Ethan Zhou

The space was not his.

It had once been something closer to a personal sanctum—disciplined, sealed, spiritual in form. A place for breathwork, breakthrough, and internal cultivation. It had angles then. Harmonized planes. A floating core matrix suspended in spiritual balance.

Now?

Now it looked like a memory theatre designed by a sentimental drunk, a nasty but sentimental drunk.

Curved walls of translucent mana flowed like smoke. Memory threads drifted through the air in glowing loops. Screens hovered at odd angles, playing back flickers of sound and color—bright flashes from a world that wasn’t his.

Ethan sat cross-legged on a floating platform of jade-glass and spirit steel, surrounded by pieces of Daniel Zhou’s life.

He watched a screen showing a crowded subway. Daniel was maybe fourteen. Earbuds in. A hoodie too big for him. Everyone was ignoring each other, which seemed to be the custom of this place.

Another pane showed a classroom. Someone was giving a presentation on planetary geology. Daniel was pretending to pay attention while drawing complex runic circles in his notebook, labeling them “lightning chakra super mode.”

Ethan stared at the note. “You learned cultivation theory from cartoons,” he murmured. “And somehow, you’re still alive.”

The archive flickered and a new series of panes spun into view—Daniel’s first time in a gym. Shaky punches and the glistening sweat followed by the wide-eyed confusion of someone realizing that fantasy had very little to do with impact mechanics.

Ethan watched Daniel's first spar.

He watched his first loss.

Then he smiled as he watched the first time Daniel got back up after being beaten down.

Ethan watched all three and couldn't stop himself from grinning.

“Resilient,” he muttered. “Clumsy. But resilient.”

Another thread wove down—pink-tinted lighting and awkward laughter. A bedroom. A body. The fumbling intimacy of two teenagers who thought they were ready.

Ethan snapped his fingers, and the thread folded itself shut with a polite blink. “Absolutely not.”

Even the spirit-echo had the decency to blur the sound. That is what it wasn't that is what it had been since Ethan found himself a prision in his own vessel. Stuck in his own soul space watching Daniel live his life in a way better way than he ever could.

All of the memories, shows and experiences, were interesting but what fascinated Ethan more than anything was the culture, scale and chaos of Daniel’s world.

Screens showed cities that burned with light even at midnight. Skyscrapers. Music so loud it made the walls tremble. People arguing over absolutely nothing with total conviction on something called "Twitter."

And everywhere—screens. People watched their lives through them. Through windows that weren’t windows. Through moving pictures, twenty-four frames at a time. Daniel had watched shows where people pretended to be other people, for money. And people paid to watch them.

Ethan tilted his head, baffled.

“So... entertainment is pretending to be sad and hot for public approval? Gods. No wonder you think our world is insane.”

He turned back to the core’s edge. A section of memory threads hovered like a curtain, labeled in Daniel’s mental voice with names like:

* The Time I Thought I Had a Plan

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* When She Laughed at My Shirt

* Best Night, Worst Morning

* I Should’ve Said Something

Ethan stepped past them. He paused at one pane: Daniel sitting alone on a couch, watching a screen flicker. It was a scene from an old cultivation movie—low-budget, absurdly choreographed, but strangely earnest.

Daniel had paused it, taken notes. He wanted to learn sword forms from it.

“You built your foundation on fiction,” Ethan said aloud, awed. “And yet...”

He didn’t finish the sentence. Because somehow, it worked. That was the thing Ethan hadn’t fully wrapped his head around. Not the memories. Not the body. Not the strange nostalgia stitched into every ordinary moment of Daniel’s life.

It was the understanding.

They shouldn’t be able to talk. Daniel spoke a language called English. Ethan had grown up speaking Vael’taric, the high-script dialect of the Empire. A language so precise it could double as a mana-weaving matrix. They didn’t share grammar, syntax, or even an alphabet.

And yet?

They spoke to each other.

“Perfect comprehension. No delay. No friction,” Ethan murmured, glancing up at the glowing memory pillars above him. “We don’t just translate. We understand.”

It made no sense.

Daniel could read spirit-scripts written in Vael’taric glyph logic—something that took Ethan years to master.

Daniel could write in it, when prompted.

“Something’s bridging the gap,” Ethan whispered. “Some magic we didn’t create. Something embedded deeper than thought. Maybe deeper than soul.”

It wasn’t just possession. It wasn’t just body-sharing.

It was... synchronization.

And Ethan wasn’t sure who—or what—was responsible for that.

But as he looked around, surrounded by birthday parties, cheap ramen dinners, silent walks through parking lots, screen-lit all-nighters, and long bus rides into nowhere, one thing became clear:

Daniel hadn’t been preparing for war.

He’d just been living.

And now, somehow, that life was going to save this world.

There were fewer combat memories than Ethan expected.

He’d assumed that Daniel’s mind would echo with violence—sparring, screaming, the chaos of injury. But that wasn’t what lingered in the inner world. Not here. Not in this space.

What remained were quieter things.

A hallway after school.

The crunch of gravel beneath shoes as Daniel waited for a train.

The flicker of a phone screen against his face in the dark—scrolling through messages he never sent, faces he never replied to.

Ethan drifted between the echoes like a man walking through another man’s dreams.

Not to change them. Not to claim them.

Just to understand.

One thread caught him off-guard.

Daniel—maybe fifteen—was sitting cross-legged in a bedroom that looked more like a storage closet. Posters on the wall. A desk lamp flickering overhead. He was reading something—an old fantasy novel with a creased spine and too many margin notes.

But he wasn’t smiling.

He was mouthing the words, softly, like trying to remember who he was.

The whole room pulsed with the quiet ache of someone who wanted out—not from danger, but from the dullness of being ordinary.

“You weren’t running,” Ethan whispered

. “You were waiting.”

The screen dimmed.

Ethan let it.

In another pane, Daniel was arguing with his mother in a kitchen full of steam. Something about scholarships. Tuition. Getting a real job. Being realistic.

Ethan didn’t even flinch. He’d seen versions of this argument before. The location changed. The language changed. The world changed.

But the theme?

The theme was always the same.

“You’re not what they expected,” he thought. “And neither was I.”

A flicker of warmth drew his attention.

Daniel—older now, maybe eighteen—standing under a parking lot light with someone Ethan didn’t recognize. A girl. Long sleeves. Big laugh. She handed Daniel a plastic cup and pulled him toward a waiting car filled with even more laughter.

The memory didn’t end in romance.

It didn’t end in heartbreak.

It just… was.

Real. Small. Human.

Ethan smiled softly and let the memory roll by without comment.

Eventually, he found the mirror room.

It wasn’t a real room, but it showed up like one—an echo, as if the inner world had tried to recreate a single defining moment out of instinct, not instruction.

Daniel stood before a narrow mirror in a bathroom lined with cracked tile and humming lights.

He wasn’t speaking. Just breathing. Just looking at himself.

Not proud. or ashamed. Just uncertain. Like someone waiting for the world to tell him who he was supposed to be.

“I know that feeling,” Ethan murmured.

He stepped closer to the memory, careful not to distort it. Daniel raised a hand in the mirror. Ethan did the same. For a second, the reflection wasn’t either of them, it was both. Ethan sat cross-legged again, settling into the floor of the mirror room like it was a shrine.

He didn’t speak. He just watched. Watched Daniel live a life of almosts—almost confident, almost loved, almost extraordinary. A life not of tragedy or glory, but one so achingly normal it hurt.

“You weren’t broken,” Ethan thought. “You were unfinished.”

And now?

Now they were finishing something together. He stayed there for a while, just listening. The memory looped again—Daniel, head down, headphones in, walking into another gray morning like a ghost trying to find a place to matter.

Ethan didn’t stop it; he just watched. And somewhere, far above the memory plane, the core of their shared body pulsed with light.

“You didn’t belong there,” he whispered. “And I didn’t belong here. But now? Maybe together we do.”

For the first time in a long, long while, Ethan Zhou felt grateful to be alive.

Even if it wasn’t his life anymore.