Date: May 17, 2024, 18:40Location: Unknown Hotel Room, Tamsui
The first thing he noticed was the silence.
Not the peaceful kind, but a silence that felt… hollow—like something had been carved out of the world and poorly stitched back in.
Zhang Huan-An blinked against the dim lighting of the unfamiliar hotel room. The ceiling fan turned slowly above, casting elongated shadows across the cracked wallpaper. The air smelled faintly of sea salt and old wood, but nothing registered as real. Everything felt staged—like a memory someone else had built for him to inhabit.
He sat up slowly. There was a dull ache at the base of his skull, not from injury, but from inconsistency—as if his brain was trying to sync with a timeline that had already moved on.
Across the room, a woman stood at the window, her back to him.
"Yang… An-Ting," he murmured instinctively. The name dropped from his lips before he even understood why. He didn't know her. Not truly. And yet, her presence rang through his bones like déjà vu submerged in static.
She turned, startled. "You're awake."
Zhang didn't answer. Not yet. He was too busy conducting a silent audit of his own mind.
Name: Zhang Huan-An.Age: 18.Knowledge: intact.Skills: present.Timeline…? Unknown.
Something was wrong. The furniture. The temperature. The view outside the window.
He stood slowly and walked to the mirror. His reflection stared back, unbroken, unbothered. But he didn't feel real. His body felt like a vessel holding someone else's momentum.
Then, without warning, a voice echoed in his mind—not hers, not his.
"This is not the first time you've arrived on a Friday."
A chill ran through him.
He gripped the side of the sink, knuckles whitening. Tuesday. Friday. KaYobi. Kinyobi. The words danced behind his eyes like sparks from a severed circuit.
And then it hit him—
This world isn't foreign.It's too familiar.That's the problem.
The timestamps didn't line up. The street names were slightly wrong. The skyline outside looked right—but felt false.It was like falling into a dream of a place you used to love, now reassembled from faulty memory.
Turning back to Yang An-Ting, he forced his voice into calmness. "Where are we?"
She hesitated. "Tamsui. You don't remember checking in?"
"No," he said flatly. "I remember everything—except this."
1. First Night's Dream — The Fault Line
That night, sleep did not come gently.
The moment Zhang Huan-An closed his eyes, he was pulled into a space that did not belong to him—an abandoned corridor drenched in twilight. Shadows bled across the walls. Footsteps echoed ahead, but no one walked.
He followed them anyway.
Doors opened where none should exist, revealing flashes of lives he had never lived: a school hallway bathed in golden dusk; a pair of hands gripping a cross, trembling; the sound of someone whispering in a voice identical to his own—
"If you remember this… you were never supposed to be here."
Then came the river.
Tamsui, but wrong. The water moved backward. Lanterns floated downstream against the current. A girl stood on the riverbank, hair swaying in the wind, her face turned away.
"Do you know me?" she asked without turning.
"I don't think I'm supposed to," Zhang whispered back.
She smiled faintly. "That never stopped you before."
He reached out, but the dream fractured like shattered glass—
And he woke with a gasp.
The cross—where was it?
His fingers dug into the bedsheets. Just fabric.
But the sense of having touched something real lingered in his palm like heat after a burn.
2. Internal Monologue — The Quiet Collapse of Self
The days passed without moving.
He walked through them, spoke when necessary, ate when prompted. But inside, something was unraveling—quietly, methodically.
"Who exactly am I in this world?"
He still had his memories—graduating early, mastering systems no one else could understand, decoding firewalls in his sleep.
But the world no longer responded to him in kind.
Things were off. The code behaved differently. Security layers seemed to anticipate his movements. Technology he'd written himself felt foreign, overwritten by someone else's logic.
It was like touching his own handwriting and being told it belonged to a stranger.
Even more unsettling—people recognized him.
Not always directly, but in brief glances, in flinches too fast to fake. One shopkeeper asked, "Back so soon?" when he'd never stepped foot there before.
Was he taking someone else's place?
"Or did I… replace someone I was never meant to meet?"
The name "Yu Yong-An" had not yet surfaced.
But the echo of a mirror image—just beyond reach—was already haunting him.
3. Realization — The Other Life Inside Him
It happened on a Tuesday.
Zhang Huan-An had been sitting at a roadside cafe, staring at a chalkboard menu written in a handwriting eerily similar to his own, when a wave of vertigo crashed over him.
For a second, he wasn't himself.
He was… someone older. Standing on a police training ground. Sunlight in his eyes. Holding a badge that bore the name—
Yu Yong-An.
His breath caught. It lasted less than a heartbeat, but it rewired everything.
Not a memory. Not a dream.It felt like a bleed-through. A crossfade of identities.
He stumbled back, gripping the edge of the table, heart pounding.
Yang An-Ting rushed toward him. "Zhang? Are you okay?"
He looked at her—and saw someone else. A name he didn't know, but felt: Li An-Qing.
For one fractured moment, he saw both women occupying the same space.
And he knew—
"I am not the only one living inside this body."