Until the mont they could no longer avoid facing what ca next.
"I think we should call for the guards to co over for the body..." Tank suggested looking at Lin Shuyin’s rigid body, it was best if they took the body away to the mortuary.
Before they could co to a decision, Shuyin’s body suddenly jerked in Tank’s arms like a fish struck by lightning.
Tank’s instincts kicked in before her brain could process what was happening.
She shoved the corpse away, because it had been a corpse, she was certain of it, and scrambled backward until her spine hit the concrete wall.
"什么鬼?! (Shén guǐ?!) What the fuck?!"
The body convulsed again, her back arching off the floor in a way that looked painful, and impossible. Limbs went rigid and then....
A gasp sounded...
Not the weak, dying rattle they’d heard before. This was violent, forceful, the sound of soone drowning finally breaking the surface. Air rushing into lungs that had been empty.
"What the hell," Blade breathed, frozen in place. "Damn! Shit, she’s....."
Shuyin’s eyes imdiately flew open.
All three won recoiled back frightened. Those weren’t Shuyin’s eyes.
The iris of her one good eye, the other still swollen shut from the beating, had transford into sothing alien.
The warm brown eye was gone, replaced by a vertical reptilian slit pupil suspended in a sea of luminous, phosphorescent jade.
It glowed in the dim cell like bioluminescent plankton, casting eerie greenish light across her battered face.
"Princess?" Razor whispered, her voice small and terrified and uncertain of the situation.
The rmaid, being in Shuyin’s body, didn’t respond imdiately. It... she pushed herself upright with movents that were clumsy yet possessed of an otherworldly grace, like a predator learning to move in a new form.
Her head tilted at an angle that was just slightly wrong, studying them with that glowing eye. These were humans in front of her, and what were they doing in there?
What was that place? Why was it so dark? And then, why did they look.....?
Then, suddenly, a painful headache hit her mories..
Kailani, because she was Kailani, the last daughter of the deep, not this Lin Shuyin whose body she now inhabited, felt it like a tidal wave crashing through her consciousness.
mories that weren’t hers flooded in like a whirlwind, from these mories, she could only grasp what was going on here..
The mories were all about, her momma from early childhood, her sudden death...
Her father married another woman, who had a daughter, possibly from an affair when her mother was alive, because they have a difference of months in their ages...
Recalling that she was to be married but betrayed by everyone, and now, she was here... All alone....
She could feel the sll of jasmine tea that her grandmother loved...
She could taste the betrayal from everyone and even from a man she had trusted. A cri she didn’t commit. Handcuffs biting into delicate wrists.
Two days in this cell. Three won who had beco unexpectedly her protectors. Tank, Blade, Razor, their nas, their histories, their surprising kindness.
Kailani clutched her head, this small, land-dwelling head that felt so fragile compared to her true form, and gasped as the mories continued to assault her.
They weren’t just images. They were feelings, these were Lin Shuyin’s emotions, her hopes, her despair, all of it bleeding into Kailani’s consciousness.
And then, in the chaos of those fragnted mories, she felt sothing else.
A presence.
A whisper of sothing that remained soul.
"You... You..." Kailani was surprised to see another tiny spirit form of the original Lin Shuyin. Kailani’s consciousness recoiled, shocked. You’re still here?"
" I don’t know what’s happening but I guess I won’t be able to go back...." She could tell and she could feel her spirit was fading away. She was dead and had no chance of surviving.
"Please avenge .... I want revenge... Please, I beg of you..." Lin Shuyin’s spirit coiled with resentnt. She wanted revenge but she couldn’t... She really couldn’t do anything...
"Oooh? All right... I will do it...." She was here for revenge, and nothing else, she can do this small task while partaking in what really brought her here...
"Take care of those three... They have been the only closest people to ... Don’t hurt them please..." Lin Shuyin’s spirit was fading faster.
They are humans, Kailani thought back, her ntal voice heavy with three years of accumulated hatred. Your ’kind’ captured and tortured .
Humans are destroyers, total parasites.
"Not them," Shuyin’s spirit insisted with surprising strength. "They protected . When everyone else abandoned , when the system threw away, they stood up for . They’re good. Please... please don’t hurt them."
Kailani sifted through the borrowed mories more carefully now, seeing through Shuyin’s eyes. The initial suspicion, Tank’s gruff protectiveness, Blade’s quiet understanding, and Razor’s fierce loyalty, the way they had chosen to shield a stranger, knowing it would paint targets on their own backs.
Your species is capable of both great cruelty and great kindness, Kailani acknowledged slowly. These three... they are not like my captors.
"Thank you," Shuyin’s presence whispered, relief washing through their shared consciousness. "I’m scared. I don’t know what happens next. But... This seems to be my fate...."
Kailani felt sothing stir in her chest, this human chest that was already beginning to heal faster than it should, power she didn’t fully understand yet flowing through this new form. I know sothing about revenge, she thought darkly. I understand that language well.
"Then we have an agreent," Shuyin said, and Kailani could feel her smiling sohow, a ghost’s bitter satisfaction. "My body is yours. My identity is yours. Use them. Just... please rember that I existed. Rember that Lin Shuyin was real, and she mattered."
I will rember, Kailani promised. I will carry your na with honor.
Kailani felt Shuyin’s consciousness slip away entirely, like sand through fingers, dissolving into whatever lay beyond death.
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