Do it.Kaelen's mental voice broke on the word. So just... just save us. I don't care what it costs.I'M GIVING YOU PERMISSION!
But how am I supposed to do it. Come on. This isn't a fantastical stuff that happens in movies. Shen Yue screamed in her mind to the bird-brained boy.[1]
But before she could roast his intelligence further, their mindscape echoed with the weight of the contract law, which in this world was a powerful binding as any signature on paper. This was consent given in extremis but it was consent nonetheless.
Shen Yue, who had died in a different world and trapped into a hopeless body with a depressed soul, who had been reborn into someone else's flesh without asking, who had become a passenger of a sinking ship, made her choice.
Time seemed to fracture into a dual existence; in the dim reality, the little Chan'er's tear-stained face was a blur as she strained to hoist Kaelen's limp weight, but in the luminous theater of his mind, a violent majesty was unfolding. An ethereal limb manifested within Kaelen's ocular vision. It was not reaching for help but for dominion. With a thunderous silent crash that rattled the boy's very soul sea, her mental hand slammed onto the cover of the hovering Bronze Grimoire, an object invisible to the world, yet blindingly real to them. The impact forced the ancient pages to submit, crushing the binding beneath a decision-making power so absolute that the air around Kaelen's physical body shimmered with a heatless distortion.
The boy's eyes rolled back, pupils dilating as the ancient pact reversed its fundamental nature. Where summoners and cultivators typically drew beasts forth to serve, this contract inverted as the master's consciousness dived like a falcon into prey, not to command from without but to inhabit from within. The grimoire pages turned of their own accord, blazing with characters, transforming summoning circles into possession seals and partnership runes into dominion marks. This was acknowledging a terrifying anomaly: the "Summoner" was the intruder and the boy was merely the high-grade beast being claimed. The grimoire accepted her spiritual signature and overwrite his own, effectively sealing him within his own flesh as a vessel while she took the helm, turning the boy into a human-shaped guardian beast under her total command.
Kaelen's body arched impossibly backward jerking in seizure-like spasms while two opposing souls warred for occupancy of a single mortal frame. When Kaelen's eyes snapped open again, they held a different weight, a foreign intelligence peering through borrowed windows. The body remained his, every scar and callus intact, but the presence animating it had changed— it was a master wearing flesh like an ill-fitting glove, neural pathways still sparking with resistance as her consciousness ruthlessly overwrote his motor controls, his memories, his very identity compressed into a corner of what had once been entirely his own mind.
The entire possession—the shattering of will, the binding of contract and overwriting of Kaelen's helm had consumed barely two heartbeats. Two seconds of eternity compressed into the space between one breath and the next.[2]
The attacking beast was still mid-lunge, jaws stretched impossibly wide, backward-jointed legs coiled for the killing strike. Chan'er had squeezed her eyes shut, small hands still gripping Kaelen's arm in futile desperation waiting for the wet crunch of teeth through bone. But when she forced her eyes open, everything had changed.
The beast hung suspended in air with its grotesque body muscles locked in mid-contraction as if someone had frozen time itself. Then its head snapped sideways with a sickening crack as its fungal growths along its spine shriveled inward, spores ceasing their toxic cascade. As it slummed on the ground, its pupils that were previously feral and mindless, suddenly dilated to pinpricks. It was dead!
Chan'er stared; mouth agape, her small hands finally releasing Kaelen's arm. The boy's body stood differently now—weight distributed with predatory grace he'd never possessed, head tilted at an angle that suggested something studying the world through unfamiliar eyes. When he—she—spoke, the voice was no longer Kaelen's submissive voice but feminine vocal cords shaped around cadence that had never been his.
"Are you okay?"
"The Summoner's contract saved us! It killed the Wényì Quǎn!" Little Chan'er who was hopeless a few moments ago was overjoyed her face radiant with smile.
"What is Wényì Quǎn?" Shen Yue asked in genuine concern.
"Come on Kaelen. Don't you know how we call Plague Hounds, that beast over there." Chan'er said while pointing at it.
"Oh I see. How did Summoner's contract save us?" She tried pressing further.
"Kaelen! You are acting dumb today. Summoner's contract law protects the summoner while summoning their beasts and cannot be harmed by any attacker. It usually...Wait a minute! Wait! What's happening here? Did you really... You had no beast to summon so why did it protect you? And has your voice changed?"
"What?"
Shen Yue suddenly realized what had happened after the contract between her and Kaelen. Had the boy consciousness vanished ?
"Kaelen! Are you in there? Talk to me if you can still hear me. Hello..."
She was panicking and didn't realize she had voiced her mental voice out loud that Chan'er stared at her with genuine interest.
"Are you okay gege Kaelen?" Chan'er asked holding Shen Yue's hand.
Shen Yue walked over to the dead Plague hound and kneeled beside to study its features. She was feeling a bit free adjusting to this boy's body, not as shared space but as sole owner; not probably the legitimate one. She didn't understand why she had sudden urge to consume something. She didn't care for the howling voices far inside the cave where Lord WuJi was fighting; not even the SaoYu, including Gu Tian, who had already fled leaving them behind. Shen Yue stretched one hand and touched the hound. She felt relieving.
The sensation was indescribable. Imagine swallowing grave dirt. Now imagine that dirt is alive, squirming and it's mixed with liquid lightning that freezes instead of burns. Imagine feeling it slide down your throat; feeling it because you're hyper-aware of every nerve ending suddenly and into your stomach where it doesn't just sit. It turns into something solid and a foreign object that your body recognizes as fundamentally incompatible with life.
Her heart stuttered.
Thud.
Heavy and mechanical.
Thud.
Steady and deliberate. The same rhythm.
The pain was exquisite. Every nerve ending lit up simultaneously sending signals that overwhelmed her brain's ability to process them. It was hot, cold, empty, pleasurable, and feeling of agony all at once, contradicting each other with each sensation as real and intense as the others.
"Kaelen?" Chan'er's voice was thin, distant, barely audible.
But Kaelen couldn't answer and neither could Shen Yue who was the current Kaelen.
This part to the rows of stars is Shen Yue in mind space to take over fully...no spoiler just clarification[3]
Because inside the mindscape, inside the previously shared space where two consciousnesses had been coexisting in uncomfortable proximity, everything had changed. The mindscape had never been clearly defined before. It was more a concept than a place, a shared awareness that existed in the overlap between Kaelen's thoughts and Shen Yue's presence. But now it had the whole architecture.
Kaelen stood, or the mental construct that represented Kaelen , in what vast space surrounded with darkness. In the center was a chair, the pilot's seat, the throne of consciousness.
Shen Yue sat in it. She looked solid now. She was no longer the ghost-impression she'd been but an actual presence, wearing the face and form she'd had in her previous life. Twenty seven years old, sharp-eyed, dressed casually that looked absurdly out of place in this mental space.
"Wait." Kaelen's voice echoed weird in this space reverberating off walls that shouldn't exist. He tried to move toward her, toward the chair but found he couldn't. His feet were... stuck? No, not stuck. He just couldn't move forward like there was an invisible wall. "Shen Yue? What's... why can't I..."
Connection to his body was severing. Thread by thread, sensation by sensation. He could still see through his eyes but the feeling of being behind those eyes, of inhabiting that flesh, was draining away like water through a sieve. He couldn't feel his fingers anymore. His toes were no longer his. The weight of his tongue in his mouth, the rate of breathing, the texture of fabric against skin all of it... fading.
"No." The word came out small. Confused. "No, wait. Shen Yue? This isn't... I can't... why is everything getting dark?"
Shen Yue turned in the chair—his chair, the chair that should have been his and looked at him. Her expression was complicated. Sad, guilty but also... determined. The look of someone who'd made a hard choice and was going to live with it.
"I'm sorry, kid. I have to do this." Her voice resonated through the mindscape with the weight of absolute authority, the voice of someone who'd just been granted root access to another person's soul.
Kaelen felt an invisible force that was simultaneously gentle and absolutely irresistible dragging him away into the darkness.
"No, wait!" Kaelen screamed.
The door to the conscious mind slammed shut. The sound it made was final like a bank vault sealing, all those precision tumblers clicking into place. Through the closing gap, Kaelen caught one last glimpse of Shen Yue in his chair looking out through his eyes. And then there was only darkness...
*****************************************************************************************
"Kaelen! Wake up! It's Chan'er!" A distant voice suddenly pulled Shen Yue back to consciousness.
Shen Yue rolled her new shoulders testing range of motion. The muscles were weak and malnourished. The body carried the physical legacy of fourteen years of poverty and recent weeks of torture but it would do. Bodies were just vehicles and people could steal vehicles and learn to drive.
The legs that had been stumbling in blind panic moved with purpose. She turned , facing the darkness behind them where howling and chittering still echoed, where shapes moved in the shadows with too many legs.
"Kaelen?"
Shen Yue smiled. It was the wrong smile. It belonged on a corporate strategist who'd just cornered a market, not a terrified fourteen-year-old boy running for his life.
"Not anymore, sweetheart." Shen Yue's voice came out of Kaelen's throat. "You can call me Yue now."
[1] Notice the mind conversation is in italics
[2] I hope you noted the soul binding contract took place while the beast was still attacking them. It seems eternity but it was barely three seconds. Chan'er was holding her hand all along
[3] I thought it needed little bit explanation since... u know its new genre and might be confusing