Face-Slapping15 min read
I Woke Up in Her Body — The Nine-Colored Lotus, a Haunted Village, and a Little Rabbit
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I opened my eyes to a face that wasn't mine and a woman looking down at me like I had no right to breathe.
"Who are you?" I croaked. My throat felt alien.
"Don't play dumb," the woman snapped, her voice cold as winter glass. "You think you can steal my resources with your family behind you? Get out of my way."
She left without looking back. Her heels clicked like a verdict on the floor.
I blinked and found myself in a hospital room that smelled of disinfectant and stale tea. Neon lights hummed. A young woman—my agent, apparently—rattled a name at me.
"Miss Abigail, the third female role in The Spirit Cloud Saga is yours. Bianca Smirnov tried to pass the audition and was turned away. Be ready in a week."
The word "Bianca" landed in my chest like a stone. The dream that came next made the stone heavy.
Before this, I had been a wasted daughter in a cultivation sect, an embarrassing failure in a world where sky-rooted talent decided futures. My parents loved me, but my spirit root was broken; I could not open my breath to the world. I had a fiancé from a good family who smiled in my face and sold me to death. The last thing I remembered in that life was a phantom I could not beat, and then darkness.
And now I was in a different world entirely—a modern world where a novel's heroine named Bianca Smirnov held all the light, and the woman whose body I now wore, Abigail Owens, was a spoiled heiress turned "numbered princess" of the internet because she literally recited numbers instead of lines on camera.
Claire Gordon—my agent—stood by the bedside fussing like a hen. "You can't waste this, Miss. You worked for that role for days. Dad's company paid for the drama. The family will be upset if you throw it away."
"I don't want to be a star," I said. My voice was steadier than I felt. "Let Bianca have it."
Claire's eyes widened like someone who had seen a ghost. "What?"
"Let her try for the part. I'm not acting."
"You can't give up your dream now!" she wailed. "You begged your father... you owe him—"
"I said no." I rolled my eyes. Inside, I was calculating. Biography files from the book waited like minefields. Bianca Smirnov was the destined heroine in this novel. If I butted heads with fate, I'd suffer the book's endings. I had one mission: return to my cultivation world and make that fiance pay.
So I picked up the script, read like a scholar, and then used the only clue I had from my past life—the Nine-Colored Lotus technique. It was an old, obscure set of moves I had once memorized from the sect's forbidden books. The book said only nine-rooted cultivators could use it; the body I inhabited had far fewer roots than that. Still, I tried to coax spirit into my bones. The world was weak with qi, but I had to try.
A week later, with a bandaged ego and a better breath, I took a plane to Kunlun's foothills. I trusted nothing but my stubbornness and the little notes I had memorized.
"You're traveling alone?" Claire asked over the phone.
"I need to see the source. If there's any spirit jade or herbs, I'm taking them."
She sighed. "All right. But text me."
At the foot of Kunlun, the air tasted like cold coins. Snowmelt ran jade-green down boulder beds. I sat in a small tent and tried, again, to pull in breath. I felt a thin whisper of qi tug at me; I folded it, and for the first time since coming to this body, I felt something come in.
"It worked," I whispered.
Two days later, in a clotted forest where the wind smelled of old snow, I heard a voice shouting, "Help! A bear!"
I grabbed a stone and walked toward the noise.
"Please—somebody!" a man cried. He ran like his life depended on it because it did.
I used a flicker of the Nine-Colored Lotus and focused my weak breath into the stone. The stone struck true. The beast went down. The man collapsed to the ground, shaking.
"You're alive? You saved me!" he panted, eyes wide as if I'd thrown down the sky itself.
"Who are you?" I asked, suspicious.
"Nico Lane," he said with a grin that didn't quite reach his nerves. "From B City. I'm so, so grateful."
"You were stealing honey?" I asked when his color faltered.
He reddened. "I... wanted some. I got lost. Sorry."
"You won't steal and not carry consequences next time." I handed him a piece of bread and half a cardamom bun. "Come with me tomorrow. The river valley should have the stones you want."
That night, we found river-rolled stones the color of milk. I found spirit jade—two pieces small enough to fit in my palm but alive with a cold pulse. I carried them back and set up the pulley grid at my apartment. I used the jade to run a small spirit-gathering formation. The air in my home shifted; plants on the windowsill shivered into green life. I sat and meditated. For the first time, I felt the seed of real cultivation.
Back in the city, on set, Bianca Smirnov appeared like a blade of frost. She bumped the shoulder I couldn't afford to have bumped.
"You bumped me," I said flatly before she could walk away.
"Are you kidding?" she sniffed. "I'm late. Don't make trouble."
"Apologize," I said.
"Don't tell me how to behave," she returned, voice like a switching knife. People turned their heads. The dressing room stilled.
"You hit me," I said, loud enough for others to hear. "Give me an apology."
She rolled her eyes and forced out, "Fine. Sorry."
"That's not enough," I said. "Do better."
She laughed, venom thin. "You will pay for this," she hissed as we left the room.
I felt a spark of something like amusement and something like war in my chest.
On set, I stood under bright lights I had never liked, and when the director barked, "Action!", I pulled on the heart of a woman who had loved, lost, and decided to stand still even as the world burned. My lines were bare, but the silence around them sang. The director stared as if he'd heard thunder in a teacup.
That night, I slipped away to the hills again. I had learned that some relics only revealed themselves under rain and moon. There, in a fog the village called wicked, I found what I should have feared—the green-black pool we used for a stunts scene.
From the bushes came a child's noise—the thin, sharp sound of someone eating weeds as if he had not eaten for days. When I came close, a child crawled and lay by the road, dirt-streaked, hair matted. Another actress—Bianca—ran to him, all ribbons and tenderness.
"Here, eat this," she cooed. "You're dirty. You're hungry. I'll find your parents."
He didn't answer with words. He had no tongue, and his eyes were like coal pits. I folded a retrospective memory over him and felt something hot: a hunger to protect him.
Later, during a water scene at a pond on a mountainside, the filming team gave me a harness and told me to sink briefly into green glass water. I had planned to do it cleanly. But once I dropped beneath, something grabbed me. The bounding knot tightened like a vice. I should have sung, but instead I used the jade around my neck.
Three times the light in the jade flared, and three times it cracked under pressure until one last fissure opened. The piece shattered; white light flooded. For a moment, the pull loosened.
"You're five minutes under," the director shouted when I surfaced, coughing lake-black. People stared as if the pond had tried to swallow a life and nearly did.
"I went down a long time," I lied, because there were things it was safer to explain later.
They wanted to stop filming at that pond. I wanted to know why the pond reached for me. That night, while the village slept under a damp hush, I dove into the place behind the pond and found something worse than a sleeping nightmare.
A carved stone stair led down into a sealed place. The heart was a black wooden coffin, and on it a dull place where something ancient had been. A tomb-epitaph told of a warlord, a king of a people from a time when nations bowed. He had bound spirits to his will and built his greatness with the flesh and bones of others. They had sealed him with a holy treasure.
"Don't touch it," a voice said in my head, not mine. The coffin shimmered. A darkness slid up its mouth like smoke.
I felt cold and then heard a whisper that promised everything—glory, money, men, power—if I would only take the sacred object. The object inside his chest was not jade but a cusp of earth that breathed. It wasn't just soil: it was spirit soil, a thing of legend—one that can birth plants that make gods.
"You will kill if you take it," I told the voice aloud. "I am not here to serve your hunger."
It laughed. The frost-thin laugh became a shadow-man, clawing toward me. I smacked it with a charm and broke it into pieces. Two more times I hurled talismans, and again and again the thing retreated back into its coffin. Each time the tomb shook and the dead muttered. Once I used both drops of blood on my palm and left my mark on a blood sigil of restraint. The thing shrieked.
It was a shattering fight. I used every scrap of my borrowed strength. I felt the spirit soil vibrate in my hands when I pulled it free. It wanted to be in someone's body, and the voice promised kingships and centuries if I would let it merge with me.
"I don't want your kingdoms," I said. "I want a way home."
Outside, a man—an old villager—began to shout in a voice that sounded like a trumpet. To my horror, others heard the call and poured out of their houses carrying offerings, kneeling as if a king walked. The coffin's storm fed them like lamp oil.
"He's awake," one cried. "Our king returns!"
I couldn't let this happen. The tomb breathed and the village answered. I smashed a driving talisman into the air, which burned through the sinful shade like a flare. That tiny slash of light sent the shadow-soul screaming. Then I ran.
We returned to the village in time for the policemen to arrive—because I had called them in the night—and then brought them to the pond. They dragged sludge out and found more than what we could have imagined: bones, brittle cloth, hidden altars. It was a mass grave.
"Who told you to dig here?" a detective demanded.
I gave them every clue I had. We found the child's home behind a locked door, and inside the people who'd dressed him up and hurt him had the guilt of years sown into their faces. The police laid charges. The villagers were taken in shackles.
What followed is a punishment they could not wish away.
"Stop filming me," said the village chief at the press stand, voice hard as a slab. He had been proud when he thought his secret kept him safe. He had the gall to stand knee-deep of the truth and lecture the cameras.
"You're under arrest," I said, and the microphone screamed.
We had the bones. We had the child's testimony—what he could manage with the shreds of his soul—and the footage from the pond and my broken jade. The local media converged like crows. The Internet exploded.
The exultation in the town square was a different thing entirely. I made them watch.
"All the evidence will be shown now," Detective Andrei Chapman said to the gathering. Phones lifted. Cameras panned. Hundreds of residents of the county had come to see. Streams ran live.
"Why are we showing this?" the chief demanded as his mouth dried. At first he was haughty. He wore his greed like armor.
"Because you never let your shame see the sun," I said.
"Who are you to judge?" he sneered.
The first video rolled. It was crude and grainy, but the sounds broke the square into quiet. A child's whimpers, an old woman laughing as if at a puppet show, a bowl being filled with leaves and old bones. "We keep the king happy," one voice crooned in the footage. The chief's smile flickered.
"Turn it off!" he roared. "This is a lie!"
"No," a voice from the crowd said, and then another. The recordings went on—phone footage of the child's wounds, of a dark procession into the tomb, of offerings being made. Each clip carved into him like an unseen knife.
"That's not us!" he shouted, desperation spiking. He had been proud. He had counted on silence. The crowd chimed in with the noises of disbelief.
They moved through every shield he'd erected. A woman in the audience, face creased by years, whispered, "He made us do this. He said the king would protect us." Her voice cracked. Phones thrust forward, light catching sweat and the wet gleam around the chief’s eyes.
"You're lying!" he said. He went from composed to startled to vicious. "I did what was necessary." He laughed then—a thin, broken sound.
"Necessary?" someone from the crowd shouted. "You killed children in secret and fed them to a dead man's power. You think that's necessary?"
The chief's composure fractured. He tried to reason, then to deny, then to rage. He pointed at me and hissed, "She planted that evidence! She set us up!"
I stepped forward. "You trafficked him, you starved him, you cut his tongue. You used the tomb to get what you wanted. The police have the remains. The world knows. Now tell us who else took part."
"You're a witch," he spat, and the crowd laughed—not with him but at him, with a dangerous, acerbic joy. People who had feared him now spat his name and recorded his humiliation. The chief's face drained color.
He slapped a hand across his chest, as if to hold himself together. "I'm not like that. It was tradition. It was for our good."
Children in the crowd began to shout. The camera captured the transition: a man once lorded over by superstition, now a spectacle. His denial turned to pleading, a whimper. "Please, please, I didn't mean—"
"Beg," someone said. "Beg for your crimes."
He fell to his knees as hundreds looked on. Phones recorded every second. The chief's hands clawed at the wet stone. "Please—don't take me away. I'm sorry. Please." Tears cracked his cheeks.
"Shut up!" one of the villagers shouted. "You did this. Your money bought us silence."
"Why are people recording?" the chief muttered, shock and humiliation fighting. He reached for the press, for legal pleas, but nothing answered his mouth.
Cameras panned to the child, now safely in care, blank and small, eyes listing like glass. He didn't clap. He had not been asked to. The crowd watched the chief change from king to prisoner. No one tried to save his dignity; they had spilled too much darkness to return it.
People filmed. They whispered. Some shook their heads slowly. A few clapped. A woman wept openly, hands covering her mouth. Men in suits took photos with clinical faces. "This will be on every feed," one said. "I saw him giving orders."
He tried to rise, then slumped back as police cuffed him. His mouth had gone dry. His face swelled with confusion and horror.
"Please," he begged again, voice gone brittle. "Please—"
No one moved. Phones continued their small, merciless glare. People murmured. Some took videos for evidence. Some laughed. Some wept.
"You're being recorded," I said softly, not cruel. "You made this city a secret of bones. Now the world will remember."
The chief's knees scraped stone. He looked like he had been unmade. "You're a liar," he whispered, the last of his power evaporating.
The police led him away. People followed; many had been his followers. They would testify, they would be judged. The man who had bowed himself to superstition and greed begged while cameras collected his pleading. He went from proud to denial to pleading to collapse. He knelt until his knees reddened, until the lives he had ruined rose like a tide.
The video of his kneeling and begging ran on feeds for days. It became a lesson. For the first time in a long time, a man who had hidden behind a king's legend was brought into the sun. People recorded, clapped, and then began to file their own reports. #NoMoreKings trended. The chief's rise and fall repeated in hundreds of small frames: his smugness, his denial, his kneeling, his strangled pleas. He tried to claim tradition. He tried to call himself a good man. The cameras ate him alive. He lost everything before the court had even started.
Later, in the police station, the verdicts would be processed. But that public moment—his collapse under the halo of hundreds of phones and a hundred eyes—was the punishment that unsettled everyone. He had been a lord to his little valley. Now he was an object to be judged and filmed. He was reduced to someone who begged, and a crowd watched with mixed horror and vindication.
"Good," a woman said after the press dispersed. She had been a victim. "Maybe now they'll stop saying the past is god's will."
I had the spirit soil tucked in my arms, and the small rescued child's ghost curled like smoke around my wrist. I didn't admire the public spectacle; instead I felt a grim, heavy relief. The people who sold innocence to an empty promise were being held to the light. The chief's arrogance was gone; his public humiliation—his begging and crumbling—was the shape of justice the town had never dared to render.
It was a hard victory.
"You're not going to prison?" whispered Claire when I told her what happened. She looked at me as if a new person had returned.
"I already called the police," I said. "They will process it."
The child we rescued—he had no tongue, but I carried his spirit into a special place. He fit into the spirit soil like a small blue flame. I did something no living person would dream of: I made a contract with him.
"I can't give you a new life now," I said. "But I can offer you shelter."
He couldn't speak. He had become something between a ghost and a child. He clicked and made small sounds—"huh, huh"—and in my hands he curled like a kitten.
"I can't let you wander," I told him. "You will stay with me. Unless you want to ghost the world."
He made a tiny sound like a laugh.
I sealed him into a rabbit plush I had bought on a whim. "You will come out at night. You will watch. You will help me guard the soil." The plush twitched like it had a heartbeat. I named nothing. Names are dangerous; names bind.
After the village fell apart and we left, my practice grew in a different rhythm. The spirit soil—lumpy and surprisingly fragrant—awoke under my palms. I fed it blood, not recklessly, but carefully: a drop to seed, more to bind. It pulsed. It sheltered the child's spirit in a hollow of warmth.
"My soil is a contract," I said aloud. "It will hold you. You will be tethered to me."
"Ah!" breathed Nico Lane when I showed him the soil. "That's legendary."
"Keep quiet," I said. "It will eat peace if you boast."
In the following weeks, shooting moved to the old town by the lotus marsh. Diesel Bishop—our male supporting actor and the man whose calm voice made the crew call him the "steady man"—appeared like sunrise. He had a patient smile and a gentleman's manners that didn't cost the world more than his quiet company.
"Abigail," he said on a night when I met him on a bridge, "do you want to practice a few lines together?"
"Do you always correct everyone?" I asked.
"No," he said with a grin, "I just don't like seeing people drown on their own."
He sat with me under lantern light. He made the simplest things look big. He was the kind of man who gave his coat without thinking, who made "I'll bring tea" into a shelter. In the novel he was one of Bianca Smirnov's stepping-stones; in my life he was just a man who made good tea.
Bianca, though, was plotting smaller and meaner things. She wanted Meng's attention—Diesel's attention in our adaptation—and used every trick she had. Yet the more she schemed, the more I found Diesel's gaze landing on me in ways that made my chest stop.
"You're dangerous," Bianca hissed to me the day we left. "You ruin everything."
"Only what deserved to be ruined," I answered.
The child's spirit—kept in my rabbit toy—grew. Night after night, I fed him fragments of my cultivation energy. He crumbled less. He smiled like a little lost animal. He started following me around the room as a presence, tucking his ghost-coat around my shoulders. He was mine, in a small way I'd never believed I'd have.
One morning, as dawn bled in like a rumor, I felt it: the spirit soil had reached. It pulsed with confidence, and without my consent, it surged into my body. It poured like rain into my belly, into my bones, into the tiny heart of my practice. I felt water gather in my dantian, and the Nine-Colored Lotus that had only whispered in me before boiled into song.
"Stop," I whispered, panic tight as wire.
But the soil had taken root. It didn't mean to harm; it wanted to grow. In the days after, my cultivation leapt. I broke through practice barriers I'd not expected to see in months. The soil hummed in my dantian. The rabbit-ridden child danced in the margins of my mind like a small moon.
I could feel him, always, a soft bright thread.
The world kept moving: scripts, schedules, tea breaks, and the small eclipse of human dramas. Yet my real work was to nurse that soil into a garden. I planted the small jade and the seeds I'd gathered on Kunlun into the soil. Seeds sprouted into herbs that whispered back in old dialects. My plants wove themselves like a new family around the soil's hunger.
Bianca watched but could not touch. She tried to push me, to push Diesel into her arms. Diesel would smile and do small, steady kindnesses. He came to my balcony, and one evening he held up a small cup of tea and said, "For the late night."
"You're very persistent," I said.
"So are you," he replied, and his hand brushed mine.
Bianca's wheeled schemes collapsed quietly as Diesel wandered to other parts of the plot and I grew into a woman who could fight ghosts with a broken charm and a bright laugh.
We finished filming the show. The director praised me, not for the money I had behind me but because I had surprised him. "Keep to this level," he said. "You have something."
I left the crew different: spirit in my body, soil in my hands, a small ghost in a rabbit's hide that hummed and watched with child's hunger. The village had been punished and humiliated in public; those who had delivered suffering were taken to court and judged. Their folly had been made a spectacle, and the world had recorded it. The chief's pleading had been seen by thousands. Justice, messy and imperfect, had been served.
People asked me afterwards why I had stayed. Why I didn't return to the sect, to my old life.
"I have unfinished business," I told them. "I will return to be the voice that helps kill the man who tried to take my life."
I gripped the spirit soil every night. The child slept inside the toy by my head. Diesel's hands sometimes brushed my back. Bianca's glare lingered farther away. Nico Lane came to bring me news of a remote mountain where a shard of jade had been blessed. Claire sent messages and left me alone. The Nine-Colored Lotus sang in my blood.
Months later, as a final scene of my own small life played, I took the rabbit toy off the shelf, cradled it, and touched the soil. The rabbit's embroidered eyes glinted like wet stone.
"You will be safe," I told him.
He made a sound like a child's "huh" and leaned into me.
There were still debts to be paid. The fiancé who had sent phantom killers after me in my old life—Dominic Hicks—would answer for his betrayal in ways that would be slow and cold. Bianca Smirnov would not walk from her cruel deeds without stumbles. The chief's public collapse had been televised, but there would be trials and sentences and quiet weeping. The Nine-Colored Lotus would be my path back to the place I had come from, and the spirit soil would be my hearth most nights.
Fuel, again: clay, blood, sweat, and the steady folding of days. I lit a candle and rested my hands on the soil. The toy rabbit's small face gleamed. A faint green sprang from the soil and kissed the rabbit like a vow.
I have a plan. I have a child ghost who will protect me, a dirt heart that feeds my practice, and the Nine-Colored Lotus humming in my bones.
"Goodnight," I said.
"Goodnight," the rabbit replied in a little echo that only my ears would hear.
The End
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