Ren Wu died at 11:42 PM on a Tuesday.
He didn't see it coming. He was too busy staring at a calculus problem about the conservation of energy.
Energy cannot be created or destroyed, the textbook said. Only transformed.
"Ren!"
His grandmother's voice didn't just drift up the stairs. It cracked through the house like a whip.
Ren dropped his pen. He ran. He knew that tone. It wasn't her "dinner is ready" voice. It was her "something is in the house" voice.
The air downstairs tasted of burning sage. His grandmother stood by the door, her knuckles white against her prayer beads.
Between them sat a crate. Wet. Heavy. Dripping with rain that looked too dark to be water.
"The return address is Site 404, Shaanxi," she whispered, backing away. "Ren. Do not touch it."
Ren looked at the box. His parents were archaeologists. They sent weird gifts all the time—broken pottery, dust, coins. But they never sent things that made the shadows in the hallway stretch toward them.
"It's just a replica, Grandma."
"It is not."
Ren grabbed the crowbar. He was eighteen. He believed in thermodynamics, not ghosts.
He wedged the iron under the lid.
CRACK.
The wood splintered.
Inside lay a box carved from obsidian. It absorbed the hallway light, drinking it in. It wasn't a jewelry box.
It was a coffin.
"Ren, no!"
Logic told him it was stone. Instinct screamed at him to run.
Ren reached out.
His finger brushed the cold black surface.
ZAP.
00:01.
The universe didn't blink. It tore in half.
Ren was ripped out of his body. It wasn't like fainting; it was like being pulled through the eye of a needle. The hallway, the rain, the calculus textbook—they didn't just vanish. They were rendered insignificant. Dust.
00:05.
Time dilated. One second stretched into a thousand years.
Ren stood on a platform of white jade that hovered over a burning world. The air tasted of copper and ozone—the taste of a spell that had just killed a million men.+1
He tried to breathe, but the lungs he inhabited were vast, ancient, and filled with the dust of empires.
He looked down.
The hands gripping the railing were pale, scarred, and encased in sleeves of black silk embroidered with dragons that seemed to writhe in pain.
Where am I? Ren screamed in the silence of his mind.
Home, the Entity whispered back.
00:15.
The memories didn't come sequentially. They hit him all at once.
Ren felt the weight of a crown that had fused to his skull. He felt the phantom pain of a thousand betrayals. He felt the cold, intoxicating rush of holding a Seal that could command the sun to stop rising.
He wasn't Ren Wu, the high school student.
He was the Grand Shaman. The Minister of the Left. The Man Who Buried the Gods.
A sea of soldiers knelt before him. Not hundreds. Millions. Endless rows of terracotta warriors with hollow eyes burning with blue soul-fire.
00:28.
A man in scholar's robes stepped forward on the jade platform. He held a fan made of human bone.
"The Emperor has requested your death," the scholar said. His voice was soft, like a knife cutting silk. "The ritual is complete. You are too dangerous to exist."
Ren felt a spike of modern panic. Run. He's going to kill us.
But the shaman didn't run.
The shaman felt... bored.
00:35.
Ren tried to keep his mouth shut, but the shaman's will was a tsunami. It crushed Ren's consciousness into the corner of his own brain.
The mouth opened.
"You think a mortal decree can dismiss me?"
The voice wasn't sound. It was Authority. It shook the jade platform. It cracked the sky. Ren felt the vibration shatter his own ribs from the inside out.
00:42.
The scholar stopped smiling. He pointed the fan at the sky.
"Then perish."
The clouds ripped open.
It wasn't a hand. It was the judgment of the Heavens. A massive, skeletal claw the size of a mountain descended, wreathed in lightning that erased existence.
The shadow of death fell over them. It was absolute. Inescapable.
Ren screamed. We're going to die!
The shaman sneered.
He didn't look at the giant hand coming to crush him. He looked at the scholar.
"I will remember this," the shaman whispered. And for the first time, Ren felt the Entity's true emotion. Not fear.
Hunger.
00:47.
IMPACT.
The world didn't go black. It went white.
Ren felt every bone in the avatar's body turn to powder. He felt the soul being ripped out of the flesh, shredded, and stuffed into a black box. He felt the agonizing, claustrophobic darkness of 2,000 years of imprisonment.
GASSSSP.
Ren arched off the floor.
He wasn't on the jade platform. He was on the hallway rug.
But the echo of the shaman's broken spine was still snapping in his ears. Ren vomited air, clawing at his chest, trying to dig the ancient silk robes off his skin, but finding only a damp t-shirt.
He looked up.
His eyes were burning. Not with tears.
With green fire.
He grabbed his grandmother's wrist. He didn't see an old woman. He saw a civilian. A subject.
He opened his mouth to ask for help.
"ZHAO HUAN!"
The command tore out of his throat. It wasn't a word; it was a shockwave.
The lightbulb in the hallway exploded. POP.
Ren blinked. The green faded. He slumped back, coughing as if he had swallowed hot coals.
"What..." Ren wheezed. "What... did I just say?"
His grandmother didn't answer. She pulled her wrist away, trembling. She looked at him with a specific kind of horror—not like a grandmother looking at a boy, but like a rabbit noticing a wolf in the room.
Ren looked at his shaking hand.
He thought of his textbook upstairs.
Energy cannot be created or destroyed.
He felt a cold draft on his neck.
Only transformed.
From the shadows of the open coffin, Ren felt something looking back at him.
And it was hungry.