Chapter 2: Stirring Two Souls Together

Kraft woke from a headache brought on by a night of post-exam revelry to find himself lying face down on a letter.

Though the light was dim, it was clear that drool had wet a corner of the paper, spreading across the slightly yellowish, rough surface until the few letters huddled in the corner were blurred beyond recognition.

Beside the letter lay a dip pen; even with the ink dried and clumped on the nib, making the pattern and model indistinguishable, it was obvious this was absolutely not the dip pen he had bought for twenty yuan with free shipping on Taobao. It was a defective product of modern industry, yet not to such a primitive and rugged degree.

The numb hand could feel tiny burrs on the pen shaft; writing with this pen would rival the operations of one of Professor Snape's black magic classes in Harry Potter.

Of course, the strangeness of this pen paled in comparison to the strangeness of his own behavior by a factor of ten thousand—his hazy eyes swept over the beginning of the letter. Good heavens, an English letter addressed to Grandpa? At least it looked like English. Such a baffling act of writing an English letter to a grandfather who had never learned English in his rural life made one almost suspect he had been taking a clichéd English exam before this.

Kraft naturally reached into his pocket, but found nothing inside. He felt there should be a hard object carried with him; this emptiness was unpleasant. So he rubbed his eyes and instinctively scanned the surroundings, trying to find what he wanted.

On the rougher wooden table, besides the paper and pen, there was only a candle with a small stub remaining; the dim light came from this, not from the familiar desk lamp. This was even more confusing. He should be in his dormitory, not in a scene resembling a horror movie, yet another thought circled in his mind, insisting that everything was normal.

He stood up smoothly, without even the slightest drop in blood pressure from sitting too long, and without numb legs. His body leaned forward naturally; the familiar yet strange respiratory muscles were strong and powerful, and the airflow from his lungs blew out the candle. His body stretched in the darkness; he could feel the limbs' muscles moving freely, a sensation of flexibility and health he hadn't felt in a long time.

He felt in his pockets as he walked toward the bedside in his subconscious; the habit of the dark environment surprised him for a moment. His positioning was so precise that he sat squarely on the edge of the bed, pulled back the quilt, and prepared to sleep properly.

In the warm darkness, thoughts previously suppressed by the headache began to surface. He thought of his grandfather, whom he hadn't seen in a long time; it seemed like half a year, yet also less than two months.

Chaotic, blurry memories were as bizarre as AI-generated art: the old man sometimes wore reading glasses, flipping through obscure traditional Chinese medical texts on a table pressed under a layer of glass, and sometimes leaned on a two-handed sword while talking to people in long robes.

The shifting background switched back and forth between a Chinese-style rural bungalow and thick granite stone walls; fragmented conversation echoed constantly in his ears, but upon listening closely, he couldn't make out what was being said. The memories became a bizarre mixture like strawberry mapo tofu; even stranger, he felt these were not contradictory.

Of course, before falling completely asleep, he groped for the third time, trying to find that thing. First by the pillow and headboard, then under the quilt. After a while, he remembered what he was actually looking for.

Where's my phone?!

What's a phone again?

Where's my phone, where's my phone?

What's a phone?!

Did I lose my phone?!

After a moment of shock, his mind, freed from sleepiness and pain, became completely clear. Now the situation was clear.

A creature from another world, after a night of revelry following an exam, experienced an unfortunate incident that allowed his roommates to smoothly advance to the next stage of their studies; perhaps due to the completion of his educational merits or some other fantastical reason even third-rate novelists couldn't imagine, he was inexplicably thrust into another world, forever bidding farewell to sub-health.

Perhaps due to exhaustion from the long journey, this soul—whose moral standing was hard to judge—could no longer remember its own name, but the knowledge points it had memorized before the exam remained etched in its mind.

And the original owner of this robust body, a rural noble youth, grew up under his grandfather's traditional physical education, raised in a small castle built across three generations, where the main content of physical education classes since childhood was twirling a two-handed sword like a windmill.

Around the age of ten, under the persuasion of his semi-literate grandfather, Kraft began to develop into a cultured person. In the standard painful education, Teacher Anderson less than smoothly taught him this set of local alphabetic characters that looked like English, read like English, and were written like English, but simply were not English—从此 Kraft became the first cultured person in three generations of the family who could read and write fluently on his own.

So currently, these two face one good news and one bad news:

The bad news is they have been stirred together; you are in me and I am in you, and they probably won't be able to separate for the rest of their lives.

The good news is they were stirred so thoroughly that they can be said to be a completely new individual; memories and thoughts in the mind interconnect, like pouring soy sauce into vinegar, adding Coca-Cola to Pepsi, or mixing Sprite into red wine. As it stands now, even if they don't possess the strengths of both, at least no rejection reaction will occur.