SECOND LIFE, BORROWED NAME

Chapter 2: A Body That Cannot Lie

The problem, Ren Xiao decided within his first hour of consciousness in this wretched, starving, twig-thin body, was that everything about it lied to him.

Forty years of muscle memory told his legs to move a certain way, and his legs simply did not have the strength to obey. His hands remembered the exact weight and balance of seventeen different blades, and these hands shook too hard to hold a training sword steady for longer than a few breaths. His mind still calculated angles and openings with the same cold speed it always had that, at least, the fall through death hadn't touched but the body meant to execute those calculations was a broken instrument, undernourished and untrained, with a cultivation root the sect records apparently rated as unworthy of classification.

He had escaped the training yard with his life and very little else. A scraped forearm. A twisted ankle he was fairly sure wasn't actually his own bad luck so much as this body's chronic malnourishment making every joint fragile as dry wood. And a piece of information that mattered more than either: the three disciples who'd tried to kill him had backed off not because they were afraid of him they weren't, correctly but because they were afraid of being caught doing something an elder might object to.

Good, he thought, sitting in the dark of what he now knew was his assigned quarters a converted storage shed at the very edge of the outer disciple dormitories, barely large enough to lie down in. Fear of consequences is still fear. I can work with fear of consequences.

He spent the night doing the only thing his new body would reliably allow: thinking.

Ren Xiao's memories of the real Ren Xiao, the boy whose skin he now wore surfaced in fragments as the night wore on, and each one made the picture clearer and worse. Orphaned at birth, taken in by the Azure Hollow Sect only because sect law required them to test every child born within a hundred li for cultivation potential. Tested. Found wanting not merely weak, but the weakest, a root so thin the examining elder had reportedly laughed. Kept on as unpaid labor rather than turned out to starve, because turning out a tested child was bad luck by sect superstition, and because unpaid labor was still labor.

Seventeen years of being told, in every possible way a world can tell a child such a thing, that he was worth less than the mud he swept off the training grounds.

They have no idea what they're keeping in this shed, Xue Wuchen thought, and something in him something he hadn't expected to survive death, something almost like fondness softened, just slightly, toward the boy whose body and name he now carried. Well. We'll fix that. Slowly. Quietly. In an order of my choosing.

The larger problem the problem that actually mattered surfaced somewhere near dawn, when he'd finally organized his thoughts into something resembling a plan.

I was murdered by seven of my most trusted people, in my own throne room, on the same night I was planning to move against three noble houses who'd been quietly building an army behind my back.

Someone benefited from my death. Multiple someones, most likely.

And whoever they are, they are still out there, in an empire I no longer recognize, wearing whatever version of history they've decided to tell about the man they killed.

He didn't know yet how much time had passed. He didn't know if this sect, this training yard, this shed with its leaking roof, existed in the same era he'd died in, or a hundred years later, or somewhere in between. He didn't know who currently sat on the throne he'd bled out on top of.

What he knew, with total certainty, was that whoever had killed him had not expected him to come back.

That mistake, Xue Wuchen intended to make very, very expensive.

A knock came at the door of the shed just as the sky was beginning to grey — three sharp raps, impatient, the knock of someone who did not expect to be kept waiting.

"Ren Xiao." A girl's voice, sharp-edged, clearly irritated at having drawn this particular duty. "Elder Kang wants you at the outer courtyard. Now. Apparently you're being tested today."

Ren Xiao's borrowed memories supplied a name to match the voice Mei Lian, a mid-ranked disciple three years his senior, assigned on rotation to keep half an eye on the sect's lowest-ranked failures so nobody could later claim they'd been entirely neglected.

He opened the door. She was already turning to leave, clearly not expecting or wanting a conversation.

"Tested for what?" he asked.

Mei Lian turned back, and whatever she saw in his face made her pause half a step longer than she meant to.

"You don't know?" A frown crossed her face, quick and searching. "It's your reclassification trial. Once every three years, every unclassified disciple gets one more chance to prove they've got a cultivation root worth keeping around." Her eyes narrowed slightly. "You look different today, Ren Xiao. Did something happen to you last night?"

Everything, he thought. Everything happened.

"I slept poorly," he said instead, and watched her decide visibly, on her face whether that was worth pursuing.

It wasn't, not yet. She turned and walked off toward the courtyard, and Ren Xiao followed a half-step behind, cataloguing everything about her as he went the way she moved, the sword at her hip, the particular caution in how she watched the compound around her, like a person who'd learned young not to trust that safety was ever guaranteed.

She notices things, he thought. That will be useful, or it will be dangerous. Possibly both.

He had no idea, walking into that courtyard on legs that could barely carry him, that within the hour he would do something with this broken, rootless, unclassified body that no elder at Azure Hollow Sect had a framework to explain and that the first person to see it happen would be the same sharp-eyed girl walking silently beside him.