Rain hammered against the window like a fist demanding entry. Nalla stood frozen, watching water streak down the stretched cicada-wing-ecco membrane that didn't quite seal right. Cheap. Common. Yellowed with age, brittle at the edges where the bone frame had warped. Cold air leaked through the gap, carrying the smell of wet earth and rotting thatch.
His aunt and uncle's "generosity." Another fucking chain.
They gave him and Allen this room with its leaking window and mildewed walls, then acted like they'd handed over a palace. And young Nalla had been grateful. Had actually thought they cared. The recollection made his teeth ache worse than the nausea building in his gut.
Something a philosopher had written on Earth stuck with him through death and rebirth and five centuries of proving it true: Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains. The name was gone, dissolved like so much else, but the bastard had understood something fundamental about existence.
Here the chains came honest. Blood. Bone. Family that owned you. Clans that used you.
At least you knew what was strangling you.
The thought slipped sideways.
For a moment he saw the window through different eyes, older eyes that had watched empires crumble and recognized calculated neglect in all its forms. The cheap membrane wasn't just poverty. It was a message. You're worth this much. No more.
Then the room tilted.
His vision doubled, tripled, overlapping versions of reality bleeding into each other. This room at fifteen. This room at twenty. This room that didn't exist anymore because the clan compound burned and everyone died screaming and...
No. Hasn't happened yet. Won't happen for centuries.
Nalla pressed his palm against the wall. Rough bone beneath his fingers. Real. Present. Now. He was fifteen years old, standing in a room that smelled of mildew.
Tomorrow was the Awakening Ceremony.
Lifetimes of accumulated experience sat coiled in his skull like a serpent trying to eat itself.
A voice echoed through the chaos, old, weathered, trembling. A scholar in a library that wouldn't be built for another hundred years reading about impossible things. About rivers that flowed through time itself. The Upstream Drifter. An ancient power offering what no breathing thing should touch, the chance to claw backward through time's current, to reach moments already buried.
The image crystallized sharp and clear. Nalla, older Nalla, the one they'd called demon, listening from shadows while the scholar's voice cracked. About the price no sane person would ever pay.
The vision shattered. He was back in his room, sweat cooling on his forehead despite the cold. His hands trembled.
He'd died for that legend. Died and came back with a mind that wouldn't stop screaming lifetimes worth of screams all at once.
The nausea hit without warning.
Nalla stumbled to the bed, collapsing. Wood creaked. His stomach churned, bile rising. Not physical sickness. Mental overload. Too much information crammed into too small a space, his fifteen-year-old brain rebelling against centuries it was never meant to carry.
Every time he reached for one thought, three others surged up to drown it. Knowledge without order. Wisdom without structure. All that accumulated experience that his mind couldn't hold, like trying to pour an ocean into a cup and wondering why everything shattered.
Breathe. Focus. Organize.
He tried to make a plan. Priority one: cultivation resources. Hidden cache in the eastern mountains. Or western valleys? The information scattered before he could grasp it.
All that knowledge, the location of every treasure, the weaknesses of clan elders, the exact moment when the Third Convergence would split the world in half, the face of someone he'd loved whose name had dissolved like smoke, and he couldn't remember if the fucking cache was east or west.
Fantastic.
Another image crashed over him. A woman's voice, sharp and cold, speaking while blood dripped from her hands. When? Where? Details blurred but the words remained, cutting like a blade through silk.
Tales split minds like axes through skulls. Some laugh it off as superstition. Others clutch at it like drowning men grasping shadows. Most refuse belief entirely, because belief demands hope, and hope costs more than most can afford when death comes cheap.
Who had said that? The woman's face was already fading, features dissolving into smoke.
His vision swam. He wasn't in his room anymore, or he was, but he was also somewhere else, listening to an old man dying by a fire that had burned out centuries ago. Or would burn. Or never burned at all. His mind couldn't keep the timelines straight.
The Upstream Drifter doesn't just take your life. You become the fuel burning in time's furnace. Body, cultivation, essence, everything you are, the admission price for a gamble with no guarantee. No promise.
The vision released him. Nalla gasped on the bed, hands clenched, nails digging into palms. Pain anchored him. Present. Real. Now.
What a fucking waste.
All that blood, his blood, their blood, blood enough to drown cities, all those corpses piled high enough to block the sun, all that suffering forging that damned Intention. And now it was gone. One-time ticket to the past. Used up. Crumbled to dust.
This is the price. Understanding came with the same clarity as his ribs turned to powder. Everything I am becomes the power to escape everything I was.
Reality screamed. Or maybe that was him. Hard to tell when your lungs were turning to mist and your consciousness was fragmenting across seventeen different moments simultaneously.
But I can recreate it.
The thought cut through chaos with certainty. Despair gave way to something darker, more familiar. Hunger that had driven him through lifetimes of choices that would make righteous people look like amateurs.
I did it once. I'll do it again.
The ambition burned through him, warming bones that still remembered death's cold. After all, what's a few more mountains of corpses between old friends? Someone has to do the work. Someone always has to do the work, and it's never the people with clean hands and righteous speeches.
People like Flameheart wanted to call it justice. Centuries of watching, and he'd never met anyone whose justice didn't conveniently align with ambitions. They wanted something badly enough and dressed it up in virtue. Made it easier to sleep at night. Made it easier to burn villages and call it righteousness.
Same prison. Different names for the bars.
At least he was honest about wanting to survive. They wanted the same thing and dressed it up in morality.
He carried something more valuable anyway. Rebirth with all those accumulated lifetimes. Experience no living man possessed. Treasure that made losing the Upstream Drifter almost acceptable.
If he could just organize the damn recollections long enough to use them.
Nalla sat up slowly, testing his balance. The room stayed mostly stable, which wasn't saying much when "stable" meant two overlapping versions of reality instead of five. Good enough.
Right now he wasn't an Assembler. Just meat wearing the echo of power. Had to hurry and cultivate, catch up to history, seize opportunities with whatever advantage he could claw from fate.
The problem was being mortal again. Soft. Weak. Pathetic.
A mountain boar could kill him. His body couldn't intimidate a particularly aggressive chicken. The irony would have been funny if it wasn't so fucking frustrating. Third level Assembler. That was the ticket out.
Through his years of Demonic cultivation, Rocinha Mountain had felt tiny. Favilo's Village like a cage. But cages offered protection, and he needed that now. Another chain to add to the collection, but at least this one he was choosing.
When he thought about the ceremony, old images surfaced. Buried things clawing up from his heart's grave. Heat flooded his jaw, or was that remembered heat? Remembered rage from a ceremony that had already happened once?
Tomorrow he'd discover if his mind was gift or curse. If his little brother was a threat or victim or something in between. If any of this, the visions, the suspicions, the weight of too many lifetimes, was real or just the elaborate construction of a brain that had shattered trying to hold too much.
But underneath the chaos, underneath the fear and suspicion and uncertainty, something else stirred.
What had he seen in all those years?
Empires rise and crumble like sandcastles in the tide. Mountains carved flat by cultivation battles that scarred the earth for centuries. Sunsets over fields of corpses that stretched to horizons painted red. The first snow after a decade-long summer, each flake a miracle no one else noticed. A child laughing while the world burned. The face of someone he'd loved, whose name had dissolved like smoke, whose touch he could still remember.
Beauty and horror so intertwined they became the same thing. Truth and lies so mixed he couldn't separate them anymore. Life and death danced together until he couldn't tell which was which.
And he wanted more.
Which was probably insane. Stockholm syndrome on a cosmic scale, tortured by existence and still begging for another round. But because, and this caught him off guard, lying in the dark with rain hammering against cheap cicada-wing and his mind coming apart, he hadn't seen enough. Hadn't tasted enough. Hadn't lived enough.
The world kept offering him new horrors and new wonders, and he wasn't done cataloging them. Wasn't done experiencing them. Wasn't done being.
He still wanted tomorrow. And the day after that. And the thousand years beyond, stretching into infinity.
The only chain worth wearing.
The realization steadied him somehow. His body might be fifteen and weak. His mind might be shattering under too many timelines. His little brother might be dangerous or innocent or something he couldn't name.
But he still wanted tomorrow.
That was enough.
Tomorrow would bring answers. Or more questions. Probably both.
The reveal of his C grade talent. The beginning of his climb back to power, starting from the bottom of a well he'd already climbed once, with hands that remembered every handhold and every betrayal.
But tonight, lying in the dark with his past refusing to organize itself, he could only wait. And wonder. And try not to think about how many ways this could go wrong.
His little brother might be dangerous.
Nalla might be losing his mind.
Both.
The uncertainty was worse than any answer could have been.
But he'd survived worse uncertainties before. Had survived being hunted through forests. Had survived his own body dissolving while righteous bastards screamed about justice.
Had survived dying twice already, once in a cubicle on Earth, stress and exhaustion and chains of modern civilization finally strangling the life out of him, and once in this world, dissolved into temporal fuel while an army cheered.
Better to never die at all. Better to keep accumulating lifetimes, keep seeing new horrors and new wonders, keep being until the universe itself ran out of things to show him.
If that made him a demon, so be it. He'd been called worse by better people.
And he'd survive this one too.
Because someone has to do the work. Someone always has to do the work, and it's never the people with clean hands.
Might as well be him.