Experiencing Heavenly Realm

“Yanyan.”

My eyes snap open. The voice echoes like a bell somewhere beyond the ceiling of my skull—soft, patient, impossible to ignore. I blink and the world comes into focus: walls lined with books, shelves crowded with photos and scrolls. Magic diagrams. Martial-arts poses frozen mid-strike. Rows and rows of knowledge, all of it humming with a strange, old-life familiarity.

“Yanyan—where is this? Where am I?” I whisper to myself, though my throat still feels too small for the question.

Is this another world? Of all the cliché possibilities—summoned to a castle, dropped into a village—I never expected a library for gods. I remember shouting that thought out loud. “What the hell is this—WHERE AM I?!”

A voice answers me from nowhere and everywhere: Recall everything from the start.

Remember everything? Who said that? Hey—! My mouth opens to shout and a white sphere slides into my vision. It threads into my head like a needle. Memory floods back in a sharp, drowning rush: my forty-seventh birthday, the chest pain, the ambulance lights. One moment I was a man with a mortgage and a horrible singing voice; the next, I’m staring at a ceiling that doesn’t belong to any hospital I’ve ever seen.

I died of a cardiac arrest on my forty-seventh birthday. I—what a cliché. Reincarnated, of course. Of course. Why wouldn't it be cliché?

I reach for a book because old habits die harder than people. My hand finds nothing. No fingers. No hands at all. I look down and panic spikes—there are no arms, no legs. A warm, ridiculous sense of disbelief wells up: am I a fetus? An embryo? A toad?

“Calm,” the unseen voice says. “Do not be afraid. You are still formless. You are not yet born into that world. I will give you a chance. When you are born, think this phrase first and everything you wish to know will be stored in your mind. Live fully, my little one.”

Live fully, huh. Cute. Also vague as heck.

“Wait—don’t go! What are these books? Why me? Why—” I crawl, if that’s the right word for a collection of thoughts trying to move, toward the nearest shelf. My fingers—my non-existent fingers—brush the spine of a volume titled Ancient Runes and Martial Legacies. The page opens under my will, and names spill out of it: Roar of the Void Dragon. Palm of a Thousand Dynasties. Dark Thunder Dragon—ancient arts the sort of people in comic books fantasize about. My heart—if I had a heart in the usual sense—stutters.

I switch volumes obsessively, one after the other. Technology manuals from a life I remember: schematics, circuitry, crude sketches of machines I once built in garages and basements. I read them like someone drowning reads the surface of the water first—careful, hungry. Sleep? Who needs sleep when you might be a frog-boy about to be sent into a world of magic?

Three months pass like pages turning in an old book. The voice returns. A column of light swallows me. I feel myself slide, tear free from the book-filled chamber, and then—cold and startling—sudden newborn air fills my lungs.

I open my eyes again, and the world is loud with crying and blessing. Warm hands, rough with honest work, cradle me. Faces blurred with tears of joy gather close.

“Qui’er, he’s a boy!” a woman cries, voice raw and shaking. Her hair smells like home and river water.

“Nei Yan, thank the gods—” my father says. Hands callused, eyes wet. They name me there and then: Yan Yan. Our family—Long Yan—has a son. A real child to hold and to raise.

They don’t know the truth. They don’t know that somewhere above the clouds, a god tucked knowledge into my skull and set a phrase on repeat: Memoir d’ Joho Xixi Jeongbo. It sounds like gibberish—Japanese? Chinese? Korean? A garbage bag of languages. Whatever it is, I repeat it under my breath and something else answers me.

A translucent frame blooms in front of my vision. Only I can see it: a clean interface floating in the corner of the world, a search box blinking patiently. I can feel it in my mind, like the pulse of an old operating system booting up. It displays everything—stats, names, places. When I look at my parents now, little tags float over their heads: Qui’er — Human (No Affinity), Long Yan — Human (No Affinity). Levels. Status. Is this—some kind of game?

I press my non-existent thumb to the search bar and the world answers. Luzviminda Continent, it says. Eight major houses: Bai Yun, Cheong Ah, Xuan Xu, Gwan Shi, Woo Ji, Nie Tong, Sosuke Dan—and Hong Yan, where the Long Yan family lives. We’re a subsidiary branch—small, respectable enough but not powerful. The Yan family is minor in a world of major families.

Great. Subsidiary. Perfect future for all kinds of plot-driven suffering. I’m a newborn. I can’t even pronounce the phrase properly, yet my mind holds knowledge like a hard drive with far too much data. Cultivation systems, elemental affinities, martial techniques, and—worse—the realization that I’m ridiculously overqualified for infancy.

Four years later, and nobody’s less suspicious than they should be.

“Yan!” my father calls. “Where did you run off this time?”

“At the river,” my mother answers. “Those rocks keep him busy.” Their voices are the soundtrack of normal life, but beneath the surface everything is not normal. I levitate a pebble and play with it between my invisible fingers. It’s such a tiny, stupid joy to make small things dance.

“Come on, Yan. Go to the countryside with me. Make friends.” My father smiles, proud and streetwise. If only he knew.

“I don’t want to,” I answer, and I mean it in the way only a toddler who’s seen way too many manuals can mean it.

He laughs. “Kids these days.”

I can read his thoughts, by the way. Don’t tell him I said that. The power is both fun and alarmingly convenient.

We sit down to eat and the normal morning collapses like a rotten floorboard.

BOOM.

The door explodes inward. Rough hands, shouting, torches—bandits, the kind of lowlife types who think a village is a safe bet for plunder. Panic is sudden and wet in the air. My parents move—my father ordering, my mother crying—and then I see what I don’t expect: a spear of light, a flash of motion that isn’t mine, and my father falls.

Time does something strange then. Pain pours through like a second heartbeat. Anger swells—hot and animal. I have a memory of a city hospital, of screens flipping through warnings. None of that prepares a child for the sound of his father’s head hitting the floor.

My mother screams. She grabs me. “Run! Yan, go!”

I scramble. I am four and everything inside me fractures into a single, terrible decision. I shouldn’t be able to do what happens next. I shouldn’t be able to make their throats stop and their bodies go silent with a sound that didn’t exist in my old life. But I do it. I scream—not with the voice the world recognizes but with something older—and the bandits’ heads fly. Blood arcs like a terrible constellation.

Silence drops over the room like a curtain. I collapse, chest heaving. Tears come raw and hot. I don’t understand everything that just happened, but something in me knows the animal laws of cause and result: my rage can carve reality.

A voice that is not the god’s this time—different, amused, ancient—sits cross-legged nearby. A man in a blue kimono, striped, with hair pulled back into a crownlike knot, holds a staff and watches me with more curiosity than concern.

“Oya? You awake, boy?” he asks as if he’d found a clever insect.

I stare, blurred vision and all. Just who is this guy, sitting in my living-room-turned-shambles, with the calm of someone who’s seen too many miracles? My chest still burns with fury and fear, and I know, with a certain terrible clarity, that this is only the beginning.

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