Flavors of the '90s

Chen Xin was jolted awake by a sharp pain in her big toe. She sat up abruptly, feeling as if she’d kicked something off her foot. The next moment, her half-awake mind was pierced by the shrill cries of a baby, and with that, a surge of information flooded in.

Fortunately, the information settled in her mind much like files being transferred to the right folders on a disk—orderly, categorized, and then quietly hidden away, allowing her to keep her wits without being overwhelmed by the sheer volume.

Ignoring the inexplicable knowledge swirling in her head, Chen Xin crawled to the edge of the bed. Peering over, she saw a baby in a tiny T-shirt sprawled on the floor, crying so hard he could scarcely breathe.

Thank goodness—someone had anticipated such accidents and padded the floor around the bed with old clothes and cotton batting. The baby wasn’t hurt, just frightened.

The moment she touched the child, information about him surfaced naturally in her mind. He was her sister’s child—no, more accurately, the child of the original body’s elder sister. The poor thing had lost his father before birth, and his mother soon after. The original owner, barely an adult herself and newly admitted to university, had suddenly become the guardian of an infant, still little more than a child herself and utterly unprepared for motherhood.

Yet she had done her best, applying to defer her university admission for a year to care for the baby. The child’s father had been a soldier, killed in the line of duty, so special exceptions were made for them, and there was