Stirring Two Souls Together

Kraft woke with the skull-splitting headache of a night of post-exam revelry and found himself sprawled over a letter.

Despite the dim light, he could clearly see that drool had soaked one corner of the paper, spreading across the slightly yellowed, rough surface. Several letters crammed into the corner had already blurred beyond recognition.

Beside the letter lay a dip pen. Even though the ink on its nib had dried into clumps and its pattern and model were impossible to make out, he could tell it was definitely not the dip pen he'd bought on Taobao for twenty yuan with free shipping and a stack of paper. That one might have been a defective product of modern industry, but it was not primitive and crude to this extent.

His numbed hand could feel tiny splinters along the pen shaft. Writing with this thing would be enough to rival the techniques of one of Harry Potter's Dark Arts professors.

Of course, the pen's weirdness was not even one ten-thousandth as strange as his own behavior. His bleary eyes swept over the beginning of the letter, and—well, damn. An English letter addressed to Grandfather? At least, it looked like English. Writing an English letter to a grandfather in the countryside who had never learned English in his life was so baffling that it almost made him suspect he had been working on one of those cliché English exams earlier.

Kraft naturally reached for his pocket, but there was nothing inside. He felt as though he ought to be carrying some hard object with him, and the emptiness was deeply unsettling. He rubbed his eyes and instinctively looked around, trying to find what he wanted.

Apart from the paper and pen, the rough wooden tabletop held only a candle burned down to a stub. It was the source of the dim yellow light, not the familiar little desk lamp. That made things even more confusing. He should have been in his dormitory, not in a scene straight out of a horror movie, yet another thought lingered in his mind, insisting that everything was perfectly normal.

He rose smoothly, without the slightest dizziness from standing after sitting too long, without numb legs. His body leaned forward naturally; his breathing muscles, familiar yet unfamiliar, were strong and powerful. The air blown from his lungs snuffed out the candle. His body stretched in the darkness, and he could feel the easy movement of his limbs and muscles—a supple, healthy sensation he had not felt in a long time.

Feeling along his pockets, he walked toward the bedside his subconscious remembered. His familiarity with the dark startled even him for a moment. With almost uncanny precision, he sat squarely on the edge of the bed and lifted the covers, preparing to properly sleep.

In the dark, warm surroundings, thoughts that had been suppressed by his headache began to surface. He thought of his grandfather, whom he had not seen in a long time. It seemed like half a year had passed, yet it also seemed like less than two months.

His chaotic, blurred memories were as bizarre as AI-generated art. At times, the old man wore reading glasses and flipped through obscure traditional Chinese medical texts on a table covered by a sheet of glass. At other times, he leaned on a two-handed sword while speaking to someone in robes.

The shifting background switched back and forth between a small Western-style country house and heavy granite walls. Fragmented voices echoed endlessly by his ears, but when he listened closely, he could not make out what they were saying. His memories had become a bizarre blend like strawberry mapo tofu, and stranger still, he felt that none of it conflicted.

Of course, before he fell completely asleep, he groped around for that thing a third time. First beside the pillow and at the head of the bed, then beneath the covers. After quite a while, he finally remembered what exactly he was looking for.

Where's my phone?!

What was a phone again?

My phone, where's my phone?

What the hell was a phone?!

I lost my phone?!

After a bout of panic, his brain, free of drowsiness and pain, became completely clear. Things were clear now.

Some otherworldly thing had spent the entire night celebrating after an exam. After some fortunate accident that might have allowed his roommates to smoothly advance to the next stage of their studies, he himself had perhaps, because his merits in enlightening others had reached completion—or for some fantastical reason that no third-rate novelist could come up with—been inexplicably thrown into another world, bidding farewell to subhealth from then on.

Perhaps the long journey had caused some loss. This soul, whose right and wrong could hardly be explained, no longer remembered even his own name, though the knowledge points he had memorized before the exam were still etched in his mind.

As for the original owner of this sturdy body, he had been a spirited young country nobleman. Raised from childhood under his grandfather's traditional physical education, he had grown up while helping build a small castle that spanned three generations. His PE classes had mainly consisted of swinging a two-handed sword like a windmill.

At around the age of ten, under the persuasion of his barely literate grandfather, Kraft had begun developing into a cultured man. Through the standard agony of education, Teacher Anderson had not very smoothly taught him this local alphabetic script that looked like English, sounded like English, and was written like English, but was not English. From then on, Kraft became the first literate member of his family in three generations who could read and write fluently on his own.

So, the two of them now faced one piece of good news and one piece of bad news:

The bad news was that they had been thoroughly mixed together. You were in me, and I was in you; there was probably no separating them for the rest of their lives.

The good news was that they had been mixed so thoroughly that they could be called an entirely new individual. The memories and thoughts in their mind flowed into one another, like soy sauce poured into vinegar, Pepsi mixed with Coca-Cola, or Sprite mixed into red wine. For now, even if they did not possess the strengths of both, at least there seemed to be no sign of rejection.