The rat was still there.
Xiyue's stomach made a sound that was almost animalistic—a deep, hollow growl that seemed to come from somewhere beyond her control.
The rat's ears twitched.
It kept eating whatever it had found, completely unbothered by the starving woman ten feet away.
You're a surgeon, she told herself. You took an oath. First, do no harm.
But the oath didn't say anything about rats, did it?
She took a step forward.
The rat looked up.
Its tiny black eyes reflected nothing.
Another step.
The rat chittered—nervous now, finally—and scurried into the weeds, dragging its prize with it.
Gone.
Just like that.
Xiyue exhaled.
She didn't know if she was relieved or disappointed.
Her hand went to her chest automatically, feeling for a pulse that she knew would be too slow, too weak.
The heartbeat under her fingers was like a bird trapped in a cage—fluttering, erratic, not quite right.
Seventy-two hours, the system had said.
Less now.
Every second that ticked by was one less second she had to figure this out.
"I need food," she said aloud, just to hear a human voice.
"I need water that won't give me dysentery."
"I need medicine that doesn't exist in this century."
The courtyard didn't answer.
The minimap appeared when she thought about it—like summoning a browser tab in her own head.
A translucent overlay settled over her vision, showing the Cold Palace complex in basic geometric shapes.
Her current location blinked blue.
Buildings were gray outlines.
Paths were thin white lines.
Okay. This is... actually useful.
She picked a direction and started walking.
The complex was bigger than she'd realized.
Building after abandoned building, courtyard after overgrown courtyard.
Some structures had collapsed entirely, just piles of rotten wood and crumbling brick.
Others stood mostly intact, their doors hanging open like invitations to explore.
Xiyue explored.
First building: empty.
Just more moldy straw, more rat droppings, more nothing.
Second building: a bedroom once, maybe.
A broken bed frame.
A wardrobe with nothing inside except moth-eaten fabric that fell apart when she touched it.
Third building: kitchen.
She knew it by the smell—old grease and ash and something sweet that might have been spilled grain years ago.
The hearth was massive, built of blackened stone, with iron hooks still hanging from the ceiling.
Pots and pans lay scattered on the floor, most of them rusted through.
But not all of them.
Xiyue knelt, ignoring the way her knees complained, and sorted through the debris.
A clay pot—cracked, useless.
A iron wok—rusted beyond repair.
A metal pan with only surface rust, the kind that could probably be scrubbed clean with enough effort and something abrasive.
She set it aside.
Near the hearth, she found something better: a water jar, sealed.
She pried off the lid and looked inside.
Empty.
Of course.
But the jar itself was ceramic and clean.
She kept looking.
Behind the kitchen, through a back door she almost missed, was a small enclosed yard.
A wall on three sides, open to the sky.
The ground here was different—darker, richer.
Like someone had once cultivated it.
And in the corner, half-hidden by weeds, something green.
Xiyue's heart rate spiked—the screen flashed a warning, but she ignored it.
She crawled toward the green thing like a woman possessed, pushing aside tall grass and thorny vines.
Her hands closed around leaves.
Real leaves.
Growing things.
A garden bed.
Small, maybe four feet by four feet, tucked against the warmest wall.
Someone had built it years ago, protected it, and then forgotten it.
But plants were stubborn.
They'd kept growing anyway.
She recognized the first one immediately.
Artemisia argyi.
Mugwort.
Chinese mugwort.
Her brain supplied the information automatically—three years of medical school, two years of residency, countless hours studying pharmacology.
Not her specialty, but you picked things up.
Artemisia was anti-inflammatory.
Hemostatic—it stopped bleeding.
Used in moxibustion, in traditional medicine, in—
None of that mattered.
What mattered was that it was something.
A resource.
A tool.
[Medicinal resource detected.]
[New function unlocked: [Identification].]
[Use: Point at unknown flora for basic analysis.]
The screen pulsed, pleased with itself.
Xiyue pointed at the mugwort.
The system responded immediately:
[Artemisia argyi (Mugwort)]
[Properties: Anti-inflammatory, hemostatic, mild analgesic.]
[Preparation: Dry leaves for tea. Crush fresh leaves for poultice.]
[Warning: Not a cardiac treatment. Does not address host's primary condition.]
"No shit," she muttered.
"But it's better than nothing."
She started picking.
Her fingers trembled with the effort, with the hunger, with the sheer exhaustion of existing in a body that was actively trying to die.
But she kept going, leaf by leaf, building a small pile on the ground beside her.
When she'd stripped the plant of everything usable, she moved on.
More mugwort in another corner.
Something that looked like mint but wasn't.
A scraggly plant with small purple flowers that the system identified as Violaceae—useful for coughs, not hearts.
She took it anyway.
By the time she finished, her pile of greens was almost comically small.
A few handfuls of leaves and flowers, probably not enough to make a difference, but enough to feel like she'd done something.
One step at a time, she told herself.
Water first.
Then fire.
Then medicine.
She gathered everything in her skirt—the original owner's robes were dirty and torn, but they worked as a basket—and made her way back toward the kitchen.
The well water was still there.
Still cold.
Still probably full of parasites.
But she had a plan now.
Back in the kitchen, she found what she needed: the pan with surface rust, the ceramic jar, and a handful of charcoal from the old hearth.
She'd learned this in a wilderness medicine elective, years ago, taught by some grizzled former army doc who said "if you don't know how to make dirty water drinkable, you don't deserve to survive."
She crushed the charcoal between two rocks—slow work with weak arms, but doable.
Spread it in the bottom of the jar.
Found a piece of cloth that wasn't completely rotten and laid it over the charcoal.
Then more charcoal, then more cloth.
A basic filter.
It took three tries to haul enough water from the well.
Each trip left her gasping, chest burning, vision swimming.
But she did it.
She poured the water through the filter, watched it drip into the pan below, and when the pan was full of water that looked slightly less disgusting, she faced the next problem.
Fire.
The kitchen had a hearth, yes.
And old ash.
But no wood, no kindling, nothing that would burn except the rotten furniture in the other buildings.
Xiyue went hunting again.
She came back with an armful of broken bed slats—dry, old, perfect for burning.
Arranged them in the hearth.
Found a piece of flint among the kitchen debris.
And then spent forty-five miserable minutes trying to spark a flame with hands that wouldn't stop shaking.
Strike. Nothing.
Strike. Nothing.
Strike. A spark, gone.
Strike—
Smoke.
A tiny curl of smoke from the wood shavings she'd made with her last ounce of strength.
She blew on it gently, like breathing life into a patient, and the smoke became a glow became a tiny flame became fire.
[New achievement: Fire Mastery (Basic).]
[Reward: +0.1% bond with future self? Just kidding. No reward. Good job though.]
Xiyue laughed.
Actually laughed—a real laugh, hysterical and exhausted and maybe a little unhinged.
She was sitting on a dirt floor in an abandoned kitchen in some alternate dimension, building a fire to boil water from a well, and the system was cracking jokes.
The water boiled.
She let it cool, then drank.
Then boiled more, this time adding mugwort leaves to make a weak tea.
It tasted terrible—bitter and earthy and nothing like the lattes she used to drink.
But it was warm.
It was something.
She felt marginally less dead.
While the tea cooled, she explored the kitchen more thoroughly.
Found a small knife, rusted but usable after some work with a stone.
Found a clay pot that held ancient grain—mouse droppings mixed in, but the grain underneath was still intact.
Found a broken mirror in a back corner, probably dropped by some long-gone servant, its surface cracked but reflective.
She picked it up without thinking.
Turned it over.
And saw her face.
Pale.
So pale it was almost gray.
Dark circles under eyes that were too big, too hollow.
Lips with a blue tint that screamed cardiac compromise to anyone who knew what to look for.
Cheekbones sharp enough to cut.
Hair matted, dirty, hanging in strings.
The face of a woman who was dying.
Xiyue stared at herself.
At this stranger who was also her.
At the eyes that didn't match the rest—those were her eyes, the ones she'd had in her old life.
Dark brown, determined, the kind of eyes that had looked at dying patients and said "not today" without ever speaking aloud.
I'm still in there, she thought.
Whatever this body is, whatever happened to the original owner, I'm still in there.
The cracked mirror showed her a ghost.
But the ghost had her eyes.
She set the mirror down carefully, almost reverently, and went back to her tea.
Tomorrow, she'd figure out how to reach the palace.
How to find the screaming emperor.
How to bond with someone who probably ate people like her for breakfast.
Tonight, she had warm tea and a fire and a pan that sort of worked.
The fire crackled.
Outside, wind rattled the broken windows.
Something howled in the distance—not a person, she hoped.
Xiyue pulled her knees to her chest and watched the flames.
[Time remaining: 66 hours, 12 minutes.]
She closed her eyes.
And for the first time since waking up in this nightmare, she didn't dream of the dead girl.
She dreamed of fire.