Chapter 1: The Funeral
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They held a funeral for me while I was still breathing.
I watched from the doorway as my father — the Demon Lord who had shattered continents, who had made gods kneel and beg — stood before my empty coffin and said nothing. Not a prayer. Not a curse. Not even my name.
He simply turned away.
That was the moment I understood something the rest of this world hadn't figured out yet.
The most dangerous creature alive isn't the one with the most power.
It's the one everyone forgot to kill.
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My name is Caden Draveth.
Third son of Malachar Draveth, the Abyssal Demon Lord. Ruler of the Seven Shattered Realms. Sovereign of the Black Throne. Destroyer of the Divine Conclave. The single most feared being to have ever drawn breath in this world's history.
And me?
I was the boy they kept in the east wing and fed twice a day out of legal obligation.
I had no mana. That was the official verdict, handed down by seven high-ranking Court Mages on the day of my third birthday, when children of noble demon blood were supposed to have their cores assessed. They pressed their glowing instruments against my chest, waited, and watched the needles stay perfectly, damningly still.
No mana signature. No elemental affinity. No demonic resonance. Nothing.
One of the mages — an old vulture named Sethrik with ink-stained fingers and a talent for cruelty — had looked at my father and said, *"The child is hollow, my Lord. A vessel with no water. It happens, sometimes, with bloodlines stretched too far."*
My father had looked at me once. Just once.
Then he left the room.
He didn't come back for eleven years.
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I remembered all of this, but the memories weren't originally mine.
Somewhere far away — in a world with electricity and instant noodles and online games that consumed entire years of a person's life — a twenty-three year old man named Lee Junho had slumped dead in his gaming chair at 3:47 in the morning. Heart failure. Energy drink in hand. Level 99 character on the screen.
That character had been Malachar Draveth.
Junho — *I* — had spent six years mastering the Demon Lord class that every other player dismissed as unplayable. The skill trees were deliberately obscure. The power scaling was punishing in the early game. The lore was buried so deep that most players never found the hidden mechanics that made the class utterly, catastrophically broken at full development.
But I had found them. All of them.
And then I died, and woke up inside the story I knew better than my own life.
Not as the Demon Lord.
As his forgotten son.
At first I thought it was a sick joke. Then I thought it was a nightmare. By the end of the first week, I had accepted it with the quiet practicality of someone who had spent six years solving problems that other people gave up on.
I was Caden Draveth. Fourteen years old. No mana. No status. No future.
Alright.
I had started with worse.
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The funeral was my own idea, technically.
I had collapsed three weeks ago in the east corridor — genuinely collapsed, because the body I'd inherited was in terrible shape. Malnourished. Undertreated. The previous Caden had been sick for most of his short life, and whatever illness had been quietly eating at him had left its marks everywhere. Weak lungs. Low blood pressure. A persistent cough that rattled like something was loose inside my chest.
The court physician, a skittish demon named Orvel who smelled of medicinal herbs and fear, had declared me unlikely to survive the month.
Word had reached my father. My father had nodded, apparently, and authorized a funeral to be prepared in advance. Efficient. Practical. Very much in keeping with the man who had once ended a war by personally executing both sides.
I had listened to all of this from my sickbed, staring at the obsidian ceiling, and thought: *good.*
Let them bury me. Let them write me off. Let every scheming noble and jealous half-sibling in this palace look at my empty coffin and feel the comfortable certainty that the problem of Caden Draveth had resolved itself.
The best thing about being underestimated is that nobody watches you.
And I had been very, very busy while nobody was watching.
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It started on my seventh day in this body.
I had been lying still, cataloguing everything I knew about this world — the game's lore, the hidden mechanics, the stat systems that players interacted with but the characters supposedly couldn't see — when something shifted.
It was subtle. A pressure behind my eyes. A faint shimmer at the edge of my vision.
And then, floating in the air before me in letters that pulsed with cold, silver light:
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**[SYSTEM INITIALIZATION COMPLETE]**
**[HOST IDENTIFIED: CADEN DRAVETH]**
**[SCANNING BLOODLINE...]**
**[SCANNING...]**
**[SCANNING...]**
**[ANOMALY DETECTED]**
**[CLASSIFICATION UNAVAILABLE — ALL KNOWN TIERS EXCEEDED]**
**[NEW CLASSIFICATION CREATED: ■■■■■■■■]**
**[NOTICE: THIS INFORMATION HAS BEEN SEALED TO PROTECT HOST SURVIVAL]**
**[BASIC INTERFACE NOW AVAILABLE]**
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I had stared at that screen for a very long time.
In the game, the System was a mechanic that only the player could see — a interface layered over the world, invisible to every NPC inside it. Characters couldn't read their own stat windows. They couldn't see skill descriptions or level notifications or hidden titles.
Except, apparently, me.
Because I wasn't just Caden Draveth.
I was Lee Junho *inside* Caden Draveth. A player inside the game. And the System had recognized something in that combination — something in the bloodline that every Court Mage had dismissed as empty — and had quietly, privately, begun to wake it up.
I had opened my status window with a thought, the way I'd done ten thousand times in the game.
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**[STATUS WINDOW]**
**Name:** Caden Draveth
**Age:** 14
**Race:** Demon (Abyssal Royal — Dormant)
**Level:** 1
**Class:** ■■■■■■■■ (Sealed)
**STR:** 4 | **AGI:** 6 | **VIT:** 8 | **INT:** 91 | **WIS:** 88 | **ARC:** ■■■■
**Mana:** — *[See Note]*
**[Note: Host does not possess a mana core. Host possesses something else entirely. Designation pending. Do not discuss with court mages.]*
**Titles:**
— The Forgotten (Active)
— Hollow-Born (Active)
— ■■■■■■■■ (Sealed — Conditions not yet met)
**Hidden Passive: Abyss Inheritance (Stage 0/10)**
*The Draveth bloodline does not grant mana. It grants something older. Something the world has not seen in four thousand years. Current output suppressed to 0.001% to prevent detection. Unsuppressing would kill the host at current VIT.*
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I had read that last line three times.
*Unsuppressing would kill the host at current VIT.*
Four weeks later, sitting in the shadow of a doorway watching nobles mill around my empty coffin with expressions ranging from politely sorrowful to barely concealed relief, I had leveled seven times, raised my VIT to thirty-one, unlocked two sealed skills, and identified the exact mechanism by which my bloodline worked.
It wasn't mana.
Mana was borrowed power — energy drawn from the world and shaped by a core. Every mage, warrior, demon noble, and divine champion in existence ran on mana. It was the universal currency of power.
What I had was different.
The Draveth bloodline, at its deepest root — before generations of intermarriage with lesser demon clans had diluted it — didn't borrow from the world.
It *consumed* it.
Every second I existed, something fundamental in the fabric of this world fed into me. Infinitesimally small amounts, completely undetectable. Like a drain so fine that the ocean couldn't feel it.
But drains, given enough time, empty oceans.
I watched my father stand before my coffin. Watched his crimson eyes sweep the assembled court with the bored authority of a man who had already decided this event was beneath his attention. Watched him turn and walk away, his black cape sweeping behind him, not once looking toward the doorway where his supposedly dying son stood in the shadows.
A faint shimmer appeared in my vision.
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**[TITLE UPDATED]**
**The Forgotten → The Sleeping Catastrophe**
*You have been mourned before your death, buried before your end, and discarded by the very blood that made you. The world has made its position clear. You are nothing.*
*Prove it wrong.*
*+15% to all hidden stat growth. Effect permanent.*
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I let myself smile. Just slightly. Just enough.
The court mage Sethrik — the one who had called me hollow eleven years ago — was standing near the coffin, speaking in low tones to another noble. As if sensing something, he looked up and scanned the room.
His gaze passed right over the doorway.
Right over me.
I turned and walked back to my room.
I had work to do.
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*The Demon Lord's forgotten son died quietly, they would later say. A shame, some would add, though none of them meant it. He had never amounted to anything. He had never shown a single trace of power.*
*They were right, of course.*
*He hadn't shown a single trace.*
*That was the point.*
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**[END OF CHAPTER 1]**
*If you enjoyed this chapter, please add to your library and leave a comment! Every stone Caden is building on will matter later — nothing in this story is accidental.