The world filters through a veil of cotton soaked in turpentine. I open my eyes not with the usual clarity, but with a languid heaviness that anchors my eyelids to sleep. A cracked ceiling, furrowed by the capriciousness of water seepage, materializes above me. It's not the spotless white ceiling of my apartment suite. This one is low, gray, and emanates a sense of oppression that constricts my chest.

I sit up with a groan that is alien to me, a hoarse, faint sound that is drowned out in the sepulchral silence of the room. Every movement is an uncomfortable revelation. My bones creak in a new way, my spine complains of the hardness of the pallet on which I lay. A subtle, chemical nausea coils in my stomach. I raise a hand in front of my face, moved by an impulse of pure astonishment. The dim light coming through the dirty window falls on skin paler than I remember, almost translucent, where blue veins are marked like rivers on a map of defeat. The fingers are longer, thinner, and tremble slightly with a shiver that is not from the cold, but from something internal, systemic. I turn my wrist. There, a thin, white scar, ancient, furrows the inner skin. A mark I do not possess.

The silence is the most terrifying thing.

Not the respectful silence of a set awaiting action, but an absolute emptiness, broken only by the distant honking of a car horn and the stubborn drip of a faucet in another room. There is no hum of spotlights, no whispers of assistants, no familiar laughter from Huang Xin on the other side of the wall. I stand up, and the wooden floor creaks under my bare feet with a protest that seems directed at me personally. The room is small, miserably sparse. Piles of books with worn spines, humble clothes folded with a neatness that contrasts with the squalor of the surroundings, a single half-empty glass of water on the bedside table. My actor's eye, trained to catch details, absorbs every crack, every shadow, every particle of dust floating in the air. This scenario is too real, too coherent in its desolation to be a joke.

I approach the small rectangular mirror nailed to the closet door, its surface tarnished and scratched. The waiting reflection takes my breath away. Large eyes, usually expressive, but now wild with silent terror, stare back at me from a face so much like my own yet fundamentally different. The high cheekbones, the fluffy lips, the straight, lifeless hair. It's Gao Tu's face. I blink, but the reflection lingers. A whisper escapes me, a brittle question directed at the image in the mirror, "What...?" The voice that comes from my lips—from Gao Tu's lips—is a brittle echo of my own, lacking its confident timbre and usual calm. A shiver, this time incontestably cold, runs down my spine. It is not a dream. It is a prison of someone else's flesh and blood.