Chapter 4: The Bleeding Edge

Chapter 4: The Bleeding Edge

The ghostly echo of Lixia’s kiss was a persistent torment. It was a receipt for a transaction he had not made, a proof of purchase for a memory he didn't own. The hollow victory of deceiving his parents had soured into the profound emptiness of being a spectator to his own life. Li Wei sat in the dim light of his room, the Umbral Plate cold and heavy in his lap. The duplicate, his perfect proxy, was downstairs, flawlessly executing a guzheng melody that the real Li Wei had struggled with for weeks.

He was the puppet master, but he could no longer stand the feeling of being backstage. The desire was no longer just to survive the pressure, but to live the successes. He wanted to feel the satisfaction of solving the equation, the thrill of Lixia’s attention, the resonant hum of the guzheng strings under his own fingertips. The obstacle was his own body, this tired, anxious vessel tethered to the room.

A new, reckless idea took hold. If the connection was the problem, why not change it? Instead of receiving faint, corrupted echoes from his duplicates, what if he pushed his consciousness out? What if he didn't just command them, but became them?

Action. Focusing on the plate, he closed his eyes and pushed. It wasn't a physical effort, but a total surrender of will. He imagined his awareness as a stream of light, flowing out from his chest, through the cold stone, and branching into the duplicates he had willed into being. For a moment, there was a wrenching, disorienting vertigo, a sensation of being torn apart. Then, it settled.

His eyes opened.

He was in his bedroom, looking down at his own still form. The original Li Wei sat slack-jawed in his chair, eyes unfocused, breathing slow and shallow. He was also in the living room, his fingers dancing over the guzheng strings, the music more vibrant and alive than ever before because he was feeling it. And he was also in the study, a third copy he’d created out of sheer ambition, absorbing a history textbook, the information flowing directly into his mind with perfect clarity and retention.

The power was intoxicating, absolute. He was a god of his own small world, a trinity of perfect students. He was everywhere at once, a master of multitasking on a level no human could ever achieve. Time itself seemed to bend to his will. While Li Wei-Academic devoured a chapter in ten minutes, Li Wei-Musical perfected a complex passage. The original body was a mere anchor, a silent hub for his fractured existence. This was the true secret of Yueming's effortless perfection. This was control.

The first glitch was subtle, easily dismissed.

Li Wei-Academic was in class the next day, solving a calculus problem on the blackboard. For a split second, the chalk in his hand felt alien, and he saw not the equation, but the strings of his guzheng, shimmering in his vision. He blinked, and the phantom image was gone. He finished the problem to a round of impressed murmurs from his classmates.

Later that afternoon, Li Wei-Musical was practicing in the living room. As he plucked a high C, he felt a phantom sensation, the dry, dusty texture of a book page turning under his thumb. His finger faltered, producing a discordant twang. His mother, passing by, gave him a sharp look, and he immediately corrected the note.

The system was beginning to fray at the edges. Senses were starting to bleed across the connections. The narrative of his own consciousness was fragmenting.

He was in the school library, reading. His hand reached to turn a page, but instead of a simple pinch-and-pull motion, his fingers contorted, mimicking the intricate fingering of a guzheng chord. He stared at his hand, confused, before forcing it to obey. At the same time, at home, Li Wei-Musical felt his own fingers suddenly try to flatten and grip, as if holding a thick book, causing another jarring mistake in his practice.

The disorienting nightmare escalated. He was walking home from school as Li Wei-Academic, but he could smell the lemon polish of the living room. He was practicing calligraphy as a fourth duplicate, Li Wei-Artistic, but he could taste the bland cafeteria rice from lunch hours earlier. His consciousness was no longer a clean, branched stream; it was becoming a swamp, a chaotic swirl of cross-sensory static. Thoughts and intentions began to misfire. He would try to speak in class, and the words that came to mind were the lyrics of a classical song. He would try to read, and complex mathematical formulas would swim before his eyes, obscuring the text.

He was losing control. The perfection was becoming a prison of noise and confusion. He tried to pull his consciousness back, to consolidate into one body, but he didn't know how. He had pushed himself out with a desperate wish, but he had no command to call himself back. He was stuck, fragmented and spread thin across his own life, a king of a rapidly collapsing kingdom.

The catastrophe arrived on a wave of searing heat.

His mother, tired from a long day, called from the living room. "Li Wei, be a good son and make your father and me a cup of tea."

Li Wei-Musical, the closest duplicate, nodded obediently. "Of course, Mother."

He walked into the kitchen. The kettle was already full. He set it on the stove and turned on the gas flame. As he waited for the water to boil, the glitches intensified. He looked at the blue flame, but he saw the white pages of his history textbook. He heard the whistle begin to build, but it was overlaid with the sound of chalk squeaking on a blackboard. His head swam with a nauseating vertigo. His very identity felt like a flickering signal, threatening to cut out.

The kettle shrieked.

He reached for it, his movements clumsy, disconnected. He was no longer a single, cohesive being. He was a host for ghosts. As his hand closed around the handle of the boiling kettle, Li Wei-Academic, sitting in the study, decided to underline a key passage in his notes. The motor impulse fired through the fractured network.

In the kitchen, Li Wei-Musical's hand didn't just lift the kettle. It jerked sideways, mimicking the swift, linear motion of underlining a sentence.

Boiling water, a shimmering sheet of pure agony, sloshed over the side of the kettle and onto the back of his hand.

The pain was absolute. It was not a singular event. The system, designed to share consciousness, shared sensation with perfect, horrifying fidelity.

The pain didn't just happen to Li Wei-Musical. It cascaded.

In the study, Li Wei-Academic screamed, a raw, high-pitched shriek, dropping his textbook as his own hand erupted in phantom, unbearable agony. In the living room, Li Wei-Artistic, who had been listening to his mother’s instructions, convulsed, his body hitting the floor as the searing pain shrieked through every nerve he possessed.

It was a catastrophic system shock. The network, flooded with a singular, overwhelming signal of pure torment, overloaded and crashed.

From the floor of the living room, through a white-hot haze of pain, the last conscious version of Li Wei saw it happen. The duplicate in the study flickered like a bad hologram, dissolving into a wisp of shadow. The one in the kitchen, the source of the agony, simply collapsed, its form turning dark and evaporating before it hit the ground.

The pain in his own hand began to fade, not into relief, but into a terrifying numbness. He felt a profound, gravitational pull, a sensation of being violently reeled in. His vision blurred, the living room dissolving into a tunnel of darkness. His consciousness, broken and burned, was being dragged back to its source. Back to the silent hub. Back to the boy in the chair.