Advent Of The True Villain

His mind was a buzzing mess as he crashed down from white limbo into a body. A dagger of pain speared him the moment he came crashing down on the cold, hard ground of the filthy little apartment. It felt like somebody was hammering a nail into his skull. He massaged his temples, groaning, as a downdraft of echoing memories swung into his mind.

The headache seemed worst. Flashes of someone else's life spilled chaotically in his unclear stare. The room around him felt tight and constricted under the burden of those memories on his chest. Flimsy little cups of instant noodle on a rotting shelf, late-night shifts at a convenience store, and mindless hours spent checking bills that could never be paid. Such was life, that peeled wallpaper was probably stronger.

"What...the hell?" Alex gasped hoarsely.

He stumbled as he few to his feet, weak in his knees and dizzy-headed. His surroundings gradually cleared up, revealing the peeling paint on the walls, the broken furniture, a tiny room smelling of dampness and neglect. 

"Wait, wait, wait..." Alex mumbled and tried to keep his head together with his palms on both sides of it. "I'm not...Alex anymore. I'm...Lin Feng?" 

As the realization sank in, the memories he'd absorbed began to make sense to Alex. Lin Feng—one of the many that had no talent for magic and lived on the suburbs of this magic revolving civilization. Barely scraping by with part-time jobs.Forever haunted by the loans he wasn't able to pay. And the loans served as his continual reminders of failure.

At that moment, Alex- no, Lin Feng- felt like throwing up.

"This man lived like a rat," he scoffed, slumping on the old mattress at the corner. "Too scared to take chances, too soft to do what needed to be done. No wonder he ended up like this!" 

Lin Feng's mind became calm and settled as he turned his focus on the surroundings. His attention came to rest on a narrow door partially open at a corner of the room-the washroom. Dragging his heavy body forward, he stepped inside though needed to bow down as the door frame was small. Surprisingly, it was clean and pure when compared to the other rooms-the washroom looked like and belonged to some other person entirely. This made Lin Feng stop for a moment but later he dismissed that thought. He staggered to the chipped porcelain basin, turned on the cold tap, and splashed the water over his hands, cupping water to wash out his face. 

He looked up and saw his reflection in the cracked, steam-shrouded mirror above the sink. It was a face that was both familiar and strange. He had raven black hair, wet from the moisture and clinging against his forehead; the pallor of his gaunt, hollow-cheeked face spoke of hunger and hard living years back. His eyes-black and disturbing like twin voids, hinting at an abyss that could consume anything. Standing six feet and five inches, with that sickly and almost fragile skeletal frame, he resembled a fluttering flame just before extinguishing—a body that was starved and battered into place without enough nourishment.

Lin Feng's lips curled disdainfully into a very weak smirk. "Pathetic," he said, his voice dripping with contempt. "But even with this... even this can be worked with." 

After sighing deeply once more, Lin Feng gave his face one last splash of water, standing tall and going back into the lounge, every step seeming to drag heavier than the last. Once more, the decrepit condition of the apartment met him, a constant reminder of his new reality. He sank down onto the rickety couch, which creaked under his weight, reclined, and stared at the cracked ceiling above him.

"What now?" he said beneath his breath, hardly audible amidst all the silence. Various thoughts jostled for space in his mind. Should he pick up from where the previous Lin Feng had left off? He was sure that way would only land him back to this horrible life. Then again, should he confront the debts and the people who probably regarded him as just some liability? At the thought of this, he clenched his jaw.

He looked around the shabby room, with the oppressive silence doing nothing to calm his thoughts. "What the hell am I supposed to do with this mess?" Lin Feng said bitterly, running a hand through his damp raven hair. The questions seemed to gnaw at him because he had no immediate answers to them, but one thing was clear—he could not remain stagnant for too long. 

Lin Feng's thoughts were interrupted by the sharp vibrations of a phone on the rickety table beside the sofa. With a frown creasing his forehead, he reached for it, seeing an unfamiliar number flashing on its cracked screen. After a moment's hesitation, he pressed the answer button and put the phone to his ear.

"Lin Feng, where the hell are you?" It was a very annoyed voice on the other end. Maybe it was Li-Mei, one of his co-workers. "Do you know what time it is? If you don't show up in ten minutes, the manager is going to cut your pay again!"

Lin Feng shut his eyes and inhaled a measured breath. Every detail of the memories came flooding back. From the incessant nagging and fake optimism of Li Mei, who never strayed far from Wang Qiang, to the overly plump Wang Qiang, a practitioner of earth magic, who always wore that smug grin and competed on who was lazier and always passed on his share of work to Lin Feng before him. They constantly acted as if they had become indispensable but were, in truth, just blood-sucking pests on Lin Feng's labor.

"I'll be coming in now," Lin Feng said coldly, cutting off Li Mei's incessant shrieks. He cut the connection and threw the phone back at the rickety table, his black eyes sharpened, and his mind was racing.

"Those two…" he muttered; a faint sneer crept onto his lips. "They've fed off this body way too long. But if they think I'm still the same Lin Feng from before..." He leaned forward, elbows resting on his knees. "They are in for a surprise." 

Lin Feng once again laid back on the couch, half his mind drifting, as he filtered through the fragments of the previous Lin Feng life. The memories played out like the most tragic of films, with every detail of each scene crying out louder for attention and pity than the other. A boy grew up without parents and shuttled back and forth between indifferent relatives, who treated him nothing more than an unwanted burden. No one wanted to teach him how to walk or support him if he stumbled.

Reaching his teenage years, Lin Feng had learned to just fade in the background: to survive with methodologies of invisibility. No real friends around, just acquaintances like Zhou Chen, who did not leave because he found it convenient. His colleagues, Li Mei and Wang Qiang, were not much different, nothing more than opportunists who had Lin Feng in their sights.

Lin Feng's eyes darkened, his black irises narrowing as he pieced all of this together. The previous owner of this very body had been utterly insignificant, an inconsequential nobody shambling on the edges of society. A man too timid to fight back when provoked, too terrified to step out of line, and too foolish to say no. He did not have one soul who truly cared for him or anyone who would even bother noticing if he just disappeared.

Lin Feng curled his lips into a cold smile, a brief flicker of malice visible in his eyes. "No parents. No friends. No one would shed a tear for him," he murmured, his voice calm and verging on being amused. "This is good... no its perfect... Marvelous." 

Lin Feng lowered himself forward with his long and slender fingers intertwined whilst he leaned his elbows on his knees. "This is good: earlier nobody cared for him, so no one will notice when things start to change. I can do whatever I want. No worries. No expectations. And most of all no drawbacks from sudden change." 

The faint light in the room cast shadows across his face, making the smirk on his lips even more sinister. This was the first time he sensed the pieces falling into place; the absence of ties and connections was no longer that manifestation of weakness; it was an unconstrained situation that he would exploit to the fullest.