If you guessed that the bed I drifted off in so peacefully wasn't Lin's bed, you're cleverer than me. Or may you just aren't struggling to overcome the trauma of astral projection and soul cannibalization. Who can say?

"Get out of my bed, you fucking idiot mongrel!" the man shouted.

He was huge (at least relative to me), angry, and more than a little sloshed. Lee Dan. The dark-eyed man with the short, dark beard from Lin's memories. I shrieked and rolled to the side just in time to avoid a leather belt as it whistled through the air. The silk sheets tore with a hiss.

"And you tore my fucking sheets!" the man bellowed, his face turning red.

I looked around for something, anything, that I might use to defend myself against the bastard. I realized that I could use the-

It didn't matter. With speed and agility that was completely at-odds with human capability, let alone his level of drunkenness, the man dodged around the bed with a single bound and grabbed me by the throat. I clawed at his fingers to pry them loose, but my little fingernails couldn't even scratch his skin. My vision started to tunnel in…

"You let Simple Lin sleep in your bed?" a woman giggled.

Lee Dan grunted, loosening his grip on me but keeping me pinned in place with a leg that might as well have been a tree trunk. "She had her own room downstairs," he growled.

The woman giggled again. She was dressed in a green silken gown with a scandalous slit almost up to her hip. Little strips of silver wrapped around the waist and arms for accent and about a pound of assorted silver jewelry studded with semiprecious stones adorned her body. She was pretty in a skinny-bitch-with-resting-bitch-face sort of way but could have done with less makeup…

Well, I guess the amount of makeup was about right. She was a 'courtesan', after all. A whore if you're feeling crass.

"Oh? So you let her sleep in your bed now? Such a pervert, Lee Dan!" she said, giggling playfully.

He growled in a way that suggested he did not find it funny. Or maybe he was doing a pretty solid rottweiler impersonation. In a flash, he was off of me. He grabbed the woman before she could react and tossed her to the bed. He pulled at the drawstrings of his robe and took a swig from a big gourd of rice wine.

"You wanna see perverted? I'll show you perverted!"

I have no idea whether the courtesan was in mortal danger or whether this was just Lee Dan being kinky and drunk. I wasn't in a position to rescue anybody, much less rescue them from a man more than twice my size with the strength and reflexes of a jungle beast. I bolted down the stairs and out into the night.

I'm not sure what time it was - probably an hour or two after midnight. A gibbous moon hung in the sky, big and yellow - it seemed larger than the moon I was used to, but I wasn't exactly in an objective state of mind. The streets were dark and quiet, and I was utterly alone. Several houses sported the dim glow of lantern light, but they were few and far between. I forced myself to take slow, even breaths and, once I convinced myself that I wasn't being followed, I wandered through the silent town.

Plumbing into Lin's memories with a more discerning eye, it was pretty obvious… her name was Lee Lin (with the family name first, obviously). My name is Lynn Lee. Two Lin/Lynn Lees? Was there a connection? I have no fucking clue, but it would be a hell of a coincidence. The belligerent bearded drunkard was Lee Dan, Lin's abusive uncle. She lived with him in his wreck of a home… in a squalid little closet, sleeping on a pile of smelly rags like some kind of fucking animal. He beat her when he was angry. He beat her when he was drunk. He beat her when he was bored…

Needless to say, I wouldn't be going back there. My only regret is that I didn't burn the place down with the bastard in it, passed out in a drunken stupor. But then I'd have felt bad about incinerating his prostitute.

I eventually made my way to the modest courtyard that hosted the town's water clock, a big, thirty-foot tower that served as both a time keeper, a topic of conversation, and a local well.

It was probably against every local statute, regulation, and custom, but I bathed myself in the flow of water, the cool of the night somehow refreshing despite making me shiver. Then, clean-ish for the first time since I arrived (even soaked and thoroughly wrung-out, my rags still had a distinct odor), I sat down beside the hush of water in the dead of night, and I meditated.

--------

I'm not being conceited when I say I'm a bit of a genius at meditation. No kidding, I am. Once, as a college senior, I was recruited to participate in a meditation study during my senior year at CalOc. They put non-meditators along with novices, amateurs, and experts into fMRI machines to see what brain areas were engaging differently during mindfulness meditation.

I later found out from a friend who was a lab assistant in the study that they'd had to throw my data out because, even though I was in the amateur group (those with 6 months to 4 years of regular meditation practice - I was right in the middle of the pack in that regard), my brainwaves (or whatever it is that fMRIs measure) were way more extreme than even the expert practitioners, who averaged about twenty years of dedicated practice. That's right. Ya girl Lynn is a CalOc-certified meditation genius.

Hmm… maybe that's why I got astral projected to wherever I am? Even during regular meditation on Earth, weird stuff occasionally happened to me, possibly because I sometimes meditated instead of sleeping. I recall having a conversation about it once with Bailey and her then-boyfriend, Daniel.

"It's useful for all sorts of stuff, really," I'd explained. "Like… sometimes I just meditate all night instead of sleeping, and I get up just as refreshed. If I didn't love sleeping so much, I'd probably do it all the time."

"Meditation doesn't work like that," Daniel replied - he was a mechanical engineer or something. "Maybe you can get some benefits out of it, sure. But you can't just meditate instead of sleeping."

"Counterpoint: like I said, I do it all the time, and I don't even drink caffeine in the mornings."

"That's true," Bailey said. "She won't even drink decaf coffee. She won't even have coffee smoothies. She's always super alert in the morning, though, so maybe there's something to it, babe?"

"It's psychosomatic," Daniel insisted. "You're probably racking up a sleep deficit, which has all kinds of problems. Plus you yourself admitted that you only do it sometimes."

"Yeah, because I love sleeping," I said. "But I'm pretty sure people can't just… not sleep for two days a week and still be okay. So it can't be psychosomatic… you can meditate instead of sleeping."

He sighed. "Do you even know what psychosomatic means?"

At that point, I gave Bailey's boyfriend double middle-fingers, and he absolutely deserved them. "Fuck you, Daniel! Of course I know what it means! And I'm telling you you're wrong, and I'm going to find the studies that prove it!"

He just rolled his eyes, as if I was being the unreasonable one. "Yeah, ok. Whatever, Lynn."

So I looked for scientific articles to prove that meditation could be used in lieu of sleep, and do you know what I found? I found studies suggesting it could improve concentration and vigilance. I found studies showing that it might decrease the need for sleep. But absolutely nothing suggested that it was a viable sleep substitute. Daniel, that bastard, was right - at least in the eyes of the scientific community.

So, if science said meditation wasn't a replacement for sleep, then what in the hell was I doing? I never got back to Daniel to admit that he was right… and, for the record he wasn't right. It's science that was wrong!

And Bailey broke up with Daniel like a month later after he cheated on her with her cousin. What a douchecanoe.

So I sat by the water clock and meditated, my concentration simultaneously spreading out into the world and turning inward, first to my body's sensations… to the lingering soreness of my throat where Lin's uncle had choked her… choked me… to the feeling of fullness from my dinner yet to fully fade… to the feeling of cool stone beneath and of the damp rags draped around my bony body. I felt and acknowledged these sensations and delved deeper still to that tiny fiber of harmony that resonated when I observed it and accepted it…

Only now it wasn't alone. Strange.

Normally, when I found what I called my 'inner light', it was alone like a gently-humming neon bulb in the stillness of deep space. Now, though, I could see that it was accompanied by another, more tenuous thread, blue and diaphanous, waxing and waning with the clunk of the water clock as it counted off the minutes. And slowly, gradually, it approached my inner light and curled around it like a sleepy cat. And it wasn't alone.

There were more threads, even fainter, the most insubstantial of wisps, and yet they glowed and thrummed with energy. Utterly fascinated, utterly unafraid for the first time since arriving on this strange world, my awareness focused on this ethereal dance of threadlike energies. The world around me muted, grew fainter, and my inner light sang a sonata as the threads danced around it, wrapped like streamers of light around a Christmas tree… and then, like Christmas lights, they lit up. They branched out into space, far beyond my ability to perceive them, and wrapped about one another, rooting into some spiritual bedrock deep within me.

Their energy flowed into me like a thousand tiny rivers. Part of me realized that, for my whole life, until that moment, my soul had been starving just as this body had been starving. My soul had been starving, and I could somehow feed it by communing with the energies of this world. In that moment, I felt such joy that I could have forgotten the world around me altogether and happily stayed rooted to that spot, soaking up the love of the universe…

But the world will not be denied. Somebody nudged my shoulder with a wooden rod.

"Simple Lin?"

My eyes fluttered open, and I was a bit surprised to see that it was already dawn and Emerald Vale was gradually awakening. Before me was a confused-looking, middle-aged man with the little flat-topped hat worn by the town's minor bureaucrats. I tried to come up with a name but, alas, Lin had never known it.

Reading on this site? This novel is published elsewhere. Support the author by seeking out the original.

"Um… good morning, sir," I said with an awkward smile.

"Were you pretending to meditate?" he asked with a chuckle.

"Sure. We'll go with that," I said. I somehow doubted that a discourse on the different types of meditation and their application would be very well-received right now. "Am I in your way?"

He blinked in surprise - yet another person not expecting full sentences and observational prowess from poor Simple Lin. "Just a bit. I set the water clock once a week, and today's the day! Can you find somewhere else to 'meditate'?"

My stomach chose that moment to make itself known. I'd somehow burned through my whole foodbaby overnight. I hopped to my feet, one hand on my concave stomach. "Do you know where I could get some food?"

The man pointed northward with his wooden rod. "You could try the marketplace. The shops should be opening for business any minute now."

I nodded, thanked the man, and scampered away, feeling far more energized than I had the day before despite the gnawing hunger in my belly. Really, what kind of lucky metabolism did Lin have that she could digest that whole glut of food in like ten hours? I didn't have a penny - or whatever money they used here - to my name, so I would have to rely on the kindness of strangers.

--------

I'll be real - I'm boujie and I'm not too proud to admit it. I didn't know the first thing about begging for money, food, or anything else. Pleading? That I'm an old hand at. I managed to plead my way into borrowing my dad's Subaru Forester an average of twice a week between 11th grade and freshman year at CalOc. But never did my very survival rely upon it.

I found Emerald Vale's marketplace easily enough. It was the big open area where people congregated around the shops, stalls, and itinerant vendors hawking their wares every which way. A handful of green-clad guards patrolled the area with imperious expressions, truncheons at the ready. And, when I started whining at passersby for coin so I could by food, I soon found myself looking down the length of an iron truncheon with a frowning, mustachioed guard attached to the other end.

"No beggars in the marketplace!" he barked and proceeded to prod and push me outside the market to a huddle of six or seven other beggars dancing, groaning, displaying old injuries, and so on for money. There was even a guy with a semi-trained monkey.

I tried to look as pitiable as possible, hands outstretched and big silvery eyes brimming with want, my scars and deformed jaw on full display…

I ran my tongue along the inside of my mouth. Strange.

Yesterday, the right side of my mouth had been in such a sorry state that I couldn't even chew with it. It felt like half of the teeth were just gone and the half that remained were so crooked and skewed that they weren't much good for anything. Now, though… it had to be my imagination, but it felt different. My teeth still felt pretty crooked, but I only felt two conspicuous gaps and I could actually manage to bite down. Maybe I was just more used to my new crooked mouth?

"Please, sir?" I whined at a passing man. "I just want to eat," I said.

"Then get a job!" he barked. One of the other beggars threw a pebble at him.

"Here, dear. It's not much…" an elderly woman said. She pressed two small coins into my palm. They looked to be fashioned from cast iron and had a square hole right down the middle.

It was two more coins than I'd had before. More people passed. More coins clinked down - most of them into the pots and palms of the more-experienced beggars. I watched them, taking mental notes, but I hoped I wouldn't be at this for too long…

A mumbled voice caught my attention: "Isn't that Lee Dan's cripple daughter?"

"His niece, I think," another woman replied with a twirl of her parasol. "The poor dear. He isn't even feeding her now."

The other woman tutted, little beads clacking in her hair. "Disgraceful! He should either feed her or put the poor dear out of her misery."

"I can hear you, you know," I said with a scowl.

"Oh! Well you won't get my coin with an attitude like that, you little mongrel!" the second woman snapped. She huffed and the two of them scurried off.

The old beggar behind me jostled me with a half-hearted kick. "Don't scare the rich folk away, idiot!"

I ignored him, opening my clenched fist and counting my haul from an hour of begging: five iron coins. I wasn't sure how much a coin was worth, but that seemed to be the most common denomination and most of the other beggars had at least as much as me. My stomach grumbled painfully. "I'm leaving anyway," I said with a snort. "Good luck to the rest of you."

I made my way into the market, past a green-clad guard who warned me with a tap of his truncheon on the stone walkway. His meaning was clear enough: he was letting me enter the marketplace, but he didn't want to see any begging.

There was a dizzying array of activity in the marketplace, several hundred people clambering about and calling out their wares and services. I wasn't sure how large Emerald Vale was… I vaguely understood that it wasn't considered to be a proper city and that it was a mid-sized town on the outskirts of… something. I had no idea what sort of government I was even living under. A feudal empire? A city-state? A theocratic oligarchy? An anarcho-syndicalist commune? Not a fucking clue. But I did know that they had a healthy selection of food, to gauge from the long row of stalls and carts selling consumables. I didn't even know if I had enough for a meal.

Five coins had to be enough, right?

"Ten dumplings for one yao!" a man shouted nearby, just as the smell of something savory and full of gluteny carbs wafted by my nose… it smelled so wrong and yet so good. I glanced at the coins in my fist, wondering for a moment whether I could actually eat fifty dumplings. My stomach sure seemed to think so.

I put on my sunny smile, the one my mother used to make me practice before going to my grandparents' place in Grover Beach. I imagine it looked a bit more lopsided on Lin's face, but there was no helping that…

"Hi, sir! I've got some money…" I held out my coins hopefully. "How many is this?"

He looked at me like I was an idiot. And, to be fair, I had a reputation for being simple and it was a pretty simple question. Maybe there's no such thing as stupid questions, but you can usually gauge somebody pretty well based on the questions they ask. The man… balding, middle-aged, and just on the wrong side of chunky… sighed. "That's five," he said.

"So I can have fifty dumplings?" I confirmed.

"That's five wu, girl. It's ten wu to the yao. That's one of these." He held up a shiny brass coin a bit larger than the dull iron ones in my hand.

"So… can I have five dumplings?"

From his body posture, I could tell the man was about to say no, but just then a woman of similar age and build waddled up to him carrying a big stack of bamboo boxes. She set them down with a grunt and poked him in the shoulder. "Just give her five dumplings, Bo! That's Lee Dan's girl. The… simple-"

"Granny P fixed me up," I interjected. "I'm fine now. Smart, even! And Lee Dan is my uncle. I'm not 'his' girl."

With a puzzled frown, Bo slid a small wooden plate of dumplings across to me along with a pair of chopsticks. Each dumpling was about the length of my thumb and twice as wide… and my thumbs weren't particularly large. Still, food was food. I took the chopsticks and began shoveling dumplings into my mouth, groaning at the sticky, glutinous texture of the steamed dough, the savory, seasoned burst of flavor as the contents gushed out. I chewed with both sides of my mouth, barely able to force myself to be disappointed that the filling was clearly about half pork…

Guys, pigs are intelligent and sensitive creatures! But… and I hate to say it… absolutely delicious. Especially if you're in the body of a teenaged girl recovering from starvation.

My chopsticks tapped against the empty plate. They were gone! Somebody had stolen my… no… nobody had stolen my dumplings. I'd practically inhaled the things. Baker Bo couldn't quite hide his surprise as his wife studiously arranged the supplies she'd just brought in. My stomach gurgled… five small dumplings had barely made a dent in my calorie deficit. I placed my five coins in front of Bo. He just looked at them, not quite knowing what to do.

"Could I maybe work for you guys?" I said hopefully.

Bo looked at his wife. She wiped her hands on her roughspun skirt and turned to face me. "You'd work for food?"

"Fen… we can't afford it…" Bo sighed.

"Nonsense! How much could a slip of a thing like her eat anyway, you grumpy monster? If she picks up dumplings like I think she might, you can take off early and play mahjong with Chen like you always want to do and I'll tend to the customers while the girl folds dumplings. Aren't you always going on about how you could make a killing at mahjong anyway?"

"I suppose…" Bo said.

"Good." Fen nodded and motioned for me to come join her behind the stall. "The first step to a good dumpling is good filling. Those are secret family recipes. Next is the dough. Now, pay attention to how I wrap this little dollop up…"

Mrs. Xu Fen showed me how to wrap the dumplings. Their stall had not one but five different fillings that customers could order. One of them was even vegetarian! My hands were small and deft, and I picked up dumpling-folding quickly. My first fifty weren't pretty, but they were edible. Fen would put one or two of my malformed ones in the middle of a plate of ten and nobody even noticed.

Next came the steaming. The folded dumplings were carefully-arranged in a bamboo steamer set above a pot of boiling water. It took around fifteen minutes to steam the dumplings… the pork and chicken were always kept near the bottom of the steamer stack since you definitely didn't want to undercook those. Fen showed me how I could use a toothpick to make sure a batch was done, and from there they were transferred to a secondary steamer stack to keep them warm without overcooking.

Every so often, Fen would 'sneak' me a few dumplings to consume, and every time I practically inhaled the things with gusto. At first, Bo whined about it, but he eventually stopped. Maybe Fen's repeated assertions that this was my payment actually got through to him. I think that part of him just wanted to see how many of the damn things I'd eat.

Quite a few. Far more than I'd have guessed at the beginning of the day.

Both of the Xus were glad to have me when the lunch rush came around. They had me wander around the stall's vicinity shouting the flavors and the price of their dumplings while periodically directing interested customers to the stall. I suggested to them that I hand out free samples, but both of them looked at me like I was insane - I guess free samples aren't a thing in this world. Yet.

"We can't have you advertising in rags, Lin!" Fen pulled at the frayed, tattered remains of what had once been a tunic. "I'm sure I've got one of Li Fen's old outfits somewhere around here."

Li Fen was the Xus' daughter, grown and recently married. It turns out they'd been able to slot me seamlessly into their workflow because Li Fen had worked in and around the stall for around a dozen years. Her clothes were a little big on me, but they were the nicest clothes that Lin had ever worn since she was a young child. I thanked the Xus effusively and skipped around the market like a little kid.

"Xu's family-style dumplings, based on recipes five generations old! Pork belly! Spicy pork special! Chicken liver and dark meat! Chicken white meat with herbs! Vegetable medley! Try one or try all! Buy ten for a yao and get an eleventh dumpling absolutely free!"

The people of Emerald Vale weren't ready for free samples, but eleven for the price of ten was apparently doable. Fen thought it was a great idea, even if Bo grumbled about it. After the lunch rush, I got back to folding and steaming dumplings while Fen took over in front. There were quite a few customers, and most of them were very interested to learn about the eleven dumplings for the price of ten special. By mid-afternoon, we were almost out of dumpling filling and Fen had to race off to fetch Bo to mix up some more while I tended to the stall.

That was fine. I was an old hand at customer service, and the only unfamiliar bit of my current task was that there were only five items on the menu and none of them were smoothies. Strange.

I shuffled back and forth between the front of the stall and the steaming boxes, handling the steady stream of customers and their many questions. "Yes, of course you can order a combination, madam! Just tell me which ones you want!"

Fen would be back any minute…

Of course, that's when Lee Dan decided to show up, dressed in all black like a bearded ninja and scowling like it was going out of style. I froze in place, bamboo chopsticks grasped in one little fist like they were weapons. As if any weapon I might wield would do any good against that monster of a man.

"You!" he shouted at me. Almost immediately, the people scattered. They left us a very wide berth, indeed. "Why are people saying that I don't house you? That I don't feed you? Why do you insist on besmirching the Lee name, you idiot mongrel-girl!"

"I… I didn't say any of that?" I managed to squeak out.

Saying a full sentence with proper enunciation should have been enough clue that this wasn't his regular Lin, but Uncle Dan was too enraged to use his faculties of reason, which were iffy at the best of times. He rushed forward, impossibly fast, and took a swing at me…

And missed. Somehow, my reflexes let me dodge his lazy, almost-contemptuous, but still blindingly fast punch.

Snarling, he lunged at me… and I leapt to the side. He bowled right into the big pot of boiling water, knocking over the steamer baskets and spilling scalding-hot water all over the place. He howled in pain and anger and I started running, threading through a group of stunned onlookers and heading for the nearest marketplace exit. As the guards rushed past me to see what the commotion was about, Lee Dan shouted after me:

"Show your crooked face here again and I'll fucking kill you like I should have done years ago!"

Welp. I guess I wouldn't be going back to Uncle Dan's house anytime soon. I sprinted for the town's north gate and kept on running once I was out. And do you know what? Part of me was glad things shook out like that.