When Travis woke up, his whole body ached. 

“Uh… what the hell…” Travis moaned as he shifted onto his back. Jarring pains stabbed every inch of his body. Especially his chest. Whenever he inhaled, he was in agony. He ran his fingers delicately across his chest. He quickly found the point of deepest pain and tentatively fingered it. He gasped and when he found what was wrong, he pulled his hand away in a hurry. 

“A broken rib… actually five broken ribs… how did this happen?” He had a body wrought with injuries - broken bones, lacerations, bruises, even a few burns. He wracked his brain in order to figure out what happened. 

“Ok, so I was drinking with the guys.” Travis suddenly laughed. “I really hope Joel’s been using a condom this whole time… He really does go for anything with a pulse.” Travis remembered their banter with a grin on his face. That changed the second he remembered what had happened next. 

He died. 

Remembering the scent of the gunpowder, the cold metal embedded in his brain, the warm, red liquid gushing out onto the street, Travis’ face hardened. He clenched his fist and shook with pure, white-hot rage. 

After a long time, he calmed down. He laughed coldly. “Man… I really died a dog’s death didn’t I.” 

“Wait, shouldn’t I be dead?” His eyes widened and he went to pinch himself, but when he lifted his hand his dislocated shoulder answered the question for him. “Okay, so I’m still alive, I’m still breathing and my heart is beating…” Travis frowned. “But how can someone come back from a bullet to the head?” 

Travis grinned. “Damn, I’m so badass I survived a headshot. When everyone finds out I’m alive, I dare anyone not to give me the respect I deserve.” 

Imagining the cred he would have in the future he got so excited he ignored the mind-numbing pain and stood up. And immediately fell back down. He groaned. “I forgot about that. What happened anyway? No way those pigs actually beat the hell out of a dead body?” He grimaced. He ran his hand through his hair. 

He immediately froze. 

What he was expecting to feel under his hand was shaven hair, with a low fade. What he actually felt was straight hair. And it stretched to his shoulders! Travis’ hands trembled. His voice shook. “What the fuck?” He looked at his hand. His eyes widened. His fingers were thin, completely different from his big, strong, manly hands. These were thin and delicate, like the hands of a pianist. But that wasn’t the shocking part. 

His hand was white. HIS. HAND. WAS. WHITE. Not black like it had been for twenty two years. Travis could not stay calm. Nothing could explain his race changing. He could accept surviving a bullet to the brain, but something like this was unimaginable. He panicked. “This is impossible. I can’t be white.” He rubbed his eyes and opened them as wide as he could. 

His hand was still as white as snow. Ok, maybe not that white, but compared to his previous skin tone, which was pretty dark for a black guy, there was a world of difference.

When he looked at his hand, roaring filled his mind. A splitting pain filled his brain, like his mind was about to tear in half. He began seeing things. Memories. 

A movie reel of scenes filled his head. 

He saw a child, about two years old. It looked like he lived in extreme poverty. His mother was beautiful; Asian. She smiled at him, tears rolling down her eyes. “I’m sorry Wang Tao,” she said. She hugged him. Travis flinched and paled in horror. A hand had stabbed through the back of her head. Blood and gore flew everywhere. 

Travis had seen really soul-numbing stuff - it was the consequence of living in the midst of inner-city poverty. He had seen crack addicts, and people stabbing their own brothers. 

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He knew the face of hopelessness and what the real gutter of society looked like, but admittedly, he had never seen the inside of a brain before. He puked, but nothing was in his stomach, so for about two minutes he dry retched. It was agony; a couple of blood vessels burst in his face. 

It seemed as though the flow of memories conveniently paused itself while Travis had been going through hell. He didn’t know whether to laugh or cry so compensated with a trusty middle finger. 

When Travis returned to the film, the kid had grown up to about five years old. He had moved to a big city and had become a street urchin - robbing and stealing. It was weird - he seemed to spend almost all of his money on food but was still skin and bones. A scene of the kid eating a whole roasted pig terrified Travis.

At eleven, the child had a bit of a lucky encounter. He managed to steal a medicinal pill out of the bag of an unsuspecting cultivator and downed it immediately. He broke through to the first stage of cultivation. He went to a local sect, was found to have some talent at cultivation and entered the sect. 

At thirteen, his appetite grew by tenfold. If he didn’t eat a whole cow a day, he would starve. He started stealing food from the kitchens. The hunger would be quelled by one or two medicinal pills, but as an outer disciple, he only got two a month. 

Wang Tao had stolen food from the kitchens, so disciples had beaten him. 

He succumbed to his injuries.

Witnessing the life of Wang Tao stunned Travis into silence. A stream of questions entered his head in rapid succession. But the most important one of all was: “Where am I?” Everyone looked Asian, so at first he had thought he had somehow come to China. 

However, seeing the hand go through the woman’s brain, there was no way a human could do that. 

Then, he saw what cultivation was - a method of using the energy of heaven and earth to make yourself stronger. Seeing the magical techniques being thrown out, he knew he wasn’t on Earth anymore.

The bizarre did not stop there. Somehow, he had become a thirteen year old Asian kid named Wang Tao. He realised that there were a whole lot of holes in his memories, and he only remembered some of the most important aspects of Wang Tao’s brief life. 

Travis had no idea what had happened, but he didn’t care to find out. He just wanted to go back home. Travis found a extreme low quality healing pill in his robes and swallowed it. A weak burst of medicinal energy filled his body, but it was good enough to heal him somewhat. 

For an entire day he walked around trying to go back to Earth. He was actually in a catacombs, ancient bones lined the walls. For some reason they were shimmering with a white light, that kept them from rotting over the years. Travis searched his memories, “Dead cultivators…” 

After a day of walking he stopped and sighed with frustration. 

“I can tell that there aren’t any ways to get back home right now which means I’m here for the near future. These guys can fly, I’m sure there’s some way I can teleport back or something.” 

Travis imagined going back home with teleportation powers and drooled. Teleportation on Earth! Teleporting to the Bahamas, teleporting into the bank, teleporting away from the police! There were so many applications for it. If he had had teleportation, he wouldn’t have died so miserably. 

“Man, why did they have to stuff me down here though?” When the disciples found he was dead, they tossed him into the catacombs so they wouldn’t be punished for murder. They took his bag of holding too. Travis was no stranger to robbery, but, “I always get my shit back. Even if it belonged to old boy, that’s mine now.” 

He carried on walking through the catacombs until he reached a dead end. He prepared to turn back, but something caught his gaze. His eyes widened, and his mouth curved into a smile full of delight. 

“Is that what I think it is?” He ran towards the wall. What he saw was a huge skeleton of a man, but what Travis’ gaze was fixed on wasn’t the corpse. 

It was a plant. It was the plant. Travis caressed the plant, and started to weep as he fell to his knees. 

“My baby, I’m so glad I found you. A world without you would be a world without love, without light. Kush! Premium fucking kush! Thank the lord!” He started blowing kisses towards the ceiling of the catacombs. 

He had found marijuana. “In my memories, this is called the… Sky Divine Grass? Apparently it’s super-rare, but has no uses.” Travis roared with laughter as he slapped his knee. “Dumbasses! You smoke it, not eat it!” Imagining centuries of people eating weed and being confused when nothing happened was hilarious. 

Travis ground the weed with his hands. He realised he was in a dilemma. He had nothing to smoke it with! No papers, no bongs, no nothing!

Travis thought of something. He looked around and a wolf-like glint entered his eyes. “That’s right, why didn’t I think of that earlier?” 

He ran towards the skeleton on the wall and pulled out a bone on its toe, which was about the size of a normal humerus. He tried bashing it with a rock he found but it was way too tough for Travis to break down and the pebble broke. 

“That shimmering white light is protecting it… how can I drill two holes into the bone?” Travis was stumped. He slapped himself in the head and went to pull another bone from the giant skeleton. He began grinding two holes: one for the weed and one for his mouth.

Admiring his handiwork, he put the weed in but soon realised the lack of a fire. He liberated two more bones from the body and rubbed them together to make a spark. 

“Fuck, it’s been two hours, and still no damn fire.” His eyes bloodshot, he gritted his teeth and kept trying. After four more hours, he finally had a fire. He immediately lit the weed and inhaled. His eyes rolled back and his body slackened. He sighed as he exhaled. 

“This weed is the best I have ever smoked. I don’t know if it’s because I worked for it or because it’s a spiritual plant, but I’ve never been this high in my life.” His heart full of happiness, he didn’t notice one thing. His hunger had left him. He had been starving the entire time he had been in the catacombs, but as soon as he smoked, the hunger vanished. 

The other thing he didn’t notice was the energy that had rushed into his body with each puff. 

“It’s time to leave.” Travis picked all the weed he could find, picked up his bong and fire-bones and stuffed it into his robes. After another hour, he saw a thread of light in the distance.

“Finally, no more dead people.”

He walked towards the light, excited but also scared for what was at the end of the tunnel.