CHAPTER 43: CHAPTER 43; A NEW SOUL

Until the moment they could no longer avoid facing what came next.

"I think we should call for the guards to come over for the body..." Tank suggested looking at Lin Shuyin’s rigid body, it was best if they took the body away to the mortuary.

Before they could come to a decision, Shuyin’s body suddenly jerked in Tank’s arms like a fish struck by lightning.

Tank’s instincts kicked in before her brain could process what was happening.

She shoved the corpse away, because it had been a corpse, she was certain of it, and scrambled backward until her spine hit the concrete wall.

"什么鬼?! (Shénme guǐ?!) What the fuck?!"

The body convulsed again, her back arching off the floor in a way that looked painful, and impossible. Limbs went rigid and then....

A gasp sounded...

Not the weak, dying rattle they’d heard before. This was violent, forceful, the sound of someone drowning finally breaking the surface. Air rushing into lungs that had been empty.

"What the hell," Blade breathed, frozen in place. "Damn! Shit, she’s....."

Shuyin’s eyes immediately flew open.

All three women recoiled back frightened. Those weren’t Shuyin’s eyes.

The iris of her one good eye, the other still swollen shut from the beating, had transformed into something alien.

The warm brown eye was gone, replaced by a vertical reptilian slit pupil suspended in a sea of luminous, phosphorescent jade.

It glowed in the dim cell like bioluminescent plankton, casting eerie greenish light across her battered face.

"Princess?" Razor whispered, her voice small and terrified and uncertain of the situation.

The mermaid, being in Shuyin’s body, didn’t respond immediately. It... she pushed herself upright with movements that were clumsy yet possessed of an otherworldly grace, like a predator learning to move in a new form.

Her head tilted at an angle that was just slightly wrong, studying them with that glowing eye. These were humans in front of her, and what were they doing in there?

What was that place? Why was it so dark? And then, why did they look.....?

Then, suddenly, a painful headache hit her memories..

Kailani, because she was Kailani, the last daughter of the deep, not this Lin Shuyin whose body she now inhabited, felt it like a tidal wave crashing through her consciousness.

Memories that weren’t hers flooded in like a whirlwind, from these memories, she could only grasp what was going on here..

The memories were all about, her momma from early childhood, her sudden death...

Her father married another woman, who had a daughter, possibly from an affair when her mother was alive, because they have a difference of months in their ages...

Recalling that she was to be married but betrayed by everyone, and now, she was here... All alone....

She could feel the smell of jasmine tea that her grandmother loved...

She could taste the betrayal from everyone and even from a man she had trusted. A crime she didn’t commit. Handcuffs biting into delicate wrists.

Two days in this cell. Three women who had become unexpectedly her protectors. Tank, Blade, Razor, their names, their histories, their surprising kindness.

Kailani clutched her head, this small, land-dwelling head that felt so fragile compared to her true form, and gasped as the memories continued to assault her.

They weren’t just images. They were feelings, these were Lin Shuyin’s emotions, her hopes, her despair, all of it bleeding into Kailani’s consciousness.

And then, in the chaos of those fragmented memories, she felt something else.

A presence.

A whisper of something that remained soul.

"You... You..." Kailani was surprised to see another tiny spirit form of the original Lin Shuyin. Kailani’s consciousness recoiled, shocked. You’re still here?"

" I don’t know what’s happening but I guess I won’t be able to go back...." She could tell and she could feel her spirit was fading away. She was dead and had no chance of surviving.

"Please avenge me.... I want revenge... Please, I beg of you..." Lin Shuyin’s spirit coiled with resentment. She wanted revenge but she couldn’t... She really couldn’t do anything...

"Oooh? All right... I will do it...." She was here for revenge, and nothing else, she can do this small task while partaking in what really brought her here...

"Take care of those three... They have been the only closest people to me... Don’t hurt them please..." Lin Shuyin’s spirit was fading faster.

They are humans, Kailani thought back, her mental voice heavy with three years of accumulated hatred. Your ’kind’ captured me and tortured me.

Humans are destroyers, total parasites.

"Not them," Shuyin’s spirit insisted with surprising strength. "They protected me. When everyone else abandoned me, when the system threw me away, they stood up for me. They’re good. Please... please don’t hurt them."

Kailani sifted through the borrowed memories more carefully now, seeing through Shuyin’s eyes. The initial suspicion, Tank’s gruff protectiveness, Blade’s quiet understanding, and Razor’s fierce loyalty, the way they had chosen to shield a stranger, knowing it would paint targets on their own backs.

Your species is capable of both great cruelty and great kindness, Kailani acknowledged slowly. These three... they are not like my captors.

"Thank you," Shuyin’s presence whispered, relief washing through their shared consciousness. "I’m scared. I don’t know what happens next. But... This seems to be my fate...."

Kailani felt something stir in her chest, this human chest that was already beginning to heal faster than it should, power she didn’t fully understand yet flowing through this new form. I know something about revenge, she thought darkly. I understand that language well.

"Then we have an agreement," Shuyin said, and Kailani could feel her smiling somehow, a ghost’s bitter satisfaction. "My body is yours. My identity is yours. Use them. Just... please remember that I existed. Remember that Lin Shuyin was real, and she mattered."

I will remember, Kailani promised. I will carry your name with honor.

Kailani felt Shuyin’s consciousness slip away entirely, like sand through fingers, dissolving into whatever lay beyond death.