When Zhao Ming's eyes fluttered open, the first thing she registered was the light.
Soft. Sterile. Nothing like anything she had ever known.
She had expected the afterlife. Instead, she found white walls stretching around her, and the low, unfamiliar hum of machinery she couldn't name. Her brow furrowed. She turned her head slowly, taking in the room with careful, cautious eyes.
Beside her, a young girl sat slumped in a chair, head tilted to the side. Her face was tear-streaked, her breathing the uneven kind that came after crying for a long time. She had wept herself into an exhausted sleep.
Zhao Ming attempted to sit up.
A sharp jab in her hand stopped her immediately. She gasped, looking down to find a slender needle embedded in her skin, connected to clear tubing. "Ah!" The pain made her inhale sharply, her fingers curling instinctively around the edge of the bed.
The movement was enough to wake the girl beside her.
Bleary eyes flew open. Then widened.
"Young Madam! You've awakened!" The girl's voice cracked with emotion, fresh tears spilling almost immediately down her flushed cheeks.
She leaned forward, relief and anguish tangled together on her face. "Miss, you're finally awake. How could you think of ending your life? Why would you jump into that pool knowing you can't swim?"
The words tumbled out before she could stop them, her heart speaking faster than her head.
Zhao Ming stared at her. 'End my life? Pool?' Her forehead creased. 'Is it some kind of well or pond she speaks of?'
Before she could form a single question, the girl's eyes dropped to her hand.
"Blood! Oh, Miss, you're bleeding!"
In her attempt to sit up, the needle had shifted. Crimson was already spreading across the white sheets, stark and impossible to ignore. Yu Mei rang for help immediately, and within moments the room was no longer quiet.
A nurse arrived and stopped short at the sight of her awake. Then came more of them, and after that, the head doctor.
They moved around her in a flurry of quiet urgency, checking her vitals, exchanging glances over her head, speaking in low voices she couldn't follow.
She was, apparently, a special case. Not just medically, but in other ways she did not yet understand.
Zhao Ming sat very still in the middle of all of it, watching.
'Am I dead? Is this the other world people speak of?' But the figures surrounding her didn't match any of the stories she had heard. No demons. No fairies. Just these strangers in white coats, watching her with puzzled expressions, speaking words she couldn't follow.
Then what was this place?
When the initial rush settled, and the room grew quiet again, her eyes found Yu Mei. The only face that felt even remotely familiar, even though she didn't know her at all.
"You addressed me as 'Young Madam' earlier," she managed, her voice barely above a whisper, throat dry and raw from months of silence.
The effort of speaking sent a dull ache through her chest, but she pushed past it. "Why?" Her eyes moved slowly around the room, taking in the white walls, the blinking machines, the strange, quiet humming. "Where am I? Is this... heaven?"
Yu Mei's face wavered, worry pulling at every feature. She hesitated, as if not quite sure where to begin.
"Miss..." she started carefully. "You don't remember anything?"
Zhao Ming said nothing, just watched her with those still, uncertain eyes.
Yu Mei swallowed. "You're Xie Ming. Jin Liwei's wife." She paused, letting that land first before continuing. "The Young Mistress of the Jin family. I'm Yu Mei, your maid. I've been with you for years."
She reached forward and gently touched her hand, as if grounding her.
"You had an accident, Miss. You fell into the pool." Her voice dropped slightly. "You've been in a coma for the past three months. Everyone has been so worried."
The words landed one by one.
'Wife of Jin Liwei.' Zhao Ming turned them over slowly. 'I wed the Emperor of the Ji Empire, Ji Cheng. Who is Jin Liwei? Why am I being called Xie Ming? Who are all these people?'
Her eyes dropped to her own hands.
And she went still.
Her skin. Her hair. The clothes on her body. Every detail felt wrong in a way she couldn't articulate, like looking at something that almost fit but didn't, not quite, not in any way that made sense.
A staggering thought crept in at the edges of her mind, too large and too strange to look at directly.
Had she died? And woken up in someone else's body?
"Mirror," she said, her voice barely holding steady. "I need a mirror. Show me."
Yu Mei, caught off guard, quickly retrieved a small hand mirror and held it out to her.
Zhao Ming took it with both hands. Drew in a slow breath. And raised it.
Unfamiliar eyes stared back at her.
An involuntary gasp left her lips. A sinking, lurching sensation gripped her chest, some deep part of her recoiling from the face in the glass. The features were foreign. The eyes, the curve of the jaw, the person looking back at her.
This wasn't her.
This wasn't her at all.