Reborn To Live Without You (and other stories)

The Immortal Who Was Reborn

"Don't thank me so soon..."

He leapt up into a sitting position, breathing heavily. Each gasp of air entering his lungs felt uncomfortable and yet reaffirmed one notion. He was alive! How was that possible?

Just as he thought this, pain flooded his brain as if every part of his body was in agony, not just the part where the blade had run through him, ending the existence of the Gu. Ending a life of being a puppet. He couldn't help the cry that escaped his throat, nor the tears that leaked from his eyes, but he did berate himself for being so weak! Had he not learned by now that being weak was to be trampled on and used until nothing remained but a waste?

It could be said that in that sense, he had been fortunate. How many disciples both boys and girls had he seen be drained of all of their worth then tossed away as if they were garbage down the mountain? His use had been far from over, so they would never have treated him so callously, though his existence had really not been much better than those poor fools. If it hadn't been the Sect, likely it would have been someone else.

Less than ten seconds after his cry, the door flew open and only now did he register that it was white, that the whole room was white. In fact, these men and women that crowded him and questioned him were not wearing the Sect robes, but while coats over blue clothes... he froze as something occurred to him.

"Where am I?" He stuttered and gasped through the pain. His voice was high pitched and tender, raising new queries.

They had him lie down as they answered his question. He was in hospital, he'd been involved in a car accident. He'd been unconscious for nearly six weeks.

"What was the last thing you recall?" One doctor asked him. She was a woman, her eyes were clear and kind, but he instinctively flinched as she reached forward to touch him. His stomach began to churn, his face turning a little green and the medics assumed that it was due to the pain he was experiencing. The doctor ordered for medicine to be added to the I.V attached to his thin, white wrist. It was then he noticed his small pale hand; too small to be that of an adult!

"Who am I?" He blurted out in sudden panic as an impossiblility occurred to him.

In that realm in which he'd become a Cultivator, his memory had attained clarity and excellence; if it could be remembered, it surely would have been. This small hand looked very much like his had when he had been just ten years old; his first finger slightly smaller than his ring finger, his smallest finger just reaching that one's second joint. The colour of his skin was a shade paler, but that was not surprising as this body had been in a car accident, but he himself had never been in a car accident. However, that was not the same for his twin brother... his identical twin brother, Xing Jia.

He was not wrong.

Life had intertwined in a strange series of events; the doctors had not been wrong about his twin, that life really had ended, only the shell had been kept alive by a series of machines. His parents had originally planned to have those machines turned off as it was not fair to the memory of their son keeping him alive in this state, only their other son had been kidnapped by a strange group of men and women and disappeared from the face of the Earth. They could not bear to lose his twin at that point, couldn't bear to face the reality that fate had stolen both their sons. And then a miracle had occurred that no doctor could explain; their hospitalised, brain dead son had woken!

He didn't have the heart to tell them that he was not Xing Jia, but their other son, Xing Xia, the one who had been kidnapped. The whole village had been shunned, looked at like some bad stars by nearby villages. The police had been baffled by the strangeness of the crime; more than ten had been murdered and one child whisked away, but there were no clues to the whereabouts of the criminals nor for the murder weapons, which had been swords instead of knives or guns. No Chinese mafia had ever bothered with a small run down village near a mountain with no value, its only claim to fame being legends that had long since been proven untrue.