Chapter 5: I'm Back as Lucian Again?! (1)
The world crept back not with the clamor of clashing steel or the roar of unraveling qi, but with the gentle theft of breath—a slow, ragged inhale that swelled his lungs with air too pure, too forgiving to belong to the blood-soaked plains of a battlefield's end.
The metallic tang of gore had vanished, chased away like a nightmare at dawn. In its stead lingered the subtle perfume of incense, a whisper of sandalwood woven with the cool gleam of polished silver, as if the air itself had been laundered in serenity.
Geomma Seonin's eyelids fluttered open, heavy as frost-kissed leaves in early thaw. Above him arched a ceiling of opulent splendor, its vaults etched with intricate gold filigree that twisted like the veins of ancient rivers, alive with painted angels whose wings unfurled in eternal flight—seraphim gazing down with eyes of lapis and gold, guardians of a heaven far removed from the murim's merciless skies. White curtains, gossamer veils of silk that shimmered like captured moonlight, swayed lazily at the edges of a bed vast as a throne, its linens smooth and unyielding, cradling him in a softness that felt like betrayal.
He blinked once, the world sharpening into unwelcome clarity; twice, as if to dispel some lingering illusion of death's embrace.
'A ceiling... gilded with the dreams of kings?' The thought stirred in his mind like a pebble dropped into still water, rippling unease through the quiet pool of his awakening.
Propping himself upright on elbows that bore no echo of agony, he waited for the familiar lash of pain—the searing pull of torn flesh, the hollow throb of a shattered dantian, the warm seep of blood pooling beneath him like an accusation from the earth. But silence answered, a void as clean as fresh-fallen snow. His hands rose before his gaze: pale, unmarred by the calluses of endless sword grips or the lattice of scars from battles that had etched his old life like a map of forgotten wars. They were the hands of youth, delicate yet assured, fingers long and tapered as if sculpted for the flourish of a quill rather than the bite of a blade.
Slowly, as one might approach a wild creature in the half-light of dusk, he turned his head to survey the chamber.
It unfolded around him like a verse from a forgotten ballad of excess—a room that whispered of nobility's quiet cruelties, where every corner breathed the weight of inherited power. Tapestries of deepest black and vivid crimson draped the marble walls like cloaks of night embroidered with threads of fire, depicting scenes of shadowed conquests: knights astride thunderous steeds, their lances piercing dragons under storm-lashed skies. Above, a chandelier of flawless crystal hovered without chain or cord, its facets catching the light and scattering it in warm, honeyed hues across furnishings hewn from dark oak— a writing desk laden with inkwells of lapis lazuli, a wardrobe whose doors stood ajar to reveal garments of velvet and brocade, rich as the plumage of exotic birds. Sunlight, golden and insistent, filtered through tall arched windows swathed in heavy velvet drapes the color of aged wine, painting the floor in shifting pools of warmth that danced like fireflies in a summer meadow.
'This... isn't the Northern Palace,' he thought, the realization uncoiling in his chest like a serpent stirring from slumber, his pulse quickening to a rhythm both alien and achingly familiar. 'No frost-veined stones, no echoes of her laughter in the halls. This is... something else. A cage of silk and gold.'
He swung his legs over the bed's edge, bare feet meeting the floor with a chill that seeped upward like the first kiss of winter's breath—polished marble so flawless it mirrored his every tentative step, turning the ground into a silvered echo of movement. A faint breeze, scented with the bloom of distant gardens and the faint chime of city bells, slipped through the half-open balcony doors, carrying murmurs of life beyond these walls: the creak of carriage wheels on cobblestone, the distant toll of bells calling the faithful to prayer, the soft hum of a world wrapped in wealth and whispered intrigues. It was civilization at its most polished, comfort woven into every stone— a luxury he had not tasted in decades, not since the raw edges of survival had honed him into a blade.
Yet even as the softness enveloped him, an undercurrent of wrongness tugged at his senses, a thread pulled taut from some half-buried memory. His gaze snagged on a full-length standing mirror near the writing desk, its gilded frame ornate as a crown, the glass within vast and unblemished, waiting like a silent sentinel. Something in its gleam called to him—an urge rising from the marrow of old wounds, sharp and insistent as a half-remembered dream.
He took a step toward it, then another, each one stirring a flutter of unease in his breast, like the warning rustle of leaves before a storm. The man who had knelt before Seoryeon's throne, body broken and qi spent like embers scattered to the wind, was no more—his form a ruin claimed by the snow, his spirit adrift in the void's indifferent arms. Yet here he stood, flesh renewed, breath steady, walking once again through a world that refused to let him rest.
The mirror loomed closer, its surface a still pond reflecting the room's quiet grandeur. He halted before it, breath caught in his throat like a bird trapped in a cage.
And froze, as if the reflection held the power to petrify.
The face that gazed back was no echo of the scarred warrior, the Blade Demon Immortal whose lines had been carved by frost and fury, whose eyes had burned with the silver-black storm of a thousand duels. No—this was the visage of youth, a boy on the cusp of manhood, no older than seventeen summers. Striking in its severity, it held a cruel beauty, like a winter rose blooming defiant amid thorns: skin pale as fresh cream untouched by sun or strife, high cheekbones sharp as sculpted marble, lips curved in a perpetual hint of disdain that spoke of privileges unearned and unchallenged. The hair fell in soft, ashen waves across a broad forehead, silver-white as moonlight on a raven's wing, framing features both ethereal and edged with frost.
But it was the eyes that stole the air from his lungs—black, fathomless voids that swallowed light whole, reflecting naught but an endless abyss, twin wells of shadow where warmth dared not linger.
He knew this face. Knew it with the intimacy of a curse revisited.
'Lucian... Azrael... Von Blackstar.'
The name tolled through his mind like a cathedral bell at midnight, deep and resonant, summoning ghosts from the ether. His hands rose, trembling as autumn leaves in a gale, to trace the contours of his cheeks, the straight bridge of his nose, the sharp line of his jaw—familiar lines, etched from a life not his own, borrowed in a world of scripted fates and pixelated wars. The same youth he had worn like ill-fitting armor in that other realm, the gacha game's glittering prison, where he had played the villain to a symphony of heroes' triumphs.
The same doomed duke who had thrown himself into oblivion's maw, shielding four unlikely saviors from a calamity's blaze—dying not as the story demanded, but as a choice carved from his weary soul.
"Why?" The word cracked from his lips like fragile ice underfoot, raw and disbelieving, echoing faintly off the marble. "Why... am I back here?"
The air in the room thickened, heavy with the weight of his incredulity, pressing against his skin like an invisible shroud. He staggered back from the mirror's merciless truth, fingers raking through the ashen strands of his hair, clutching as if he could uproot the nightmare by the roots. His reflection pursued him, flawless and mocking, a porcelain doll untouched by the ravages of time, pain, or the quiet dignity of scars earned in love's defense.
'Why?'
The question looped in his skull, a relentless drumbeat that drowned the distant bells, pounding against the fragile walls of his composure.
'Why this face again? Why this world, with its gilded lies and scripted falls? Did the heavens—or whatever cruel weaver spins these threads—find no sweeter torment?'
His knees buckled then, meeting the unyielding marble with a dull thud that reverberated through his bones. He pressed his palms flat against the cold stone, the chill seeping into his flesh like a lover's indifferent touch, grounding him in this borrowed skin.
'Was death not payment enough? Did fate hoard such cruelty, doling it out in echoes, denying even the mercy of finality?'
A sound bubbled up from his chest—not a sob, for tears had long since frozen in his veins, but a laugh. Faint at first, like the rustle of dry leaves skittering across a grave, then building, swelling, until it spilled forth unchecked.
"Hahahahahaha..."
It was no mirth born of dawn's light or the spark of unexpected grace. No, this was the laughter of a soul unmoored, stripped bare of illusions—a hollow cascade carrying the freight of exhaustion, the sharp sting of resignation, and a regret so profound it scorched like embers swallowed whole.
"Hahahahahahahahahahahahaha..."
The peals ricocheted off the tapestries and chandeliers, sharp and unyielding as shattered crystal, filling the regal chamber with a symphony of sorrow. Each note wove through the air like smoke from a funeral pyre, heavy with the ghosts of battles lost, of a lover's final smile etched in frost, of worlds traversed and left in ruin. It was the laugh of a man who had exhausted his rage, his pleas, his very capacity for defiance—left only with the vast, echoing emptiness of a heart that had given all and received naught but cycles.
He tilted his head skyward as the laughter crested and broke, crashing into silence like waves upon a barren shore. His chest heaved once, twice, the rhythm steadying as he drew a deep, shuddering breath, the incense's calm a faint balm against the storm within. In the quiet that followed, he whispered to the painted angels overhead, words softer than a dying breeze.
'S o this is it. Even death, that great equalizer, denies me its quiet arms.'
His hand rose once more toward the mirror, fingertips grazing the glass with a feather's touch, sending faint ripples across the surface as if the reflection might shatter under the weight of his gaze. There, staring back, was the boy—young, beautiful in his isolation, a canvas unmarred by the poetry of suffering—and in that moment, a flicker of hatred stirred, not for the face, but for the innocence it mocked.
'Lucian Azrael Von Blackstar. The first mask I donned in this mad carousel of fates. The villain scripted for chains and crowns, not for the freedom of a blade's honest edge. I thought I'd left you buried in that game's final light.'
His fingers curled into a fist, pressing harder until faint cracks spiderwebbed across the glass like fragile veins, a silent testament to the fracture within.
He closed his eyes then, letting the room's hush reclaim him like an old friend. For a suspended breath, he simply was—inhaling the sandalwood's hush, exhaling the murim's lingering frost. The storm in his chest ebbed, not to serenity, but to a hard-won stillness, the eye of a hurricane that promised no peace, only passage.
'No. If the wheel turns me back to this spoke, there must be design in the grind. Fate squanders no malice without intent.'
His eyes opened, locking onto the mirror's fractured gaze—this time with a calm forged not in acceptance's gentle fire, but in the cold forge of resolve, sharp as a whetstone's kiss.
'So I've returned to the world of Lucian Azrael Von Blackstar... once more. Then I'll walk its shadowed paths to their bitter conclusion, eyes open, blade ready.'
He glanced down at his hands, turning them palm-up in the light; they were steady now, the tremor fled like mist before the sun. Within this youthful vessel stirred a faint hum of power—not the roaring qi of mountain peaks, but a spark of something older, darker: threads of forbidden mana, the arcane whisper that had always branded Lucian the pariah, the duke whose blood ran black as his ambitions.
'If this is penance anew,' he thought, flexing his fingers as if testing an unseen string, 'then I'll weave my own thread through the tapestry, just as before—no more puppet to the plot's cruel hand.'
Rising with deliberate grace, he stood tall before the mirror, his ashen hair catching the sun's slant and igniting at the edges like the corona of a fallen star cloaked in twilight's embrace. The cracks in the glass fractured his reflection into a mosaic of selves—the boy, the demon, the guardian—yet in their union, a quiet strength took root.
His lips curved into a small, weary smile, etched with the lines of lifetimes unspoken.
'No matter the world, its gilded traps or scripted falls... I'll tread it on my own terms, shadow and all.'
Outside, beyond the balcony's stone balustrade, church bells tolled in the distance, their sonorous peals summoning the devout to vespers, a call to prayer in a city that knelt to gods of gold and grace. Somewhere in the palace's labyrinthine depths, servants stirred like shadows given form—the clink of silver trays, the murmur of polished deference—as the world beyond these walls wheeled onward, oblivious to the fracture in its grand design.
But within this chamber of gold and velvet whispers, a man reborn from death's forge stood sentinel—cloaked in the guise of the villain, armored by the soul of the Blade Demon Immortal.
Lucian Azrael Von Blackstar had returned.
And though his laughter had ebbed into silence, its echo lingered in the quiet halls—a haunting refrain not of joy, but of surrender's quiet ache, regret's unyielding thorn, and a sorrow vast as the void between stars.