The creaking of half-rotten wood filled the air as a matronly woman kneeled down next to a bedridden child, gently holding their hand.

  For a moment, the child looked to the woman, even the slightest movement of their head proving arduous.

  The woman met the child's fading eyes with a calm expression, holding their small palm gently, until at last, she knew the child's eyes no longer saw anything.

  Behind the woman, the door laid slightly ajar. An older child peered inside, having silently watched their sibling slowly pass away. 'Little Biya…'

  This impressionable child had just witnessed death for the first time in her life. She knew death existed, yet, as innocent as she was, she didn't understand it. Even now, she shouldn't understand death; no child should, even if they had been surrounded by it their whole life.

  For a child, death should be a simple thing, just a grim fact that some people will disappear from life without any good reason. But somehow, the girl understood death intimately.

  As the memory engraved itself into her mind, strange thoughts spilled out from deeper within her consciousness.

  'Souls clattering through the wheel of samsara, thrown to Diyu and bickered over by their blind idiot judges, tossed aside by the self-satisfied puritans of the bureaucracy and forced to drink that vile soup…'

  Her mind was flooded with thoughts not her own, laced with indignation and hate.

  As she looked towards the motionless form of her sibling, knowledge, memory, and sentiment bore down on her soul, the suffocating weight of another life's debris suppressing her consciousness, stifling all thought and motion.

  Her mind ground to a halt, and the girl's body fell, limp and unconscious, into the open door. As her body hit the floor, it sent a shock through the caretaker who was still at the side of the child inside. "Jun Li?!" The caretaker rushed to the girl's side.

  ...

  Memories flashed through Jun Li's mind, memories of flying through the skies, of wielding profound artifacts and esoteric techniques, memories of creating grand works and combating great dangers across a world unlike her own.

  But these were not her memories; they felt distanced from herself, like a vividly remembered story.

  In the moments after she awoke, these memories bewildered her, and in her state of confusion, she could do little but open her eyes and turn to look around her, at the room that suddenly felt so wholly unfamiliar, despite the fact that she had lived in this orphanage her whole life.

  The curtains of patchwork cloth that barely blocked the light of the sun, the dark and uneven wood panels that composed the floor and walls, and the rows of small beds she shared with her siblings, beds she had nearly outgrown, lined up against the walls.

  "Auntie! Jun Li is awake!" A younger boy hopped off a stool neighboring Jun Li's bed and rushed down to the hall.

  Before he even reached the door, the 'Auntie' he called for quickly walked into the room. "Jun Li… are you okay?" The caretaker woman knelt down to hold Jun Li's hand, startling her.

  The moment the caretaker touched Jun Li's hand, the child remembered what she had seen last night and wrenched her hand away. Caught off guard by her own reflex, Jun Li thought to apologize, but before she could, the caretaker spoke. "It's okay. As long as you're fine, it's okay."

  The caretaker looked at Jun Li with solemn concern, but didn't seem at all shaken by her reaction. After a moment, Jun Li spoke what few words she could muster in her disoriented state. "Thank you... I'll be fine, Auntie, really, I just need to rest some more..."

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  "If you need anything, please let me know." The caretaker stood and ushered the younger child, who had been standing in the doorway, out of the room with her. Jun Li found herself alone once more, with nothing but her muddled memories to keep her company.

  As she sank back into her bed, Jun Li's mind wasn't on the death of her sibling, but the death she 'remembered' from the distant past.

  She had died, she thought for a moment, only to internally self-correct, it wasn't her who died, but a vaguely remembered 'someone.' Someone whose fragmented memories had lain dormant inside her until now.

  "I was... no, they were an 'Immortal'?" It took a few minutes for Jun Li to understand 'who she was' and that despite her new memories, she ultimately hadn't become the person whose memories she now possessed. She had simply gained a new, and very different perspective on her life and the world around her.

  For half an hour, she searched her memories with wonder, each new sliver of her shattered inheritance revealing more and more of a world she could never have imagined.

  These memories were not so clear that she could fully remember things like sights and experiences, but instead, they were a more intimate 'knowing' of myriad facts, works, and methods that this mysterious Immortal had discerned in life.

  As Jun Li struggled to figure out who that 'Immortal' was, she finally found part of the answer in their memories. That mysterious Immortal had engraved a spell upon their soul designed to pass through the cycle of death and rebirth without losing their memories and individuality.

  Perhaps it would have worked as they intended if their soul had not been so badly damaged when they died. In the end, it resulted in the shattered soul being 'misplaced,' and for most of the fragments to seep into a whole, undamaged soul in the cycle of rebirth.

  The remainder of the Immortal's soul mustn't have even been whole enough to survive the process.

  Regardless of how it happened, what mattered most to Jun Li was the fact that it could change her life for the better. "Cultivation..."

  It wasn't as though she had never heard the term before; the Auntie of her orphanage had told her stories about Cultivators, and even mentioned a local Sect before.

  But she had never heard anything about Cultivators that matched up with what her memories told her.

  The concept of a human becoming immortal, of all things, was so far out of her understanding that she doubted her mind for a while.

  But, she couldn't convince herself she had gone crazy, nor could she just ignore it.

  Despite trying to suppress it, she had become rather excited at the prospect of becoming a Cultivator. "How does all this work then?" Jun Li whispered to herself as she searched her memories to try and figure out how to begin.

  "I should sit… like this?" Jun Li seated herself upright in the lotus position as though it were second nature. "Focus, breathe steadily, and try to perceive the... 'Spiritual Energies of Heaven and Earth' was it?" Jun Li mused to herself as she sifted through her new memories.

  A minute passed, and another, then another. Eventually, her confusion overtook her. 'Well, this is a bit relaxing, but I can't feel anything?' she thought, searching her memories for an explanation.

  Did she not have any talent for it? That couldn't have been the case, even if she had no real talent, she should still be able to perceive Spiritual Energy with the correct practices.

  Perhaps something was wrong with her body. Was her Dantian, where energy accumulates, damaged? Were her Meridians, where energy flows, broken?

  Impossible. If either of these were the case, she surely would have had rather extreme health conditions in the past. Then, what was it?

  As she racked her brain trying to find an explanation, almost believing she really had gone crazy, she finally realized something. 'These stories don't match up…?'

  The stories her Auntie told her about Cultivators in her world didn't match those of the Cultivators in her memories.

  There, Cultivators were esoteric sages and magic users who tried to understand and manipulate the mysteries of the world. But in her Auntie's stories, they were superhuman martial artists who wielded powerful and esoteric martial techniques that let them fight whole armies of normal humans alone.

  After thinking for a moment more, Jun Li found an explanation in her new memories. 'There's... not enough Spiritual Energy in this world to Cultivate...?'

  She realized that the Cultivators in her world couldn't be the 'Daoist Cultivators' from her memories, the ones that cultivated Spiritual Energy, but were instead 'Martial Cultivators' who used Qi.

  The realization had left her dazed, almost completely ruining her hopes of becoming a Cultivator. Even though she knew her newfound memories would help her on the path ahead, it had taken the wind out of her sails.

  For a moment, she stopped thinking about such fanciful things and remembered her reality.

  "Ahh..." Jun Li cast her gaze down. "Little Biya... really died..."