Chapter Text
Memory broke like glass and scattered: the last-minute laugh about a missed book sale, the way her mother tucked a loose strand of hair behind her ear in the seat beside her, her father laughing from the other side.
The plane had been bright and warm, and then the smell of fire, metal and wind and the sharp wail of alarms, and then nothing but an indifferent dark.
She woke to a ceiling that smelled of bleach and mothballs.
For a second she tried to count her fingers out of habit. The thumb was too small. The nails were bitten down. These were not the manicured hands of a twenty-seven year old who’d never wanted for anything.
They belonged to a ten-year-old boy.
A child’s chest rose under the thin hospital gown. The breath came too fast. Her mouth tasted like antiseptic and metal.
She pushed herself up and the room tilted.
For a second she lingered in that awful place between dream and waking, when senses lie and the brain stitches them together with whatever it reaches. Memories surfaced in two voices: one bright and comfortable; dinners, a career, the only child in a loved family and another, foreign and sharp: this body life’s history, the one she’d read about in Nongjian’s novel called “Desire”.
Her eyes flicked to the sofa beside the bed and froze. A woman slept there, hands folded, fast and fragile.
She remembered, with the sickening intimacy of someone inhabiting another person’s skin, the household this body belonged to: a mother numbered among many mistresses, fragile-faced and soft-willed, the sort of pale, fluttering presence who is like a dodder flower.
Also a mistress.
The recognition hit like a punch. In the life she’d just left, this kind of woman would have been loathed, women in her maternal line had been steady, proud, trained and respected. They are doctors, engineers, professors, bankers etc.
This woman was the exact opposite.
This is someone who made a career out of spreading her legs.
Her father in this life was the opposite of the rigid, honour-bound military commander of her remembered life.
Sheng Fang is a successful business man but also a playboy in every obvious way, a man who measured himself by conquests and left a trail of bastards like a catalogue of potency.
Where the father she remembered had loved with solemn duty and worn his honour like armor, this one treated people like accessories.
And then the other piece slid into place: this world ran on ABO rules, a genre often debated in modern literature whose laws shifted from story to story.
She, who had lived twenty seven ordered years, was now Sheng Shaoqing, a ten year old boy not yet showing secondary sexual characteristics, the illegitimate son of parents she already despised.
The realization turned her stomach.
Revulsion rose again and this time she leaned over the bedside and vomited, startling the omega woman asleep on the sofa.
She wiped her mouth, tasted bile and cold anger, and thought, fierce and loud.
Fuck you, God.
The world folded into a white blur and then nothing.
She woke again to the soft, implacable weight of a hospital ceiling, a slow drip in the distance, the taste of bile still sour at the back of her throat.
Then memory arrived like a train: the plane, the sudden wrench of metal and the hot smell of burning, her mother’s laugh beside her, her father watching them with kind eyes, the last ordinary bright thing, then darkness.
Her vision narrowed.
Faces swam at the edge: a nurse’s mouth forming, a man’s voice clipped and hurried, someone saying her name as if testing it against a ledger. Panic skittered along her skin.
She tried to sit up and the world tipped.
A new pain lanced low and private, an oddness she could not place at first, like a foreign current under the surface of her limbs.
Something in the body she inhabited had shifted.
A nurse’s hand steadied her. “Sheng Shaoqing,” someone said, the name brittle in the room.
The syllables landed differently now. Not a woman’s voice. Not hers. A boy’s name. Her chest tightened.
She had died—a bright, small fact—on a morning that once held a routine breakfast on a flight home.
“Differentiation occurred,” a doctor said nearby, clinical and calm. “Congratulations, you are now presenting as an S class omega, peony scented: a highly valued, sought after aroma that signifies noble grace and beauty. You should be proud, kid.”
The words dropped like ice.
S-class. Peony scent, the queen of flowers, according to Chinese culture.
She swallowed and the room shuddered around the smallness of it. In the novels she had read—S-class alphas were legends; S-class omegas were not even mentioned, but with Shaoqing memories she know that they are just as rare.
A thin fog of grief slid in behind the shock of differentiation.
She remembered—oh God she remembered—the plane, then her family gone.
Her parents.
The faces of the people who had loved her and whom she love back just as fiercely. They were gone in a way that did not thicken into future tense. They were gone like a sentence ended, not to be continued. Her throat closed around the loss and the room seemed to tilt.
“Mama? Daddy? Where are you?” she called, her voice small and wrong. For a second the old life felt like a movie memory she could not quite reach, bright and impossible.
The new life, the small, ten-year-old body, the bare chest under the gown, the way a nurse smoothed the blanket with trained hands felt unreal and monstrous at once.
“Is this real?” she thought, because that’s what the mind does when it needs a shape: it asks the simplest question. Was this a dream, a graft of grief and too much coffee or morning mimosa?
Images continued to come unbidden: the last photo of her family on a beach in the Maldives, sun in their hair; the small, absurd domestic certainties of the life she’d had.
She tried to name who she was now.
Sheng Shaoqing. Ten years old.
A nurse continue to adjusted the IV with quiet hands.
A woman held her hand, the soft-willed mother of this life, pale and blushing with worry.
Looking at the woman, all the old prejudices from the life she’d lost crowded forward, noble pride and a lineage of duty, spilling judgment on this new mother’s tired face.
The feeling was ugly and immediate, and she recoiled from herself for it.
“Who am I?” she asked aloud.
Behind her, Jian Yin Yue, this life’s mother was calling for doctors, the nurse’s face tight with worry.
She carried twenty-seven years of memory in a ten-year-old body: instincts honed by a long life, how to arrange, to plan, alongside the helplessness of a child who needed cupping and guidance.
That mismatch would not resolve overnight.
It might never.