It started with a hum.

  A low, flickering vibration from overhead lights—too pale, too sterile.

  Li Chen didn’t notice. He hadn’t noticed much in years.

  The spreadsheets bled into one another, lines dancing under his dry eyes.

  One more report. One more entry. One more line of garbage for an audit no one would read.

  His head throbbed. His nose dripped.

  He sniffed hard and wiped it with the back of his hand.

  The blood was dark and wet.

  His vision blurred. The cubicle spun. The glow of the monitor stung like judgment.

  The floor seemed distant. The weight in his limbs unbearable.

  Then—darkness. Sudden, vast, and absolute.

  The ink smelled bitter.

  Parchment rustled like leaves in a storm. The air was thick with dust and sweat and silent shame.

  He was kneeling.

  No—someone was kneeling. Was it him? It felt like it.

  He looked up. Wooden columns loomed. The sunlight filtered through paper windows.

  A board stood ahead, towering and final. Names in sharp black strokes.

  His chest tightened.

  Not a single one matched.“He failed again.”

  “Four times. Heaven has forsaken him.”

  Voices whispered behind him. They were faceless. Familiar.

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  His heart pounded as if to rip free. The linen of his scholar’s robe clung to his back, soaked in fear. He looked down. His hands were thinner, paler—not his.

  He tried to speak, but the words lodged in his throat like bone.

  Cold plastic against his face.

  A gasp. Light. Gloves. Voices.

  “BP’s bottoming out!”

  “Get the paddles—clear!”

  Chest compressed. Once. Twice.

  The beeping grew frantic.

  He wasn’t breathing.

  He vomited bile onto stone tiles.

  The examination courtyard tilted around him.

  Heat bloomed from his spine outward, like a coal buried beneath skin.

  His vision danced with spirals—brush strokes, failure notices, red circles around wrong answers.

  Laughter—mocking. Then nothing.

  He collapsed, twitching in his fevered robes.

  A woman’s voice trembled, far away:

  “He’s thirty-four… how is this happening?”

  “No response. Pulse is gone—again.”

  Another jolt. His limbs lifted off the bed. His fingers curled involuntarily.

  Silence.

  The parchment burned in his hand.

  A scroll writhed like a living thing, curling in heatless flame.

  And the fever took hold fully.

  The last thing he felt before vanishing was the heat.

  Suffocating. Humid. Pulsing under the skin like disease or divinity.

  Darkness closed in.

  And in that dark—

  Something stirred.

  [End of Prologue]