The pain came first.
Not the clean, sharp agony of a blade—he knew that song well.
This was a deep, marrow-deep ache. A rotting soreness that clung to every brittle bone.
Yin Jie tried to open his eyes.
He couldn't.
His body was a prison of weak, trembling flesh.
Where…?
The last memory flashed, white-hot.
The cold smile of his most gifted disciple, Bai Zhan.
The ceremonial blade, meant to honor their bond, plunging into his core. Not with stealth, but with theatrical slowness.
The look of pure, unadulterated envy in the boy's eyes as Yin Jie's celestial power began to bleed out into the heavens.
I was betrayed.
He forced a breath.
It rattled in a chest too narrow, in lungs that felt shallow. The air was thick with the smell of damp stone, stale hay, and… unwashed body.
His body.
Panic bubbled up. He wrestled it down.
An emperor does not panic.
An emperor assesses.
He commanded his divine consciousness to expand, to scan his surroundings.
Nothing happened.
A cold worse than any pain seeped into him.
He tried to circulate his Qi, to draw upon the ocean of power that had once made stars tremble.
Only a hollow, screaming silence answered.
A void where a universe of energy had lived.
Am I dead? Is this… the underworld?
Then, the second wave hit. Not pain.
Memories.
They flooded in, jagged and sharp. A broken mirror of another life.
Lin Feng. Sixteen. The "Useless Son of the Lin Clan."
The image of a gaunt, dark-haired boy, perpetually hunched, flashed behind his eyelids.
Failed Meridian Awakening. Zero combat talent.
Father vanished on a dungeon delve. Mother… died of shame. Or was it illness?
No.
It was the whispers. The constant, crushing weight of being less than nothing.
He saw flashes.
A wooden training yard. Kicks connecting with ribs. Spittle landing on worn shoes.
The laughter of his cousins, Lin Tao and Lin Wei.
The vacant, disappointed eyes of the Clan Elders.
This is not my memory. This is… an infection.
He rejected it.
He was Yin Jie, the Dark Heaven Emperor! He had ruled the Nine Celestial Domains for a hundred thousand years!
A new, sharper image surfaced.
The boy, Lin Feng, alone in this very room—a glorified storage closet next to the stables. Clutching a rusted locket, the last thing his mother left.
Crying.
Not with rage, but with a soul-deep exhaustion that promised no tomorrow.
The despair of it was so visceral, it momentarily drowned the emperor's wrath.
Yin Jie's eyes snapped open.
Darkness.
Slivers of grey light cut through cracks in a warped wooden wall. He was on a thin, scratchy pallet on a dirt floor.
He lifted a hand.
A boy's hand. Thin-wristed, calloused from grunt work, not from wielding celestial swords.
Disgust twisted his gut.
This frail shell. This… mortal vessel.
He pushed himself up.
Every muscle protested. The world swam. He was starving, dehydrated, and weak.
Bai Zhan, he thought, the name a silent curse. You didn't just kill me. You cast my spirit into this… this midden pit of existence.
A fresh, more terrifying realization dawned.
His spiritual foundation was damaged. Fractured by the betrayal and the violent transmigration.
He was a blazing sun crammed into a paper lantern. His power was locked away, seeping out through a thousand hairline cracks.
Despair threatened again. True, utter helplessness.
But then, in the very center of that hollow, aching void… he felt it.
Not Qi.
Something… older. Deeper.
A silence so profound it had weight. A stillness that existed before the first star flickered to life.
It was just an echo. A faint, distant hum.
What is this?
He focused on it.
The echo didn't grow stronger, but it became clearer. It was a presence. A primordial residue clinging to the shattered fragments of his soul.
Before he could probe further, the door crashed open.
Wood splintered against stone. Grey light flooded in, outlining three figures.
"Look who's decided to rejoin the living," a sneering voice said.
Lin Tao. The memory supplied the name, along with a familiar clench of fear in his stomach.
"Thought you might've finally died from shame," said the second, Lin Wei. "Save us the trouble."
Yin Jie slowly turned his head.
He saw three youths, maybe a year or two older than this body, dressed in rough training gear. Their faces were twisted in identical masks of bored contempt.
This was a routine for them. As mundane as taking out the trash.
Lin Tao, the bulkiest, stepped into the room. His shadow fell over Yin Jie.
"Get up, trash. It's your day to muck out the stables. The Bloodmane Stallions are especially fragrant."
"He likes the smell," Lin Wei giggled, a high, unpleasant sound. "Reminds him of his own lineage."
The third cousin, a quieter boy named Lin Jie, lingered in the doorway. He looked uncomfortable but said nothing.
Yin Jie said nothing.
He simply watched. He assessed them as he would any insect.
Their stances were sloppy. Their cores unbalanced. Their Qi—what little they had—was thin and turbid.
Mortals. Barely even that.
In his past life, a glance from him would have reduced them and their entire bloodline to dust.
Now, he had to look up at them.
Lin Tao misread the silence for defiance. Or maybe he just wanted an excuse.
"Deaf as well as useless?" He drew back his foot. "Let me remind you of your place."
The kick was aimed at Yin Jie's ribs.
It wasn't a fighting technique. It was a brutal, casual expression of dominance, meant to hurt and humiliate.
Time didn't slow. Yin Jie didn't have the power to make it slow.
But his mind, the mind that had planned campaigns across galaxies, operated on a different axis.
He could try to roll away. It would prolong this. It would invite a more severe beating.
He could take the hit. As Lin Feng always had.
A cold, detached part of him made the calculation.
Data is required.
Assess the capabilities of this body under stress. Assess the true nature of the void within.
He chose.
He let the kick land.
Thud.
The impact was solid. It shoved the air from his new, pathetic lungs. A sharp, bright pain flared in his side. A lesser rib, likely cracked.
Lin Feng's body screamed. Years of conditioned terror screamed along with it.
Yin Jie listened to those screams. He observed them from a distance.
The physical pain was… trivial. A pinprick.
The fear was just chemical reactions in a feeble brain.
But then, something else happened.
Where Lin Tao's boot had made contact, a sensation bloomed. Not pain.
A coolness. A gentle, sucking numbness.
And inside him, the deep, silent echo stirred.
It was faint. A single ripple in an endless, dark lake.
Lin Tao frowned, looking down at his own foot as if it felt strange. He shook it off.
"See? Nothing but a sack of meat. Now get up. The dung awaits."
He reached down, his meaty hand grabbing the front of Yin Jie's tunic to haul him upright.
The moment Lin Tao's fingers made contact with his chest, the ripple became a wave.
The cool, sucking sensation intensified.
It wasn't drawing anything out of Yin Jie.
It was drawing something in.
A tiny, almost imperceptible thread of warmth—the faint, crude physical vitality from Lin Tao's hand—was pulled across the point of contact.
It was less than a drop of water from an ocean. Meaningless.
But to the howling void inside Yin Jie, it was… something.
Lin Tao yanked him to his feet.
"Move!"
Yin Jie staggered, the world tilting. He caught himself against the rough stone wall.
He looked down at his own hand.
For the briefest instant—where his skin had been touched by Lin Tao—a soft, shimmering grey light had flickered.
Like the ghost of a flame, seen through thick ash.
Then it was gone.
Inside him, the echo settled again. But it was different.
It was no longer just an echo.
It was a presence.
Awake.
And hungry.
Lin Tao shoved him toward the door.
"Stop daydreaming, waste of space!"
Yin Jie stumbled into the grimy light of the corridor. The cousins' laughter followed him, bouncing off the stone.
He didn't hear it.
His entire being was focused inward, on that newfound, ancient hunger at the center of the void.
Lin Feng's memories, his own fury, the plan for vengeance—they all shriveled into insignificance before this single, staggering truth.
He had been wrong.
Bai Zhan hadn't cast him into a midden pit.
He had thrown a starving god into a butcher's shop.
Yin Jie looked at his pale, thin hands as he was prodded down the hall toward the stinking stables.
He flexed his fingers.
A whisper coiled up from the depths of his soul. Not in any language, but in the concept that existed before language.
…devour…
The last of Lin Feng's fear melted away, burned off by a cold, dawning certainty.
He didn't need to seek power.
He just had to take back what the universe itself owed him.
Starting with the next fool who laid a hand on him.