Darkness pressed against me long before I understood what I had become.
There was no sky.No ground.No breath.
Only weight.Only heat.Only the faint echo of a world I no longer belonged to.
So… this is death?
A laugh tried to form, but I had no throat. No lips. Just thought—raw, unfiltered—drifting like ash in a windless void.
Faces flickered through the dark.
Targets.Assignments.Rooms that smelled of metal and bleach.The dull eyes of a man who had realized, a second too late, that I was not there to negotiate.
I remembered the last job.
The quiet approach.The silenced shot.The exit plan that should have been flawless.
Then the message.
You don't retire from us.
I remembered the muzzle flash behind me.The burning impact in my back.The taste of blood.
Of course it ended like that.
Death should have been the end.
Instead, the void shifted.
Sound bled into existence like cracks spreading through glass.
A heartbeat.Not mine.
Then another.And another.
Voices. Muffled, frantic.
A woman's strained cry.A man's low, unsteady murmur.The rustle of cloth. The clink of metal bowls.
Pain returned first.
Crushing pressure wrapped around me, like the world itself was trying to squeeze me out of existence. Something pushed, something pulled, and my awareness was slammed into a body far too small to fit who I used to be.
Cold air knifed against wet skin.
Light attacked my eyes.
I screamed—not from fear, but because my new lungs demanded it. The sound came out thin and weak, the wail of a newborn.
How humiliating.
Arms caught me—shaking, exhausted arms that smelled of sweat and herbs. A woman's voice sobbed with relief.
"He's breathing," she whispered hoarsely. "Thank the stars, he's breathing…"
Breathing, I thought dimly. Again.
The room came into focus as my newborn eyes struggled to adjust. Nothing sterile. No white tiles. No blinking machines.
Rough stone walls.A low wooden ceiling blackened by smoke.Shelves lined with jars and bundles of herbs hanging from strings.A single, flickering orange light: fire, not electricity.
A midwife wrapped me in a coarse blanket that scratched against my skin.
"He's quiet," the midwife muttered. "Too quiet for a newborn. Most cry more than this."
Quiet.
If I'd had control of my face, I might have smiled.
I'd spent an entire lifetime perfecting silence. The habit would not break simply because I'd been stuffed into a smaller body.
The woman who held me—my new mother—lifted me closer. Her hair clung to her temples, dark with sweat. Her arms trembled, but her eyes…
They were warm.
"He's… beautiful," she breathed.
Beautiful.
I had been called many things in my life.
Weapon.Asset.Monster.Ghost.
Never "beautiful."
I studied her through blurred vision, forcing my new brain to adapt faster. Her features were ordinary by any objective measure; the kind of face crowds forget. But there was something in her gaze that didn't exist in the world I'd come from.
A kindness that didn't ask for payment.A softness that didn't hide a knife.
I didn't know what to do with that.
A shadow loomed behind her. A man stepped closer, his movements hesitant, as if he were afraid he might break me just by breathing too loud.
Broad shoulders.Rough hands.Simple clothes patched at the elbows.
A villager. A soldier once, judging by the way he carried himself. Retired, or broken.
My new father.
He swallowed as he looked down at me.
"He's… ours," he said, voice unsteady. "We really… we really did it, Maeve."
So that was their names, then. Elian and Maeve.
"Hn," the midwife grunted. "Keep him warm. The winters in Blackstone don't forgive the careless. I'll bring the elder tomorrow to register his name."
Name.
The last one I'd used had died bleeding on a floor of cracked concrete.
Ethan Crowell is dead.
I looked up at the smoke-stained ceiling. The world smelled of ash and straw and iron.
Fine. Let's see what this one has for me.
Time blurred.
Infancy was a prison.But even prisons can be studied.
My limbs were weak, clumsy things that flailed more than obeyed. My head was heavy; my muscles soft. Every attempt to move was an exercise in frustration and humiliation.
But the adults in the room smiled every time I managed to grip a finger.
They laughed when I tried to stand and failed.
They celebrated my weakness.
I catalogued each reaction carefully.
Maeve sang to me at night, voice low and a little off-key. Songs about rivers and stars and something called "Arcanum's Breath." She smelled of soil and dried leaves, her hands always tinted with the faint green of crushed plants. An herbalist, of sorts.
Elian carried me outside whenever the weather allowed it, pointing at distant shapes and naming them.
"That's Duskwood," he would say, nodding toward the dark sea of trees that ringed the village. "You don't go there alone. The forest has teeth."
Teeth, yes.And secrets.
He spoke of winters, of harvests, of hunting wolves and skinning rabbits. No talk of assassinations, governments, or covert operations. His world was smaller but somehow more honest.
At least, on the surface.
The villagers came and went. Some peeked into the small house to coo at the baby. Others glanced once, then looked away quickly, as if the sight made them uncomfortable.
"He's too quiet," someone murmured once when they thought no one could hear. "Never cries. Never laughs. Just… stares."
"Maybe he's simple," another said. "Or touched by the forest."
Touched by the forest, I repeated silently. If only you knew.
I observed them all.
The way they avoided each other's eyes when debts were mentioned.The twitch in a jaw when a lie was told.The glances toward the forest when someone spoke of missing hunters.
Problems.Tension.Fault lines.
Even in a peaceful village like Blackstone, there were cracks.
I had made a career out of slipping into such cracks.
Years passed.
I learned to walk, then run. To speak their language with a child's intonation, carefully hiding the weight of my thoughts behind simple words.
"Elias is a quiet boy," they said.
Yes. That was the name they had chosen for me: Elias Vale.
Elias, who watched.Vale, who dwelled in a valley of shadows.
Fitting.
At five years old, I started noticing it more clearly—something beneath everything, like a slow-flowing river under stone.
Heat that didn't belong to fire.Cold that wasn't quite air.A whisper every time Maeve traced tiny patterns in the air to soothe a bruise.
"Arcanum," Elian called it, when he caught me staring.
"All life has it, in small amounts. Some are born with more, some with less. Some turn it into strength."
He said the last part with something like regret in his voice, fingers brushing his old, stiff knee.
A soldier's injury.
"Can I use it?" I asked, voice small.
He gave a sad smile. "That's for the elder to say when you're older, boy. We all get tested eventually."
Tested.
Evaluation.Classification.System.
A familiar comfort in a strange form.
Good. That meant I could break it.
The day of the test came when I turned ten.
They gathered the children in the main square of Blackstone. The air was sharp and cold, each breath visible. We stood in a rough line: boys and girls with nervous eyes and fidgeting hands, wrapped in wool and patched coats.
In the middle of the square sat an old wooden table. On it lay a slab of stone about the size of my chest, etched with faint, almost faded runes.
The elder—a bent man with white hair and a back like a question mark—hovered protectively near it.
"This is a simple affinity tablet," he explained. "You place your hand here, send your Arcanum forward—what little you have—and the tablet will show your nature. Elements. Strength. Potential."
The other kids eyed the stone with a mixture of awe and fear.
One by one, they stepped forward.
A girl with braids placed her trembling hands on the slab. A soft green glow appeared beneath her fingers.
"Earth," the elder said, nodding. "Good foundation. You'll make a sturdy cultivator, if you have the will."
A boy followed. Pale blue light shimmered.
"Water. Hm. Calm on the surface, deep currents beneath. Work hard."
Red.Brown.Yellow.Faint colors, but colors all the same.
Murmurs rippled through the crowd with each display.
Then it was my turn.
I stepped forward, expression blank. The wood creaked under my weight as I rested my palm on the cold stone.
The rune patterns under the surface felt… wrong.
Incomplete.Misaligned.Crude.
This thing is a joke, I thought. It barely qualifies as a formation.
"Relax, Elias," the elder said. "Breathe. Let your Arcanum flow."
Arcanum. The energy I'd only barely begun to sense, a flicker at the edge of awareness.
I reached for it, coaxing it forward.
A tiny ember stirred in my chest.
Nothing happened.
The slab remained dull and lifeless.
No color.No glow.No reaction.
The silence was heavier than any gasp.
The elder frowned. "Again."
I exhaled slowly, pretending to try. In truth, I held back more than I pushed.
Attention was a blade. I'd had my fill of blades.
I let only a sliver of Arcanum touch the tablet.
Still nothing.
"Hm." The elder pulled back, disappointment obvious as he shook his head. "Affinity too weak to register. Another ordinary child."
Ordinary.
The word washed over the crowd.
Some looked away, already disinterested. Ordinary children had hard lives and short futures. No one invested in the weak.
Elian's jaw tightened. Maeve's hand closed around her shawl.
I stepped back from the table, eyes downcast, posture small.
Inside, my mind moved like a knife.
The tablet wasn't refined enough to read me properly. Its runes were damaged—some misaligned, one completely dead. A proper formation might've shown something. Or it might've broken.
Either way, being labeled "ordinary" was an advantage.
No one watches the invisible boy.
Good. Let them underestimate me.
Duskwood became my refuge.
By eleven, no one followed when I slipped between its twisted trunks. The adults were too busy, and the children too frightened.
The forest air was damp and cold, heavy with the smell of moss and old bark. Branches intertwined overhead, turning the sky into a patchwork of gray and shadow. Strange calls echoed in the distance—birdsong warped by something older.
Tracks crisscrossed the ground. Some were of deer, rabbits, wolves.
Others were… not.
Claw marks that belonged to no normal beast. Imprints that faded too quickly. Circles of ground where the leaves refused to fall.
I moved carefully, each step calculated.
I had hunted men in cities where every shadow hid a gun. A forest with secrets did not scare me.
It intrigued me.
I found carvings first.
Lines etched into stone, half-swallowed by moss. Circles, triangles, spirals. Primitive to the untrained eye; precise to mine.
Runes, I realized.
Not the crude kind on the affinity tablet. Older. Deeper.
I brushed my fingers across one line, tracing the groove.
Energy shivered beneath the surface. Weak, but there.
So the world does remember.
Day after day, I returned. I mapped patterns. Counted distances between stones. Measured angles with my fingers. Tested how Arcanum reacted when I stood closer or farther.
Nothing responded at first.
But knowledge is a slow accumulation, not a sudden gift.
I was patient.
I had been patient with humans who would've killed me the second they suspected what I was.
I could be patient with a forest.
One morning, fog lay thick across the ground, wrapping the trees in pale, shifting veils. The air was heavy, hard to breathe. The kind of silence that comes before storms.
I walked deeper than usual.
My parents had warned me not to go too far. The hunters, when they still bothered to speak near me, mentioned "old places" where no one returned from.
So of course, that was where I went.
The usual markers—familiar stones, fallen logs, claw-scarred trunks—fell away behind me. New sounds took their place. A low hum. A soft, almost inaudible crackle.
I knew the sound of power when I heard it.
The trees eventually parted, revealing a clearing.
At its center stood a monolith of black stone, taller than any house in Blackstone, split from top to bottom by a jagged crack.
The ground around it was bare. No grass. No moss. No leaves.
The air felt… thinner here.
Lighter and heavier at the same time.
I approached slowly.
Runes crawled across the monolith's surface. Not carved with tools, but grown, as if the stone itself had birthed them. Some were intact, glowing faintly like old embers. Others were fractured midway, lines sliding out of alignment, forming broken patterns.
My chest tightened.
This isn't a simple formation.
This was a remnant.
A piece of something colossal, shattered and left to rot.
My fingers itched.
Every part of my past life screamed at me to walk away.Observe from afar.Gather more data.Never touch the unknown.
Every part of my new life—the child who had watched his strength be labeled "ordinary"—reached forward.
I pressed my hand against the stone.
Cold.
Then—
Impact.
Energy slammed into me like a wave made of knives. It tore through my flesh, bypassed my bones, sank straight into the tiny core that had only just begun to form inside my chest.
For a moment, I forgot how to think.
Light exploded behind my eyes—not bright, not warm, but a deep, devouring darkness streaked with fractured silver lines.
A voice spoke without words, more sensation than sound.
––Fractured.Shadow.Bound and unbound.A path without laws.––
My core burned.
Cracks spiderwebbed through it—literal fractures in my cultivation foundation, something that should have killed me instantly.
But instead of shattering completely, the cracks… held.
Darkness poured through them, filling the gaps.Fusing broken pieces together.Forcing the unstable shape into something new.
It shouldn't work, a distant, clinical part of me thought. This defies everything they described about cultivation…
The rest of me screamed.
Pain clawed up my spine. My fingers dug into the monolith, nails tearing. Breath hitched in my throat.
Memories of both lives spiraled:
Blood on my hands.Fire in my lungs.My mother's song.My father's tired smile.The elder's dismissive tone.The word "ordinary."
No.
I refused that.
I refused weakness. I refused insignificance. I refused to be shaped by anyone's hands but my own.
If this world wants to break me, I thought, as the darkness sank deeper, it will have to try harder.
The energy surged one last time, as if testing me.
Then it sank into my core and went still.
I collapsed to my knees, chest heaving, sweat soaking through my shirt despite the chill air.
Arcanum moved inside me—no longer a faint ember, but a restless, unstable flame threaded with shadow.
Something had changed.
Something irreversible.
I pulled my trembling hand away from the stone.
The runes nearest my touch had gone dark, their faint glow extinguished.
"I see," I whispered, voice hoarse.
The monolith didn't answer.
It didn't need to.
I felt it inside me—the first echo of a path that shouldn't exist. A fractured shadow, wedged into the structure of my cultivation.
Dangerous.Wrong.Perfect.
I forced myself to stand, vision still swimming.
"I'll come back," I murmured, surprising myself with the promise. "Next time, I'll be ready to take more."
The forest watched in silence as I turned away.
By the time I staggered back toward Blackstone, the sun was already low. Smoke rose from chimneys. Voices carried on the wind—familiar, grounding.
My legs trembled with every step. My core burned with slow, pulsing heat.
I shouldn't be alive, I thought.
A normal body, a normal core, would've shattered under that contact. Even if it had survived, the backlash would have crippled the cultivator.
But my core had been wrong from the start.Shaped poorly.Unstable.
And because it was unstable, it could bend instead of simply breaking.
The flaw had become an entry point.
A weakness had become a gateway.
"Elias!" Maeve's voice rang out as I emerged from between the last line of trees. She dropped the basket of herbs she was carrying and rushed toward me. "Where have you been? You're freezing!"
Her hands cupped my face, thumb brushing away dirt smeared along my cheek. Her eyes shone with worry, not anger.
"You promised you'd stay near the fields," she scolded gently. "Duskwood isn't safe. There are things in there that don't like being seen."
I know, I thought.
Aloud, I said, "I just went a little further. I'm sorry, Mother."
The apology felt strange on my tongue. Mechanical. But her shoulders relaxed at the words.
Elian appeared behind her, leaning on his worn walking stick. His gaze swept over me once, sharp and assessing in a way most would never notice.
"Any trouble?" he asked.
I shook my head. "No. I was careful."
He held my gaze a heartbeat longer, something like suspicion tinged with pride flickering in his eyes. Then he sighed.
"You're too quiet for your own good," he muttered. "But you came back in one piece. That's more than some grown men manage in that forest."
Maeve swatted his arm. "Don't encourage him!"
He only smiled faintly.
I watched them both, the ache in my chest shifting into something heavy, unfamiliar.
In my previous life, "home" had been a safehouse. A staging ground. Four walls and a bed where I cleaned weapons and closed my eyes for a few hours at a time.
No warmth.No songs.No hands pulling you closer just because you existed.
Here…
Here, if I let it, something could grow.
Affection.Attachment.Weakness.
I turned my gaze toward the dark line of Duskwood in the distance.
Somewhere in there, a broken piece of an ancient law hummed quietly inside a monolith of black stone.
Inside me, a fractured shadow stirred.
I was not just a child.Not just a villager.Not just a reincarnated killer.
I was the mistake this world had made when it tried to recycle a broken soul.
I tightened my jaw.
If there was one thing my two lives agreed on, it was this:
I would never again let anyone else decide what I was allowed to be.
Not an organization.Not an elder.Not a god.Not the Laws that ruled this world.
My name was Elias Vale.
And whether this world was ready or not, I had already stepped onto a path that would eventually tear its foundations apart.