Redeeming the Broken Stars.

CHAPTER 10: AWAKENING IN FLESH NOT HIS OWN.

CHAPTER 10:

Pain. That was Kaelen's first thought upon regaining consciousness, not the sharp, clean pain of a blade through the heart, but something worse. 

A deep, fundamental wrongness that screamed through every nerve ending, as if his soul had been forced into a vessel three sizes too small and made of broken glass.

He tried to open his eyes. The simple act felt like lifting mountains.

When his vision finally cleared, he saw stone. Rough, grimy stone walls streaked with moisture and mold. 

Not the celestial jade of the Ashwright Sect's ceremonial chamber. Not the reality-warping void where the Devourers had descended to feed.

This was a mortal stone. Common. Worthless.

And it stank. Kaelen's next breath brought the overwhelming stench of refuse, unwashed bodies, and something sickly-sweet that might have been rotting meat. 

He gagged, or tried to, his body didn't respond properly to the command. Everything felt foreign, disconnected, as if he were operating a puppet through fraying strings.

Where am I?

The last thing he remembered was fragmentation. 

Being pulled apart across dimensions. The Devourers' terrible hunger. Old Moth's blind eyes promising survival at a terrible price.

And then... nothing. A void of consciousness. How long had he been scattered? Days? Weeks? Years?

He should be dead. He'd felt death, experienced the dissolution of self, the cosmic horror of being consumed by entities that existed outside mortal comprehension.

Yet here he was. Breathing. Thinking.

In someone else's body.

Kaelen finally managed to turn his head. 

The alley around him was narrow, barely wide enough for two people to walk side by side. 

Garbage piled in corners. A rat the size of a small dog watched him from a nearby heap of refuse, its eyes reflecting dim light from somewhere beyond the alley's mouth.

With tremendous effort, Kaelen raised his hand.

The hand that rose into his field of vision was not his own.

His, Kaelen Ashwright's, hands had been elegant, cultivator's hands refined through nineteen years of training. 

Strong but graceful, unmarred except for the calluses from weapon practice. 

These hands were skeletal, knuckles prominent beneath skin stretched too tight. Scars crisscrossed the fingers. Dirt caked under broken nails.

Horror bloomed in his chest.

He looked down at his body, this body. Thin to the point of emaciation, ribs visible through skin, covered in bruises at various stages of healing.

Ragged clothing that might once have been a robe hung from his frame like burial shrouds.

This wasn't his body. This wasn't even a cultivator's body.

This was the body of someone who'd lived hard and would die young.

Kaelen tried to access his cultivation base, to feel the familiar flow of spiritual energy through his meridians. What he found made him want to scream.

Shattered.

His meridians, no, this body's meridians, were destroyed.

Not damaged or blocked, but fundamentally broken, like rivers whose channels had been torn apart by some massive force. 

Dark veins traced visible patterns across his torso where meridian pathways should have flowed with qi. They looked like cracks in porcelain, except these cracks ran through flesh and bone.

No normal cultivation would ever be possible in this body. The foundation was gone, destroyed beyond any conventional repair.

Kaelen lay back against the alley wall, mind reeling.

“I'm alive. Somehow, impossibly, I survived the Convergence Sacrifice. But I'm trapped in a cripple's body in what appears to be the worst slum in the Nine Heavens.”

A laugh bubbled up from his chest, bitter, broken, edging toward hysteria. 

All those years of training. All that potential. The youngest Grandmaster candidate in three centuries, reduced to a street rat's corpse.

"Corpse" was the right word, he realized. 

This body had died. Recently. He could feel the lingering echo of death in the tissues, the way organs had begun shutting down before his consciousness arrived. 

Whatever had killed this body's original owner had happened within the last few days.

Which raised the question: whose body was this?

Kaelen closed his eyes, searching for memories that weren't his own. They came in fragments, broken and fading like dreams upon waking.

Zain. The body's name was Zain.

Seventeen years old, though malnutrition and hard living made him look both younger and older simultaneously. An orphan.

No family, no sect, no prospects. Survived by begging, stealing, doing whatever necessary to see another sunrise.

The memories showed Kaelen glimpses: hunger as a constant companion, cold nights in alleys like this one, learning to identify which merchants would give scraps and which would beat him for approaching their stalls.

And the shattered meridians? Those came from a botched cultivation attempt three years ago.

Zain had stolen a low-grade cultivation manual, tried to open his meridians without proper instruction or supervision.

The backlash had crippled him permanently, destroying any chance of rising above his station.

He'd died four days ago. Debt collectors from a local gang had found him in this alley, beaten him for money he didn't have. 

Internal bleeding. Slow death over days, alone and cold, too weak to even call for help.

An empty vessel. Perfect for a disembodied consciousness desperate for any anchor to reality.

Kaelen opened his eyes, staring at his, Zain's, scarred hands.

"I possessed a corpse," he said aloud, his voice rough and unfamiliar.

"The great Kaelen Ashwright, marked by the Convergence Star, prophesied to ascend to godhood, is now a crippled street rat in a dead boy's body." Kaelen Ashwright slowly muttered to himself as he examined the body.