Fifteen years ago, I couldn't even roll over in my hospital bed.
I was forty then. A triple Ph.D. — physical engineering, biomedicine, and social psychology. An orphan who climbed up on brainpower alone. No family backing, no noble patrons. I paved every step of my path myself.
How high was my peak? Three articles in the main journal of *Nature*, principal investigator for two international research projects, and headhunting offers sent simultaneously by four top-tier institutions. I rejected a tenured professorship at MIT because I felt I could still go higher.
Then, on the highway, I spaced out for two seconds.
Two seconds.
In those two seconds, my car hit the guardrail, lost control, and the heavy truck behind me couldn't brake in time. It crushed right over me.
Spinal cord injury. Completely paralyzed from the neck down.
The surgery took eleven hours. When the chief surgeon came out, his face was bleak. He said a bunch of things I, as a biomedical Ph.D., perfectly understood. Translated into human speech, it meant: *Your brain is intact, your consciousness is intact, but from now on, your body has nothing to do with you.*
My first reaction wasn't to cry. It was to ask, "Is my paper's data backed up?"
The nurse stared blankly.
"I have three project deadlines, and the nearest one is next Friday."
The nurse walked out. Probably to find a psychiatrist.
I stared at the ceiling and thought for a long time.
A hyper-control freak suddenly losing all control over his own body. The psychological drop was worse than death.
But I didn't die.
Because I figured one thing out: My brain was my only freedom. So, I would push it to its absolute limit.
***
For the next ten years, I lived a busier life than most able-bodied people.
Eye-tracking to control the computer, voice input to write papers, assistants to execute experiments. I kept publishing, kept mentoring students, kept attending academic conferences — a webcam aimed at my face, and behind my face, a hospital bed and a white ceiling.
Some people called me a paradigm of inspiration.
I disliked the word. Inspiration is a placebo meant for onlookers. I simply had no other choice.
In those ten years, I read a massive amount of books. Not out of a love for knowledge, but because it was the only thing I could do. The moment I stopped, I would think: *Why can't my hands move? Why can't my legs move? Why am I even alive?*
So I didn't stop.
Physics, chemistry, medicine, psychology, history, military strategy, philosophy, classical literature. Once I finished the serious stuff, I started on the unserious — ancient history, mythology studies, folklore, religious texts.
I read *Journey to the West* seven times. The unabridged original, not the adaptations. I also read all the academic research I could find: Hu Shi's textual criticisms, Lu Xun's analyses, comparative studies of different editions. Purely as a pastime. What else could a paralyzed man do for fun?
I also studied weapon mechanics, engineering nomenclature, demolitions, and ballistics.
This one was indeed a bit hard to explain. A fully paralyzed man researching these things sounded like some sort of psychological pathology. But my reason was simple: since I was idle anyway, I might as well.
I even studied human biomechanics and sports science. This was even harder to explain — someone who couldn't move studying how to push the human body to its physical limits.
But there was a sentence in my heart I never voiced to anyone: *If one day I can move, I will train my body to the absolute limit.*
It wasn't hope. It was an obsession.
***
The year I turned fifty, I had a routine MRI check-up.
A standard procedure, once a year, to see if there were any changes in the state of my spinal cord. The answer was always *no.*
Before entering the examination room, I glanced out the window at the sky.
There was a halo around the edge of the sun. Not a solar halo, but a scattering effect I hadn't seen before. High-energy particle streams refracting in the atmosphere? Solar flares? I ran through the possible physics explanations in my head; none matched perfectly.
Then the assistant wheeled me into the room.
The MRI machine started up.
The sound was wrong.
I am a physicist; I have an instinct for frequencies. There was a harmonic in the sound coming from that machine that shouldn't have been there — like two different frequency signals interfering, spawning an entirely new frequency. It wasn't an equipment failure; some external signal was resonating with the machine.
The sun outside the window. The magnetic field inside the equipment. The two superimposing.
I wanted to yell, "Stop."
My mouth didn't have time to open.
***
The sensation of consciousness detaching from the body isn't like falling asleep. It's like being poured out of a container.
I saw my own body lying in the MRI machine, extremely quiet, like a piece of luggage forgotten on a carousel that no one came to claim.
Then my vision collapsed.
It wasn't darkness — it was sensory overload. Timelines became visible. They weren't lines; they were layers, stacked one upon another, and every layer had color, temperature, scent. I passed through several layers, and with each one, there was a tearing sensation. Not pain, but the sound of paper ripping — amplified a thousand times and poured directly into your consciousness.
Then came the compression.
Like being stretched infinitely long, and then suddenly compressed into a single point.
I stayed in that point for I don't know how long. Maybe a second, maybe a millennium. Time held no meaning there.
And then I was stuffed into a container that didn't belong to me.
Forcefully stuffed. An ill fit. Like crushing an adult's consciousness into a box that's too small, everything squeezing everywhere.
***
The first sensation was wind.
Wind blowing against skin.
I almost screamed.
Not because it hurt — because I hadn't felt anything on my skin in ten years. Ten years. Three thousand six hundred and fifty days. My nervous system was screaming at maximum volume: *You have skin you have skin you have skin you have skin—*
The wind felt like blades slicing. Not a metaphor, literally like blades slicing. My senses had been starved for a decade; suddenly force-fed, they overloaded.
Then came light.
The light of an oil lamp. Extremely weak, but my eyes hadn't adjusted yet, stinging until I teared up.
Then came smell. Sandalwood, wood, old cloth, some kind of unnameable herb. Every scent hit my olfactory nerves like a sledgehammer.
Then came gravity.
I was lying on a bed. I could feel the hardness of the bed board. I could feel the weight of the rough bedding pressing down on me. I could feel my back pressing against the coarse surface beneath me.
I twitched my fingers.
Five fingers. All of them moved.
I stared at that hand for roughly thirty seconds.
Then I cried.
Not because of transmigration, not out of fear, not out of confusion.
But because my fingers had moved.
It had been ten years.
***
Rationality returned about three minutes later.
I sat up — a motion that nearly made me pass out. Not from weakness, but because my vestibular system hadn't processed the "sit up" signal in ten years. It needed recalibration.
I held onto the edge of the bed, waited for the dizziness to pass, and began to observe.
Wooden ceiling, mortise and tenon joints, no nails. Oil lamp, ceramic, cotton wick. Rough cloth bedding, washed many times. Paper-pasted windows, letting in the morning light.
Architectural style, material of the artifacts, angle of the light — Tang Dynasty. Early to mid-period.
Then I looked down at my hand.
Very small. Short fingers, baby fat on the back of the hand, clean nails.
The hand of a five-year-old child.
Footsteps sounded outside the door, followed by a young voice: "Xuanzang? Are you awake?"
Xuanzang.
I ran through all the information I knew about that name in my head. Seven readings of *Journey to the West*, all the academic research, all the comparative editions.
I knew what was going to happen next.
So... right now—
Who am I? A fifty-year-old physics Ph.D. currently residing in the body of a five-year-old monk.
What is my name? Xuanzang. Yes, *that* Xuanzang who was supposed to go to the Western Heaven to fetch scriptures.
Where am I? The Great Tang, Jinshan Temple. Next, I was supposed to travel a hundred and eight thousand li to see an allegedly merciful bald man. Along the way, I would meet a monkey, a pig, a sand demon, and a horse transformed from a dragon.
I ran these three questions through my head.
*F--k.*
The thing I looked down on the most in my life was transmigration dramas.
***
"Xuanzang?" The voice called again from outside.
"Come in," I said.
I startled myself when the voice came out — childish, clear but pitched high, with a hint of hoarseness. A five-year-old's voice coming from my mouth. The cognitive dissonance was intense.
The door opened. In walked a young monk, early twenties, wearing that specific blend of restraint and eagerness typical of the newly ordained. His eyes lit up when he saw me sitting on the bed. "Xuanzang! You're awake!"
"Mm."
"Do you know how long you slept? Five whole days!" He walked over quickly and squatted down to look at my face. "We all thought you were gone. Master said we should start preparing for your funeral if you didn't wake up."
Five days.
"What... happened to me before?" I asked. I deliberately softened my voice, slowed it down, sounding exactly like a child who had just woken up.
"You don't remember?" The young monk's expression changed to slight worry. "You went with Senior Brother Huiming to hear the dharma outside the city and got separated on the way back. When we found you, you were lying in the mountain woods. No injuries, but we just couldn't wake you."
Separated. Mountain woods. Comatose for five days.
What had happened to the original owner of this body? I didn't know. The memory "hard drive" had been half-formatted; that segment was gone.
But it didn't matter. What mattered was — I needed an explanation. If a five-year-old child wakes up from a five-day coma and acts too normal, it invites suspicion. If he acts too abnormal, it invites fear.
The best strategy: be abnormal, but in a good direction.
"I had a dream," I said.
The young monk froze for a second. "A dream?"
"Someone was reciting scriptures in the dream." I closed my eyes, dug out a fragment of a sutra from the original body's residual memories, and used my five-year-old voice to recite it, word by word.
The *Heart Sutra*. The first three lines.
The young monk's mouth dropped open and stayed that way.
"How... how do you know how to recite this?"
"I heard it in the dream." I opened my eyes, wearing the perplexed expression a five-year-old should have. "Senior Brother, who was the person reciting scriptures in my dream?"
He didn't answer. He stood up, took a step back, and the way he looked at me changed.
Not fear. It was awe.
"Wait here," he said. "I'm going to get Master."
He ran out.
I sat on the bed, listening to his footsteps fade away, and then his voice shouting in the courtyard: "Master! Master! Xuanzang is awake! He... he heard a Buddha reciting scriptures in his dream!"
I chuckled inwardly.
Child Psychology 101: When a child displays abilities beyond their age, an adult's first reaction isn't suspicion, but to find an explanation they can accept.
"The reincarnation of the Golden Cicada," "Buddha imparting wisdom in a dream," "born with innate spiritual roots"— any one of them would do.
They would choose the answer that made them most comfortable, and then believe it unconditionally.
***
For the next three days, the entire Jinshan Temple was talking about me.
"The five-year-old Xuanzang was in a coma for five days, and when he woke up, he could recite the *Heart Sutra*."
"Not just the *Heart Sutra*, he can explain the sutra's meaning."
"He must be the Golden Cicada reborn. He received direct teachings from Buddha in his dream."
I said nothing. When asked, I just occasionally dropped a line or two of scripture fragments I dug out of the original body's memories, then looked at them with a five-year-old's eyes, waiting for their minds to fill in the blanks.
Within a week, the temple elders spontaneously granted me access to the Sutra Pavilion.
Within two weeks, no one monitored my daily schedule anymore.
Within a month, the legend of "The Golden Cicada Reborn" had spread from Jinshan Temple to three neighboring counties.
I spent a month securing a degree of freedom a five-year-old child could never possibly attain.
Cost: zero.
***
Now that I had the freedom, the next step was analysis.
First priority: language.
The original body's residual memories allowed me to understand Tang Dynasty spoken Chinese and read most of the characters. However, modern vocabulary occasionally slipped out when I spoke, requiring deliberate control. Essentially, it was just code-switching dialects — I had read enough classical texts to adapt basically within three days.
Second priority: assessing the cognitive level of this era.
Through interactions with monks, pilgrims, and merchants, I spent ten days completing this assessment. The conclusion: a massive information gap. The smartest person in this era still had a fourteen-hundred-year blind spot of knowledge compared to me.
It wasn't that they were stupid. It was that I brought a fourteen-hundred-year cheat code.
It wasn't fair.
But I liked it.
Third priority: confirming the rules of this world.
This was the most important, and the most surprising.
On the tenth day, in the Sutra Pavilion, I found a hand-copied manuscript logging local demon sightings. It had times, locations, and witness testimonies; it read like a modern incident report.
On the fifteenth day, a pilgrim came in claiming there was a demon in the mountains near his home that had already eaten three people. His tone wasn't panic; it was the exhaustion of "here we go again."
On the twentieth day, at night, I heard strange noises outside the temple. Not wind, not animals, but some kind of low-frequency vibration that my physics knowledge couldn't explain. My five-year-old body instinctively shrank under the covers — this body remembered fear, even if my brain didn't.
I pieced this information together and reached a conclusion:
The mythology of this world is real.
Not a metaphor, not superstition, but literally real. Demons exist, immortals exist, spells exist.
The good news was I could move.
The bad news was there were things in this world that could eat me.
The even worse news was — I was eventually going to have to walk right into those things' territories, all while pretending to be a holy monk.
***
Day thirty post-transmigration.
I stood on the mountain behind the temple, looking at the distant peaks.
The mountain was distant, the sky was immense, and the wind blowing on my five-year-old face no longer felt like a knife. My senses had adapted.
I reviewed the original text of *Journey to the West* in my head. I listed all the plot points, characters, locations, and rules, and began to run simulations: if all of this is real, what happens next?
The answer was very clear.
I had roughly ten to fifteen years of preparation time. Before Emperor Taizong summoned Xuanzang.
Ten to fifteen years.
Enough time for me to forge a body capable of fighting. Enough time for me to build sufficient weapons. Enough time to establish an intelligence network. Enough time to figure out the underlying rules of this world inside and out.
I formulated a plan for myself: ten years.
When I turned fifteen, I would walk out of here armed with enough preparation.
Not because of a mission, not because of faith, not because of some bulls--t divine destiny.
It was because I had been paralyzed for ten years.
In those ten years, I had thought countless times: *If I could move, what would I do?*
Now I could move.
I was going to walk to the end of this world, just to see exactly what it looked like.
***
Ten years later, Jinshan Temple produced a name that the Great Tang would never forget.