The restraints engage before you can move—titanium bands emerging from the central platform to lock around your wrists and ankles, pulling you horizontal. You twist violently, every muscle fiber screaming resistance, but the machinery operates with inhuman precision.
"警报!" Your voice echoes off surgical steel walls. Warning. "有人在那里吗?" Is anyone there. The Mandarin flows unbidden, your thoughts still crystalline English trapped behind a linguistic barrier your own nervous system enforces.
Mechanical arms descend from the ceiling, their movements smooth and deliberate. Needles find veins with surgical accuracy—dozens of injection sites simultaneously breached. The substances flooding your bloodstream don't burn; they simply erase sensation, replacing it with profound wrongness that spreads like ink through water.
Your vision fractures. The ceiling panels multiply, kaleidoscope, reform. Something fundamental in your proprioception disconnects—you can't tell where your limbs end and the restraints begin. Time becomes elastic, stretching and compressing in waves.
The cellular restructuring begins as pressure. Your skeleton feels suddenly too large, then too small, dimensions shifting as bone density recalibrates at the molecular level. Your chest compresses, ribs narrowing. Your hips widen with grinding sensation that would be agony if the neural blockers weren't suppressing pain receptors. You feel everything happening but filtered through chemical distance.
Your hands—calloused from years of striking makiwara posts, scarred from rope burns and impact trauma—smooth and shrink before your eyes. Fingers shorten. Knuckles round. The musculature built through decades of training melts away like wax, replaced by softer tissue that redistributes across a frame growing smaller by the minute.
Fat deposits bloom across your abdomen, your thighs, your upper arms. The sensation is deeply, viscerally wrong—your body expanding in ways your mind can't reconcile with any previous physical experience. Your face feels like wet clay being reshaped by invisible hands. Cheekbones shift. Your jaw narrows and rounds. Even your throat restructures, your Adam's apple dissolving.
Hair cascades past your peripheral vision—black, straight, impossibly long where moments ago you had short dark brown. Your chest swells with tissue that has never existed on your body before, weight settling that feels simultaneously alien and undeniably real.
When the restraints finally release, you roll off the platform and collapse. Your hands—small, soft, definitively female—press against cool tile. Your reflection stares back from the polished steel of the equipment housing.
A young Han Chinese woman, perhaps twenty-three, with round features and a body carrying substantial weight. Black eyes wide with horror meet your gaze.
"不..." The whisper escapes your lips. No. "这不是我。" This isn't me.