She was cold and sweating when Xia Yi woke up with a start.
Her eyes were wide and darted around the strange space, and her breath came in frantic bursts.
Below her, the air was too thick with a silence that cried out loneliness, the bed too plush, and the linens too opulent.
Her voice was unsteady and nearly incomprehensible to her own ears as she murmured, "Where... where am I?"
She gripped her chest tightly, her heart racing as jumbled memories raced through her head. They weren't her recollections, though.
Her consciousness was assaulted by flashes of a girl's existence, a life of agony, humiliation, and unending torment.
She was struck with a sudden wave of nausea and sprang to her feet, gripping her stomach as the room whirled around her.
Frantically, she murmured, "This... isn't my body," as her throat tightened. "This isn't... me."
She noticed small bruises around her wrists when she gazed down at her fragile hands. Her breath caught.
"Whose corpse was it?"
As the bewilderment turned into something far darker—a gnawing sense of sadness that wasn't hers... but yet hers—she forced herself to breathe deeply.
Abruptly, a voice, eerie and filled with pain, reverberated in her head.
"Please... just let it stop..."
The remarks were like a kick to the stomach. She was attacked by memories of the past Xia Yi's life—infinite days of hurtful rumors, the piercing sting of laughter reverberating through the corridors, and the oppressive weight of being undesired and hated.
The continual reminder that she didn't belong here, the bullying, and the loneliness. The people around her had been breaking her slowly and deliberately.
"You're nothing but a joke."
"Why don't you just disappear?"
Every taunt, shove, and grin was like a knife piercing the original Xia Yi's soul, one fragment at a time.
She was crushed from all sides by the terrible agony. Nobody had arrived to rescue her. Nobody gave a damn.
Whispering, "She... she didn't survive it," Xia Yi's eyes were watering.
She gripped the silk sheets with shaking hands, her heart aching for the girl who had previously occupied this body.
"They killed her..."
The realization came to her suddenly. The first Xia Yi had passed away.