb, as blood had poured out my gut. My classmate grabbed me and screamed, as I fell, and then there was nothing.

School shooting? I couldn’t tell, my memories were too vague, but dying from a bullet wound was not the way I’d expected to go out. I guess this made for the second time I had died in an unexpected way.

I looked down at myself and found a pair of familiar T-shirts and jeans covering me. I’d almost forgotten how it’d felt to wear regular clothes over robes. It felt nostalgic, yet also oddly foreign.

“What now?” I called out to the dark. No response came.

“Is this it? Just unending darkness? Talk about lame dude,” I said, as the silence stretched on. I kept muttering to myself nontheless. The words were more to keep myself sane than anything else.

Eventually, I began to walk. This wasn’t my first foray into unending darkness and floaty void expanses after all. Not that my first one lasted too long, or went particularly nice, but dying was just one of those things that happened when you went spirit delving.

But what if I wasn’t dead? Perhaps this was just a haze induced coma and I was still alive. It’d be odd after having the literal heavens shoot me with lightning, but I’ve heard of stranger things happening.

I looked down at myself and tried to feel at my core. Two broken halves sat within, shattered and split right down the middle. Guess there went my cultivation days.

“At least I may still be alive,” I muttered out loud, not feeling the relief my words may have implied.

Dying may be the better alternative over living as a cripple. Although I could probably still do science if I wanted to, yet there was something about the joy of exploring magic that I couldn’t replace. It wouldn’t be the same. Without Labby, Sheldon, all my notes on Alchemy, the pills I was working on. The spirit garden. None of it would be the same.

“Whoa whoa, no depression fest. Things might be recoverable after all. Should’ve thought of all this before defying the heavens and calling it dumb and stuff, too late for regrets man,” I said out loud to myself, trying to keep my spirits from sinking. I’m not sure it worked.

“It seems we’re more similar than I’d ever thought.” a familiar voice whispered..

My head snapped forwards and my eyes widened in surprise as I paused mid-step at the shadowy figure walking towards me.

My own face, a face that I'd grown familiar with in the last two months, headed closer. A frown covering his brows with an arrogant touch to his spirit. He wore the same outer robes I used to, but the clothes fit him much more than they had ever fit me.

I watched with a sinking heart as Lu Jie walked towards me.

“You’re… alive?” I asked, watching the boy walk closer. He held the same arrogance that I associated with cultivators, yet there was also exhaustion in each step he took.

“I am, or was. Until you took my name that is,” the boy said and I winced. I did do that, didn't I? I pretended to be him and lived his life in his stead. In my defence, I’d thought he was gone for good. Not that it’d have made me any more likely to give up… being alive.

I decided to put my moral quandary to the side.

“Well. Thanks for letting me borrow yours. I made sure not to tarnish your name too much, but a crazy young beauty thought you were into men. My bad for that,” I said out loud, trying to get a reaction out of him. Neither of us laughed.

An odd sensation filled my chest now that I was face to face with Lu Jie. Was this the end of my free life trial? Subscribe to the premium service for more? Subscription services didn’t want to leave me even in a whole other world goddamnit.

“You still don’t realise it do you?” Lu Jie asked me, and I raised my eyebrow.

“Not if you are all mysterious about it, no. If you tell me though, then I might,” I replied as Lu Jie continued to stare at me with a silent expression. Almost like Liuxiang, when he didn’t blink for a minute or two straight, but slightly more unnerving.

“What’s your name?” Lu Jie asked and I stared at him in confusion.

“What do you mean by my name?”I asked, baffled at the question. ”Of course, my name is Lu… Jie.”

My words died down, the moment I uttered them. I looked up at Lu Jie standing in front of me before my gaze drifted downwards, and onto my hands. They were shaking.

Lu Jie was the arrogant boy in front of me. The boy whose path ended early, but who stubbornly refused to accept his fate. The boy who had been beaten down by two young children and had lost his life in an unfortunate accident.

He was Lu Jie. But then… who was I?

“It hadn’t been until my so-called death that I had finally begun to realise who you truly are. Why do you think you remember my memories? Why is it so that, despite having an unfamiliar face and body, you moved as if it was your very own? As if you’d never had a doubt in the fact that this was you?” Lu Jie spoke, and I stared at him dumbfounded.

“You’ve been there all along. A bundle of memories. Right from my childhood, you were there. Little memories of a world I’d never seen or heard of. Things I’d never encountered coming to my memory. I had never understood it. The elders called me spirit touched, and sent me to the cultivators, who soon found potential in my spirit and Qi in my budding core,” Lu Jie said, as I sensed dark mist rising from his limbs.

“Do you know what they didn’t find? What I didn’t find until the very end? It was you,” Lu Jie said, his eyes burning as he stared into mine.

I stumbled back as if physically pushed. I was... what?

My lips parted, as I tried to desperately come up with a name, my name. To recall my memories, any memories. Of who I had been.

But, what I saw was not the modern home and my family, not the luxuries of the modern world and internet, but instead, a broken-down shack, and a kind man toiling in the fields.

“You are me,” Lu Jie said, continuing. “Or at least a part of me. I do not know what to call you, you have no name I know of besides my very own, Lu Jie. You have lived the same life I have. Even if you do not remember all of it. Same as how, I do not recall everything from our previous life,” Lu Jie said, and I clutched my head.

“Just, hold on, please. This is getting a bit too freaky,” said, stopping the boy as I stood in silence trying to sort my mind. A laughable notion, nothing made sense right now.

“I… am you. But not you? Like, hold on. So, you mean to say that I am a part of you and I’ve been here from the start? All those memories I thought were yours…they were me? Me from when you were running the body that is,” I asked, and Lu Jie nodded.

“They were both of us. You lived within my mind and you sometimes spoke when I slept instead. You have been my shadow, the hidden half that the world didn’t see. The difference between us… is not too clear. I am you but not complete. And the same goes for you,” Lu Jie said.

My heart thundered as I felt a headache mounting. My clothes began to shift as I now wore robes from this world. A world I’d lived in for years without being aware of it.

“Then… how come I’m the one running things now?” I asked, looking up at Lu Jie. “Or what, is this where you consume my spirit and become complete and ascend in your big dick quest to immortality as your spirit bloodline awakens or some shit?”

There was heat in my voice. I didn’t want to be reduced to nothingness again.

“No,” Lu Jie replied and I blinked in surprise.

“No? Just like that? You don’t want to be the one doing all the, you know, being alive and stuff?” I asked, surprised.

I would be suspicious of him but… somehow I knew he wasn’t lying. None of this was a lie. I could tell. I was him after all.

“I wish to, now that I’m awake again, the desire fills my heart once more. But I can’t. My spirit is still too weak, and I have changed. If I took over, we would both die,” Lu Jie said, his voice bitter.

“I’ve also had some time to observe you, and think about my life as you went about denying everything I’d lived for up until the very moment I’d died.” I winced once more. Self roasts sucked.

“I watched you through your journey, and I spent a lot of time thinking. I was arrogant, foolish, and frustrated. And I let my ambition and anger get the best of me. I had worked harder than anyone else, yet I’d found only half the result and ultimately, it led us to this,” Lu Jie said, extending his hand outwards and I watched the expression of muted sorrow cover his face.

“Well… yeah. You were kinda stupid honestly. Wait, I’m just roasting myself here, aren’t I? Damn it,” I muttered and was surprised when I heard a chuckle escape from Lu Jie’s mouth.

“I was, and I was a fool. That is another reason why I wish for you to return, instead of me. I wish to see just where your Path will take you. The insight that I couldn’t grasp within all these years, you managed to touch upon with such ease. Perhaps there is something within that yearning of knowledge and understanding, which separates us, but you have ignited my desire to see, and walk that Path with you,” Lu Jie said, as dark smoke whipped around him.

“Miasma… are you gonna go demonic batshit on me now?” I asked, trying to circulate my Qi when I soon realised the state of my dantian, sitting shattered in two.

“Odd for you to say that. Did you forget your own words? Energy is just energy. There is no good or evil within it,” Lu Jie said as he glided towards me.

“The insight I lacked. The reason why when you cultivate, you do so, not in one, but two cycles. It is me, and it is you. There are two of us, two that form the same whole. All my life, I’d cultivated only one half of my spirit, leaving the other behind. It is why it took me twice as long, and twice as much effort to get to where I was. But not anymore,” Lu Jie stared at me, and I found something in my spirit rising. I had an innate understanding of what I was meant to do here.

“It is time for us to be free.” Lu Jie said, extending his hand. Miasma rose around him, sizzling and hissing as it circulated the boy in a dark haze. And then the boy spoke, his words shaking my spirit.

“I am the Gu, the miasma, the poison, the death.”

“And I… am the Qi,” I whispered, extending my hand forwards. My spirit shuddered as I brushed my spirit against Lu Jie’s spirit.

The two halves of my shattered dantian split apart.

Miasma circled around me, mingling with Qi as two cycles formed. One flowing into the other, an eternal cycle that complemented one another.

The energies flowed, filling each half and complementing the other. The Qi filled mine, the Gu, Lu Jie’s.

Two cores shone within the darkness, revolving around each other like twin stars circling one another. One was black, filled with Miasma, the other, a pure white, filled with Qi.

There were the two of us, two halves of the same whole. And thus, so was our Path, made of not one, but two forces.

Something changed in my soul, in both of our souls. Words arose, from the depths of my being, marking themselves within my mind. The First Law within the path I walked, it revealed itself to me. And for the first time since I’d opened my eyes in this world, I felt complete.

The First Law of Cultivation: The Duality of Qi and Gu.

The Qi churned around me, mingling with the Gu from Lu Jie as a storm surrounded the two of us. I stared at Lu Jie, as he gave a wry smile, black hair whipping in the unseen wind as our spirits intertwined.

“I’ll see you soon, Lu Jie,” he muttered, as the storm swallowed us whole.