Transmigration between worlds

Transmigration between worlds is the condition that turns Shen Tang’s life into a struggle over identity, agency, and belonging. She is not simply transported from one setting to another; her existence is reframed across worlds, first as a life governed by a fictional storyline and then as the life of an orphan who gradually discovers that the two Shen Tangs are the same person. The decisive consequence is not merely displacement but choice: once return becomes possible, Shen Tang decides that the world in which she has found family and love is the one she wants to call home.

Origin in the Novel World

The state is most fully revealed through Shen Tang’s dream, in which she stands apart from the action as a bystander and watches an entire life pass before her. In that vision, the original “Shen Tang” possesses a clear consciousness but cannot control her body. She is compelled to follow the plot, behaving as a vicious cannon-fodder character and carrying out the kinds of wrongdoing that the role demands. The experience establishes the central violence of the first world: the body acts, but the consciousness is denied meaningful agency.

The dream also contrasts the fictional Gu Huaian with the man Shen Tang knows in reality. In the remembered storyline, Gu Huaian is cold and intimidating, and even a glance from him can make her freeze. The controlled Shen Tang continues along the prescribed path until she meets a terrible death. Only after that death does her soul leave her body and drift into another world, where she discovers the truth that had been hidden from her: she was merely a character in a novel, destined to be shamed in various ways, and her life was controlled by the novel’s author. The revelation destroys her sense of reality rather than liberating her immediately, because it proves that even her apparent choices had belonged to an imposed narrative design.

Reappearance as an Orphan

After the dream’s darkness, Shen Tang sees “Shen Tang” become the Shen Tang of another world, an orphan who mysteriously appears at the doorstep of an orphanage. The second life therefore does not begin with a known family, an inherited place, or an explanation of origin. Its defining image is arrival without recognition: she exists in a new world before she understands why she has no parents or why nobody has ever come looking for her.

The state produces a layered perspective on this second existence. Shen Tang watches her life unfold again, as though both participant and observer, and compares the uncertainty to the image of Zhuang Zhou dreaming that he was a butterfly. She cannot immediately determine whether she is one self transformed into another or another self dreaming the first. Yet the apparent philosophical confusion gradually becomes a concrete identity discovery. She realizes that she is not from this world, but also that she is “Shen Tang,” and that “Shen Tang” is her. Transmigration thus joins rather than permanently separates the two lives: the orphan’s present identity contains the consciousness and history of the person who crossed from the other world.

Choice Between Worlds

The possibility of return becomes explicit when Shen Tang visits Master Zang. She asks for his help, and Master Zang asks whether she has decided to stay after coming from a different realm. His question turns transmigration from a past condition into an immediate moral decision. Shen Tang understands that returning may still be possible, but Master Zang does not answer directly; he responds with silence, a smile, and the space for her to decide for herself.

Shen Tang’s answer is firm. She chooses to stay because this world contains people who love her and people whom she loves. More than friendship binds her to it: she has found family and loved ones, a kind of warmth she had never experienced in the other world. The comparison is grounded in ordinary life rather than grand metaphysics. Before this world, she ate alone, slept alone, worked alone, and even became ill alone. Having experienced profound warmth, she can no longer accept that solitary existence as an adequate home. The value of transmigration therefore shifts from loss to belonging: what began as unexplained displacement becomes the condition that allows her to choose a life connected to others.

Identity, Memory, and Agency

Transmigration between worlds also explains why Shen Tang’s identity cannot be reduced to either the original fictional role or the later orphaned life. The first Shen Tang is treated as a role within a predetermined plot, while the later Shen Tang possesses the capacity to resist that role and make decisions outside it. The dream makes the contrast visible by separating consciousness from bodily action, then reunites them through the realization that both lives belong to one continuing self.

That realization changes the meaning of the past. Shen Tang remembers what she did to Gu Huaian in her former life and feels embarrassed by it, but she is relieved that he does not know. The response is neither complete denial nor simple repetition of guilt. It shows a person who can look back across worlds, recognize the moral consequences attached to a prior identity, and still continue living as someone capable of different choices. In this sense, transmigration creates the narrative distance necessary for self-recognition while preserving responsibility for the history being remembered.

Narrative Significance

As a recurring state of the story, transmigration links the orphan plot, the author-controlled novel plot, the dream revelation, and the final decision to remain. It transforms the question of where Shen Tang came from into the larger question of which relationships and choices make a life real. The world of origin possesses explanatory power, but it is associated with isolation and imposed control; the adopted world begins in mystery, yet becomes the site of family, love, and self-determination.

The condition also gives the story its strongest contrast between predetermined narrative and lived attachment. In the first life, Shen Tang’s consciousness is trapped inside a role and can only witness her body performing the plot. In the later life, she can interpret the past, understand the reason for her orphanhood, and answer Master Zang’s question with determination. Her decision to remain does not erase the fact of crossing worlds. Instead, it completes its meaning: transmigration has carried her from an existence written for her into a life she actively chooses.