A Writer's Transmigration With A System

The false dream realm’s sky was falling on him one memory at a time.

Rain struck Li Jiwen’s face, warm rain, and wrong. Each drop carried a scene: a girl blowing out birthday candles, a soldier’s half written letter home, an old fisherman mending a net with the smell of tar baked right into the moment.

Ten thousand tiny lives shredded to droplet size, sifting down out of the violet vault like debris from a universe that had run out of shelving.

The white figure fell beside him, arms spread, serene as laundry on a line.

He could not hear himself scream. The storm ate sound the way Baal’s clerics had, but sloppier, swallowing shouts and swallowing whimpers and leaving only pressure where his own voice should be.

So he thought his scream instead: ’I want it noted for the record that I detonated my entire cultivation, fought a library, and made deals with a depressed sword god, and I am STILL ending this week in freefall.’

The ring said nothing at all. Ember dim, cracked through its circumference, pressed warm against his knuckle and silent as a slept through alarm.

The figure turned its faceless head toward him during the second thousand feet, unhurried, and pointed downward with one small finger.

He followed the gesture. Immediately below them hung a boulder of compacted memory drifting in the stream, a wedding scene the size of a market stall, frozen mid vow. The figure angled toward it, landed on its surface like a leaf, and stood there riding it down with the immovable composure of something that had never once needed to worry about terminal velocity.

’Show off,’ Li Jiwen thought.

The first leviathan nearly ended him before he even understood there were leviathans.

It came gliding up out of a cloud shelf below: a cathedral that had given up on religion and on having a spine, ribs arcing in tiers, membranes stretched between them like sailcloth, gill fronds trailing for a li on either side of a mouth designed by committee from the anatomy of baleen whales and harvest sieves.

Filter feeders. It hung in the wind currents, mouth agape, drinking the memory rain out of the sky by the acre.

Suspended in those trailing fronds hung the catch. Semi dissolved people drifted between the filaments, previous fallers, mid filtered, their edges already fuzzy as wet ink. One turned her gaze to him as he tumbled past at terminal velocity. Her lips moved. No sound survived the sky.

’Not today,’ Li Jiwen decided.

He tried flight. Authority answered with nothing, worse than nothing, the effort felt like trying to sprint up a waterfall. Whatever layer these filterers breathed, this whole altitude band was soaked through with something that *ate* power output. Even speed authority guttered on each use, banking lower every time, so he rationed ruthlessly and steered with falls instead.

Falling, it turns out, is just flying sideways with commitment issues.

He kicked off drifting debris memory, chunks of eroded scenery dense enough to hold weight: a shattered temple gate, a whale fall of furniture, someone’s entire recalled childhood compacted into a boulder the size of a house.

Off these he pushed, angling across the current lines, reading the rain’s grain the way river runners read foam. The current wanted him in one place only: down every gullet in the stream. Streams of shredded memory funneled visibly toward each feeding mouth, glittering conveyor roads he refused to board.

The second leviathan was bigger and much closer, and it had noticed that one fleck of falling authority that wouldn’t cycle down: him, pre turn, still blazing faintly gold at the edges like an unbanked lamp.

It adjusted its feeding line without hurry. Currents bent around its mouth mass, rain streams visibly re plumbed themselves towards the closing sieve. Something with that little urgency owned the whole altitude band, and knew it.

Its gill shadow swallowed him whole, rain scent replaced instantly by something mineral and old. Fronds closed over his head from six directions at once, silk soft, unbreakable polite.

He got one arm braced against the nearest filament and watched with professional calm as it began drinking the authority straight out of his skin, cell by shining cell, gentle as a nurse taking blood pressure.

’So that’s why everyone above feeds them,’ he thought. ’You don’t dodge a sieve this size. You get strained by it or you starve it.’

He stopped feeding.

Deep cycling every meridian shut, cold forging his own power down to embers. A sieve does not chase. A sieve waits for flow. Eight full seconds he hung there doing magnificent, attentive nothing while the giant’s attention wandered off him toward two fatter, brighter, tastier memories tumbling past.

Then he cut loose, dropped out of the gap between two newly parting fronds, and rode the massive displaced air down along the thing’s flank, half slide, half controlled plummet, boots running the ridged bone of its outer rib like a mountainside, using each buttress as a ramp while the whole breathing edifice tried slowly, to roll him back aboard.

A frond the width of a banner swatted at him from above near the flank’s end, he ducked inside its arc, kicked off the last rib into clean air, and let the giant’s own downdraft fling him away like a seed off a shaking branch.

Behind him the cathedral mouth closed on the region he’d vacated, chewed nothing with immense contentment, and resumed its patient trawling.

Somewhere in the middle of that bone slope descent, the System flickered back online for one final appearance.

Ding! [Anomal]

That was all. No warning followed, no note, no obituary for retail services rendered. The window simply tore in half and did not come back, and for the first time since a phone shaped shop had crashed into his miserable new life, Li Jiwen was entirely alone in his own skull except for a cracked ring that wasn’t speaking.

"...Say something insulting," he told it. "Anything."

Nothing. Just wind, and the smell of rain with somebody’s first kiss in it.

Below, the ground was arriving far too fast to consult politely about scheduling. Continents drifted in the middle distance like lily pads for gods, continents and worse. One landmass dominated everything under the fall path, vast, slow turning, pocked across its entire flank with crater holes, honeycombed like spent coral. Rib mountains. Marrow lakes glowing pale amber through fissures. Petrified hair forests streaming from a skulled horizon.

A corpse. A titan the size of a province, dead in the sky, and he was aimed directly at its sternum with no flight, no system, no plan, and one working shoulder.

Li Jiwen twisted his fall toward the longest rib slope he could see and began, very calmly, to ski.

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