The slam of a hand on his desk didn't just startle him awake—it shattered a century of silence.
"Asuta Kirigaya!"
His head jerked up, eyes wide and unfocused, scanning a scene that was achingly familiar yet impossibly distant. The scent of chalk dust and old wood floor polish. The afternoon sun slanting through grimy classroom windows, catching motes of dust in golden beams. Rows of bored teenagers in navy uniforms. The whiteboard covered in half-erased calculus equations.
Where am I? This isn't the Endless Void. This is...
Memory flooded back in two competing streams: the crisp, immediate present, and the fragmented, centuries-deep past. He was Asuta Kirigaya, sixteen years old, second-year high school student. He was also Asuta the Hunted, who had lived and died across seven hundred years of cultivation and warfare.
"Pay attention when I'm speaking!" the voice came again, sharper now.
He blinked, and the dual visions merged into one painful reality. Standing over him was Miss Chu, her expression hovering between irritation and genuine concern. Her hand still rested flat on the scarred wooden surface of his desk.
The words left his lips on instinct, an old script resurfacing from the depths of a drowned memory: "I'm sorry, Miss Chu. It won't happen again."
She studied him—the sweat beading on his temple, the disoriented cast to his eyes, the way his hands gripped the edge of the desk like it was the only solid thing in a spinning world. Her stern expression softened incrementally.
"Are you feeling unwell, Asuta?"
He shook his head, the motion feeling too quick, too jerky for a body he hadn't inhabited in lifetimes. "No, ma'am. Just... a bad dream."
"See that it stays a dream," she said, but the bite had left her voice. Worry now shone clearly in her dark eyes. "This is your last warning. Fall asleep in my class again, and I'll have to contact your parents."
He nodded mechanically, the motion feeling foreign. "Understood."
As she returned to the whiteboard, her heels clicking on linoleum, he tried to steady his breathing. In for four. Hold for seven. Out for eight. An ancient breathing technique from a monastery that had been dust for five centuries. It did nothing to calm the storm in his soul.
His fingers, trembling slightly, fumbled in the pocket of his uniform trousers. They closed around cold, sleek plastic—a smartphone, a technology that felt both mundane and miraculous. He thumbed the screen on, and the display seared itself into his mind.
Thursday, February 13, 2020. 2:47 PM.
The numbers weren't just a date. They were an indictment. A miracle. An impossibility.
Seven hundred years.
The classroom around him seemed to waver, the sounds becoming muffled as if heard through water. The last dregs of sleep-magic vanished, replaced by the cold, stark truth of what had happened.
His final memory was not of peace. It was of blood-stained robes clinging to wounds that would not heal, of labored breath misting in the thin air of a mountain peak that pierced the clouds. The taste of copper in his mouth. The silhouettes surrounding him—cultivators from three immortal kingdoms, their weapons gleaming with stolen sunlight. They had hunted him across lifetimes for the secrets he guarded, for the techniques he had mastered, for the sheer audacity of a mortal-born reaching heights that threatened their heavenly order.
He had closed his eyes, waiting for the final blow that would scatter his soul to the winds...
And had opened them here.
To this fragile, ordinary world. To a life before the sky cracked open and rained down fire and cultivation. Before the Immortal from the Xi Kingdom fell to Earth like a dying star, bringing with him both salvation and apocalypse.
A slow, brilliant smile spread across his face, so full of fierce, hard-won joy it felt foreign on his teenage features. It wasn't the smile of a carefree student. It was the smile of a general who had just been handed a second chance at a lost war. The whispers of his past life—centuries of loneliness, battle, loss, and fleeting triumph—coalesced into a single, iron resolve that settled in his bones like bedrock.
I'm back. I have time. The invasion isn't for four more years. I will not fail them again. I will not watch the world burn. I will not lose her.
The resolve was immediately followed by a crushing wave of grief so potent his breath caught. Faces flashed before his eyes—comrades, mentors, disciples. All gone. All lost to time's relentless march. All except...
Ruri.
The bell rang, shrill and mundane, shattering his reverie.
"Don't forget the problems on page 214 for homework!" Miss Chu called over the sudden scrape of chairs and rustle of backpacks. "And Asuta?"
He looked up, meeting her gaze. She opened her mouth as if to say something more, then seemed to think better of it. She simply nodded, that worried look still in her eyes. "Get some rest."
"Asuta! Earth to Asuta!" A familiar arm slung around his shoulders, smelling of cheap citrus cologne and the faint, ever-present scent of the potato chips Ken always smuggled into class. "You were totally dead to the world, man. Chu was staring at you for like, a full minute before she smacked your desk."
Ken Zuto. His best friend since they'd traded dinosaur stickers in kindergarten. A face not seen in epochs, now grinning with effortless, unburdened youth. The sight was a physical blow to Asuta's chest—a sweet, painful ache.
"Just tired," Asuta managed, his voice rough. He stood, his body feeling both too light and unbearably clumsy. The muscle memory was all wrong. This body hadn't spent centuries honing itself into a weapon. It was soft. Untrained. Mortal.
"Let's walk home," Ken said, already dragging his backpack from under his desk with practiced clumsiness. "We'll wait for Ruri at the gate. She said her club ended early today."
Ruri.
The name was a lance, a key, a prayer all at once. Asuta followed Ken numbly, moving through the crowded hallway like a ghost haunting his own past. Every laugh, every shouted plan for the weekend, every flicker of teenage drama was a preserved treasure he'd thought atomized by time. He saw Yumi Tanaka giggling with her friends by the lockers—she would die in the first wave of the spiritual beasts, trying to protect her little brother. He saw Haruto Sato, the class representative, arguing passionately with a teacher about a grade—he would become a ruthless warlord in the fractured remains of Hokkaido.
Asuta looked away, the weight of futures-that-might-not-be pressing down on him.
And then he saw her.
Standing by the school's wrought-iron main gate, scrolling on her phone with one hand, the other holding the strap of her book bag—Ruri Kirigaya. His little sister. Fifteen years old, with her hair in a practical ponytail, her uniform neatly pressed. The one he had found too late, in that other life, in a ruined city, clutching a broken photograph of the two of them.
His heart hammered a frantic, painful rhythm against his ribs.
Badump. Badump.
Seven hundred years of regret, of whispered apologies to an uncaring void, compressed into a single, paralyzing moment. The noise of the departing students faded. Ken's chatter became distant static. There was only the figure by the gate, backlit by the afternoon sun, alive and whole and here.
He didn't walk; he strode, breaking away from Ken, closing the distance in a few steps that felt both too slow and too fast. He didn't think. He acted on seven centuries of pent-up longing.
He wrapped her in a crushing embrace, his arms tight around her shoulders, his face buried in her hair that smelled of cherry blossom shampoo and pencil lead.
"Hey, sis," he whispered, the words thick and choked. "Big brother missed you."
She stiffened in his arms, startled. Then, after a heartbeat of shock, she pulled back, her book bag dropping to the ground with a thud. Her sharp eyes, so like their mother's, immediately caught the redness in his, the unshed tears he couldn't quite contain.
"Brother?" Her voice was laced with confusion, then a flicker of alarm. "What's wrong? I saw you this morning. You were fine. You didn't even finish your eggs." She reached up, her touch hesitant, then firm as she wiped a traitorous tear from his cheek with her thumb. "Why are you crying?"
He forced a laugh, but it came out rough and unconvincing, scraped from a throat raw with emotion. "Hah, who's crying? Just got some dust in my eye. The wind, you know?" He glanced around pointedly at the utterly still, late winter afternoon.
Ruri's eyes narrowed. She wasn't buying it. Not even a little. But she saw something in his face—something raw and vulnerable that she'd never seen in her usually reserved, quietly responsible older brother—that made her hold her tongue. She allowed a small, hesitant smile to touch her lips. "You're such a weirdo sometimes. Let's just go home."
He bent to pick up her bag, his movements deliberate. "Ruri," he said as they began walking, Ken catching up with a curious look, the suburban streets with their neatly trimmed hedges and parked cars feeling like a painted backdrop in a dream. "What do you want for dinner? Let me cook tonight."
Now she stopped, turning to face him fully. Ken hovered awkwardly a few steps away, sensing this was a sibling moment. "What is with you today?" Ruri asked, her voice low. "You're acting... different."
He looked down at the pavement, not to hide, but to collect himself, to let the genuine, sorrowful love that threatened to overwhelm him settle into something she could bear to see. When he looked up, his expression was soft, open in a way it hadn't been since they were small children. "Your birthday is coming up. You'll be fifteen." He paused, the weight of countless missed birthdays, of celebrations he'd been absent for in spirit long before he was absent in body, heavy in his words. "Tell me. What do you want? Anything. A new phone? Concert tickets? That art set you've been eyeing?"
The trace of worry in her eyes deepened, hardening into something more substantial. Her guard went up. "I don't need anything," she said, her tone final, a little sharp. It was the voice she used when she was hiding hurt, when she didn't want to be a burden. A voice he remembered with heartbreaking clarity.
He couldn't bear it. The distance. The polite denial. The ghost of the future grief between them. He reached out, not grabbing, but gently taking her hand. When she didn't pull away, he drew her into another embrace, this one softer, less desperate, but no less heartfelt.
This time, his words were a bare, raw whisper meant only for her, his lips close to her ear so even Ken couldn't hear. "I'm sorry, Ruri. I'm so, so sorry."
He felt her tense again. Then, slowly, she relaxed against him. And as he held her, his eyes squeezed shut against the tide of memory, he felt the faint, warm dampness of her tears seeping through the cotton of his uniform shirt.
---
Later, in the quiet of his childhood bedroom.
The familiar ceiling, with its faint crack shaped like a dragon (he'd imagined it as a child, a sign of his destiny, he'd thought then), held no answers. The events of the day and the torrent of memories from a prolonged, brutal life clashed in his mind like tectonic plates. The mission was clear, carved into his soul with the clarity of hindsight: prepare. Protect. Prevent.
But strategy required power. In this nascent era, before the Qi tides flooded the world with the arrival of the wounded Immortal from the Xi Kingdom, he was starting from absolute zero. The air was sterile of spiritual energy. The earth's ley lines slept deep, untapped and forgotten. He was a master pianist seated before an instrument with broken strings.
His mind, a library of ancient and forbidden lore, sifted through techniques. The Divine God Body Sutra surfaced, not as a memory, but as a living scripture etched into his soul. It was not a gentle path. It was a blueprint for apotheosis through agony, a brutal forging of mortal clay into an indestructible divine vessel. It demanded the agony of the crucible before the ecstasy of the transformation.
The first great realm was the Tempered Vessel Stage—nine layers of pure, grueling physical metamorphosis. No Qi manipulation, no mystic arts, no flying on swords. Just the slow, excruciating process of driving every muscle, bone, sinew, and drop of blood beyond human limits, of purifying the marrow, of making the body itself a treasure. In his past life, impatient for power, he'd used a hundred clever, lesser techniques to bypass this foundational pain. He'd used Qi to cheat the process. That, he now understood with crystalline clarity, was the fundamental flaw that had placed a ceiling on his ultimate ascent. His foundation had been elegant, but built on sand.
This time, he vowed, the oath solidifying in the quiet dark, I will build the foundation that can hold up the heavens themselves. I will walk the true path. I will endure the hammer.
He sat up, crossing his legs on the bedspread covered in faded stars. He closed his eyes, and the ancient, silent verses of the Sutra began to cycle in his mind, not as words, but as concepts of pressure, alignment, and cellular awakening. He guided his breath into the first torturous rhythm—inhaling for seven painful heartbeats, holding the breath until his lungs burned and spots danced behind his eyelids, exhaling for eight as he imagined toxins leaving his pores.
With each cycle, he consciously clenched and relaxed muscle groups in a specific, excruciating sequence. He started with the small muscles of his feet, working upward. It was a brutal, internal hammering. A tearing down. Pain, sharp and hot, lanced through his calves, his thighs, his core. Swep beaded on his skin, cold and clammy. His body, this soft, teenage body, trembled violently with the strain.
After what felt like an eternity—but was only an hour by the clock shaped like a cat on his desk—he slumped forward, drenched, gasping, his muscles screaming in protest. No golden light had surrounded him. No swirling energies had danced in the air. No impurities had erupted from his skin in a black, sticky mess. Not yet. That would come later, with resources, with the catalysts his body needed.
There was only the raw, unglamorous, profound ache of work begun.
Yet, in the absolute stillness that followed the pain, as he lay on his back breathing normally, he felt it. A whisper at the very edge of his perception, a sense honed across lifetimes. Not of Qi within him—his channels were sealed, dormant, waiting for the Vessel to be Tempered enough to bear their opening. But of its faint, faded potential in the world around him.
The dormant, god-like spiritual sense within his soul could feel the ghost of energy in the old wood of his house frame, a memory of sunlight stored over decades. In the moonlight now streaming through his window, a pale, thin echo of stellar essence. In the very air—thin, brittle, and utterly inert for true cultivation.
But perhaps not unusable for guidance. For manipulation on a scale so minute it would be invisible to any but him. With immense focus, he could probably nudge the infinitesimal traces in a century-old ginseng root or a piece of jade worn by generations. He could, with painstaking effort, coax these dormant sparks into alignment, using them as catalysts in chemical processes to create the most basic of supportive aids—a Flesh-Knitting Pellet to accelerate recovery, a Marrow-Cleansing Elixir to hasten the purification his body was starting.
It was a pathetic, laughable starting point compared to summoning lightning or moving mountains. But it was a lever. And with a lever, a place to stand, and seven hundred years of knowledge on where to place that lever, he knew he could move worlds.
A thin, determined smile touched his lips, there in the dark. It was the smile of the Eternal Hunter, seeing the first track of his prey.
He opened his eyes, and his gaze, though physically exhausted, was sharp in the moonlight. Clear. Purposeful.
First, he thought, the plan unfolding with military precision in his mind, I need resources. Herbs. Minerals. A space to train without questions. Then, I need to understand this timeline. To see if the cracks are already forming.
Outside his window, a car passed, its headlights sweeping across the ceiling. The world slept, ignorant of the storm four years hence. And in a small, ordinary room, a god in a boy's body began the long, painful climb back to heaven.
One hammer strike at a time.