As they approached, his fading mind immediately realized they were not normal elves. Their skin was the color of extinguished coal and ash, while their hair was as bright and white as freshly fallen snow. Their eyes glowed like predatory amber within the storm. Dark Elves.
The otaku knowledge he had gained from the countless manga and dark fantasy novels he read in his old world was now the only logical trump card to save his life. Dark Elves were ruthless, selfish, and extremely xenophobic toward other races. When finding strangers—especially a human child lying in a pool of blood—the most likely scenario was that they would slit his throat and throw his corpse to the wolves rather than show him mercy. However, they possessed a fanatical, unshakeable loyalty to their own kin, to their ever-dwindling communities.
Ignoring the blood filling his lungs and the tearing agony in his ribs, Akira ruthlessly squeezed out the last, feeble drop of mana remaining at the bottom of his mind. Blocking out the gargantuan suffering enveloping his body for a single second, he activated his [Transmutation and Illusion] magic upon himself. His frail, pale human skin slowly took on an ash hue, his golden-yellow hair turned white, and his round ears elongated and sharpened. He was now an eight-year-old Dark Elf child, lying in a pool of blood and on the verge of death.
This final mental effort completely flipped the switches in his brain, and Akira, wearing his ash-colored mask, sank into absolute darkness. The tactic had to work; otherwise, he was already just a piece of meat on this mountain.
His consciousness returned slowly and painfully, as if surfacing from beneath deep, dark waters.
The first thing he felt was the scent burning his throat—moss, pine resin, and a strange, metallic smell of blood. When he opened his eyes, his vision was still blurred. He saw the ceiling; it was a dome-shaped roof masterfully woven from thick branches and black leaves. The interior was dim, but there was no trace of the freezing mountain cold. The floor he lay upon was covered with soft animal pelts.
'It worked...' he thought to himself, his brain throbbing. 'They thought I was one of their kind and brought me to their camp.'
However, it was impossible to move, or even twitch a finger. From the dragon's blow, his entire body had been crushed, his bones pulverized to dust, and his internal organs scrambled. The pain was so dimensionless, so crushing, that it had now turned into numbness. He was just thankful he could still breathe.
He began to hear voices from outside the room and right beside him. The voices grew closer, but Akira's mind was suddenly rocked by a massive terror. Since the very first day he arrived in this world, that flawless "Auto-Translate" skill the system had bestowed upon him wasn't working! The words the Dark Elves spoke to one another were a completely alien, predatory language—guttural, full of hisses and sharp, melodic clicks. He couldn't understand a single shred of what they were saying or what they were discussing about him. There was no trace of the comprehensible language of humans and nobles. The fact that the auto-translate didn't cover the language of this ancient and ostracized race had turned him into a deaf and mute victim.
Right at that moment, he felt something going terribly wrong in his body. His frail, eight-year-old human body was autonomously redirecting all remaining mana reserves toward [Cellular Regeneration] and keeping his organs functioning in order to survive. This feral survival protocol of the body began to siphon the energy from that "Dark Elf Illusion" Akira was consciously trying to maintain on the surface.
To an outside observer, the sight was horrifying. Akira's ash-colored skin began to flicker like a broken magic lantern, reverting in patches to his own pale human skin. His pointed ears trembled and shortened, while his snow-white hair turned golden-yellow from the roots.
The meaningless hisses of the two healer elves standing at his bedside, examining him to heal him, were suddenly cut off like a knife. Their amber eyes widened as if they would pop out of their sockets. That absolute silence of shock, which lasted for a few seconds, gave way to pure hatred, to savage roars born of feeling betrayed. The thick pelt used as the room's door was thrown open, and dark elf warriors clad in heavy, black leather armor poured inside. The curved black steel swords in their hands—clearly coated in poison—and their hooked spears were pointed directly at Akira.
The elves shouted angrily in their incomprehensible language, brandishing their weapons threateningly. In their eyes, he was no longer an orphan who needed saving; he was a despicable human pup trying to infiltrate their tribe, deceiving them with magic. A spy, a parasite that needed to be exterminated.
Two burly, armored soldier elves stepped forward, snarling. Lowering their weapons, they marched toward the pelt where Akira lay with heavy steps. With ruthless movements, they grabbed the shattered child lying on the ground by his arms. Their goal was clear: to drag him out of this tent and interrogate him under torture in the middle of the tribe, tearing him to shreds.
However, the exact millisecond those soldiers' cold, armored hands made contact with Akira's broken arms... That was the only moment, the only opportunity Akira had been waiting for.
'You asked for this,' Akira whispered from the bottomless, dark chambers of his mind. He couldn't move physically, but his eyes suddenly flew wide open; his blue pupils overflowed with a pure, pitch-black void.
"[Damage Transfer]."
His ribs shattered by the dragon's tail strike, his dislocated left arm, his ruptured internal organs, and his crushed spine... He activated the terrifying healing magic required to instantly repair this inconceivable damage to his body at full capacity. However, he exacted the "Equivalent Exchange" toll demanded by the system's laws of nature—that devastating recoil—not from his own body, but directly from these two elite dark elf soldiers who had grabbed him by the arms!
The air inside the room suddenly grew heavy; the familiar green mana of the healing spell merged with a sickly, pitch-black smoke, surging from his arms into the elves like lightning.
CRACK! SNAP! THUD!
While the bones in Akira's body rapidly and flawlessly snapped back into place and fused together within seconds, the exact opposite—a literal hell—was taking place within the bodies of the two soldier elves holding him.
The soldiers' left arms suddenly snapped at a reverse angle with a sickening crunch, exactly like Akira's arm when he fell from the mountain. Their ribcages suddenly caved inward as if struck by a massive, invisible dragon's tail, their thick leather armor shattering, unable to withstand the pressure. Subjected to the exact same pressure Akira experienced while falling from that mountain, their internal organs ruptured in seconds.
Emitting only a muffled, bloody wheeze from their mouths, their eyes bulging with shock and indescribable agony, those two powerful warriors collapsed on either side of Akira's bed like boneless heaps of meat.
Akira was no longer that helpless child lying on the brink of death, unable to move just moments ago. Perfectly intact, having recovered his strength and spewing his Level 130 dark aura around him, he slowly stood up from the pelt beneath him. The dull, cold expression of his former human body had completely returned to his face. The darkness in his eyes was deep enough to freeze the warrior spirits of the dark elves inside the tent.
Seeing their two comrades drowning in their own blood on the floor and this inconceivable human child standing up, the other dark elves froze in terror for only a few seconds. However, their ruthless warrior instincts of the forest and their centuries-old racial hatred prevailed. Uttering savage shrieks, they began to attack Akira from all sides inside this cramped tent with their curved black swords and spears, like a deadly tempest.
In the dim darkness of the tent, those curved, poisoned black steel swords descending toward him hung suspended in the air in a millisecond where time froze. The pitch-black void in Akira's pupils was no longer just a survival instinct; it was the manifestation of that absolute helplessness of being crushed by the dragon, the despair he felt while watching his family be slaughtered, and the disgusting games this endless, cruel world played on him.
The colossal, untamable Level 130 mana ocean within him transformed into pure, unadulterated hatred and erupted from his ribcage.
"YOU... YOU ARE ALL THE SAME!" roared the eight-year-old child. His voice, far beyond his years, shook the tent with a demonic echo torn straight from the depths of hell.
The moment he activated his fire magic, the flames trickling from his fingertips were not the familiar orange or red; they were a pitch-black vortex of hell, composed of pure destruction, dark magic, and the color of blood, consuming the surrounding oxygen in seconds. The warrior elves attacking him melted and turned to ash within those black flames before they even had the chance to scream. But Akira did not stop. He was seeing red. His mind was stuck on that night the Royal Inquisition had burned his own village.
The black flames swallowed the tent like a piece of paper and spilled outside. The wooden and pelt-made houses of the hidden and sheltered dark elf tribe, their sanctuaries in massive tree hollows, began to catch fire one after another. The panicked screams within the tribe mingled with the roar of the flames. Akira, with his ash-colored skin in a half-human half-elf appearance and his bloody clothes clinging to him, was like an angel of death walking among those burning homes.
He did not discriminate against the warriors who crossed his path, the shamans trying to prepare their magic, the fleeing elders, or even the children clinging to their mothers' skirts. His black flames, with just a wave of his hand, a snap of his fingers, swallowed everything and everyone in front of him; tearing flesh from bones, and hope from souls. In that moment, there was no right or wrong; there was only the gargantuan grudge of a suffering human who wanted to vomit it all out onto the entire world.
Minutes passed like hours. When the black flames could find no other soul to swallow, no other wood to burn, they slowly died down, giving way to a heavy, throat-burning layer of gray smoke.
Akira stood perfectly still right in the middle of the tribe, amidst warm ashes that reached up to his knees. When the mountain's freezing wind blew the ashes into the air, the scent of burnt flesh filling his lungs suddenly slapped his paralyzed mind awake.
When the blinding fog of adrenaline dissipated, he looked at the landscape around him. Charred corpses... most were unarmed. The shriveled remains of mothers and children who had perished embracing one another...
Akira's breath caught in his throat. He looked at his small, trembling hands covered in soot and blood. His pupils constricted with horror. A poisonous dagger, sharper even than the dragon's tail strike, pierced his heart: Remorse and realization.
'What... have I done?' he thought. His stomach churned; he wanted to vomit right where he stood. How was he any different from those silver-armored, faceless Inquisitors? Hadn't they also burned and destroyed Lilia's father, Elysia, and Zephyro without mercy under the pretext of them being "demons"? He had inflicted the exact same tragedy visited upon his own village onto a foreign race on this mountaintop, without sparing women or children. On this path he had set out on for revenge, he had turned into the monster he had sworn to destroy.
Just as he was about to fall to his knees, his twenty-three-year-old cold, pragmatic mind suddenly kicked in as a survival mechanism and ruthlessly suppressed the voice of his conscience.
'Wait...' A bolt of lightning flashed in his mind. 'The Royal Inquisition burned my village but couldn't kill me. And because I survived, I've now turned into a demon who will bring about their end. I've sworn an oath of revenge.'
He snapped his head up. The tearful, broken expression in his eyes suddenly assumed the sharpness of a hawk seeking its prey. 'What if someone from this tribe survived too? What if this massacre I committed gave birth to a new avenger who will bring about my own end?!'
The terrible irony of this cursed cycle of revenge he had created hit him in the face. No one should survive. He couldn't leave this work half-finished if he didn't want to seal his own fate.
He staggered to his feet and began a frantic search among the burning ruins and smoking corpses. He hurled massive logs aside with his mana, looking under every tent remnant. And he encountered that reality he both feared and inwardly avoided facing behind a half-collapsed storehouse at the far edge of the tribe.
Beneath burned black leaves and a collapsing roof, a tiny figure was huddled.
Akira approached slowly. This was a dark elf girl, five years old at most. The tips of her snow-white hair were singed, and her ash-colored skin was covered in soot and mud. The simple leather tunic she wore was in tatters. But what truly froze Akira was the girl's posture. The girl wasn't crying. She wasn't trembling. Looking at this bloody demon who approached her and had slaughtered her entire family, there wasn't a single shred of fear in her eyes.
Those large, amber eyes were looking directly into Akira's, with a hatred so pure, undiluted, and vast enough to burn the world.
Akira stood frozen to the spot. The wind was howling, but he could only hear the scream in those eyes. Standing before him wasn't a five-year-old dark elf girl; it was the eight-year-old Akira himself, standing at the edge of the forest and looking toward the Capital when Lilia died and his mother was speared before his eyes. The darkest mirror of his own soul, of his own creation, stood right in front of him.
He raised his right hand. That familiar, diamond-hard ice blade formed between his fingers in seconds. His logic screamed: 'Kill her! Break the cycle! Don't leave an avenger behind!'
He raised the blade toward the girl. The dark elf girl didn't even blink; on the contrary, she gritted her tiny teeth and growled softly at Akira with her frail body. She wasn't surrendering. She was defying death.
Akira's breath wavered. The hand holding the blade began to shake more violently than ever before. The freckled, smiling face of Lilia appeared before his eyes. Elysia's last whisper saying "Live..." echoed in his ears. After destroying so many innocents, so many lives for the sake of his own rage... he couldn't find the courage, that final brutality within himself to shatter and cast aside this tiny mirror who shared his exact same fate. His conscience had shattered his thick mask from the inside.
The moment the ice blade slipped from his hand and fell onto the snow, it evaporated.
"I can't..." whispered Akira, his voice drowning in his own helplessness.
On that thin, sickly line between his logic and his conscience, he made a new, completely perverse decision. He couldn't leave her here to die; she would perish in the mountain's freezing cold or in the teeth of wolves. He couldn't kill her either. In that case, there was only one thing he could do: Pull her into this darkness of his own creation.
He slowly reached his right hand toward the ashes and burned vines around the girl. '[Transmutation] magic,' he focused. The carbon and plant fibers on the ground suddenly bent and changed shape through the perfect manipulation of his mana. Within seconds, those soft ashes turned into a thin gray rope, as hard as steel yet equally flexible.
The girl instinctively tried to flee backward, but it was too late. Akira unleashed the rope he controlled with magic like a snake upon the girl. The rope bound the girl's tiny wrists together firmly, yet with a precision that wouldn't break her bones. Then an extension of the rope wrapped around her mouth like a sturdy gag to prevent her from screaming, muttering spells, or biting him while trying to escape.
The girl struggled, cursing Akira with muffled growls, fire flashing from her amber eyes. Akira grabbed the girl by the scruff of her neck with a rough motion and tucked her under his arm.
Casting off that tearful expression, he donned his ice-cold, unfeeling mask once more. He cast a cold look down at the struggling girl who hated him.
"I don't know what the hell you're saying in your own language," said Akira. His voice held both the ruthlessness of a killer and the weariness of a cursed guardian. "But you're coming with me now. Hate me for the rest of your life if you want. Try to kill me when you grow up. But I won't let you die on this mountain."
The girl understood none of the words. To her, Akira was nothing more than the golden-haired, demonic human hatchling who had shattered her world and now held her captive.
Akira turned his back, clutching the small dark elf girl—who struggled beneath his arm and stared at him with pure malice—as he began to walk with heavy, bloody steps into the heart of the storm. He left behind the ashes of the burning tribe, the final remnants of his conscience, and the dragon atop that ruthless peak. He was no longer alone on this cursed path; he carried with him a living, breathing testament to his own sin.
The crushing defeat he suffered on the legendary, bone-chilling summit of Mount Mythar had shattered Akira's pride like a shard of glass. He carried a wound in his chest that was more than just physical; it was the weight of that gargantuan dragon's indifferent gaze, a gaze that had mocked him with the reality of how fragile and pathetic a mortal he truly was despite his Level 130 mana. He had failed the quest. Furthermore, on this path he had taken with a vow to destroy the Inquisition, he had stained his hands with the ashes and blood of an innocent tribe. He could not return to the Capital, to the Adventurer's Guild, or to Vargus's mocking, inquisitive eyes in this state—defeated and broken. Especially not with this little dark elf girl, a living embodiment of his guilt and shame, by his side.
The months ahead were like a freezing reflection of hell on earth. Akira turned his route completely away from the Capital, toward the unknown, wild depths of the map. His goal was survival and the reconstruction of his strength and his broken pride.
However, this struggle for survival in the forest was not just against nature; it was against the five-year-old dark elf girl he had dragged away and "saved." The hatred within the girl was sharper than the mountain's freezing cold. In the first weeks, she refused to eat, sealing her lips until she grew weak and fainted. Akira was forced to feed her the meat of the wild boars or deer he hunted by holding her down, sometimes using magic to pry her jaw open. At night, whenever Akira closed his eyes from exhaustion, the girl attacked his jugular repeatedly with sharp stones or shards of bone she had found, only to be hurled back every time by his mana, which functioned as an automatic defense mechanism. Not a single word was shared between them. One was a fake adult—silent, hollow, and scorched by regret; the other was a feral kitten, her eyes dripping with pure malice, burning with the flame of revenge.
After these bloody and grueling months, the suffocating, dense fabric of the forest gradually began to thin, and the trees were replaced by a wide path carved with muddy wagon tracks. The rusty scent of civilization mingled with the air.
Following the path for days, they crested a high hill where the forest ended, revealing a massive, industrial, gray city nestled in a vast valley—entirely different from the Capital. Colossal walls woven from black stone, massive iron chimneys vomiting toxic gray smoke into the sky, and a giant metropolis where thousands of people swarmed like a colony of ants.
At that exact moment, the steps of the dark elf girl beside Akira—her hands still lightly restrained by a magical bond—stopped dead. When Akira turned his head, he saw that those amber eyes, which for months had looked at him only with pure hatred as if staring at a murderer, were now wide with shock. The girl's breath hitched; her jaw hung slightly agape. For the first time in her life, her fierce, unyielding hatred gave way to pure shock, a fascination mingled with terror at this inconceivable sight. All her life, she had known only tree hollows, the silence of the forest, and the small tents of her tribe.
Akira observed the girl's momentary mental paralysis but did not dwell on it. "Our turn," he muttered.
They couldn't enter the city like this. A dark elf, with ash-colored skin, snow-white hair, and pointed ears, would be hunted instantly in these bigoted human cities. He himself, in the body of a blood-stained eight-year-old boy, would draw too much attention.
Taking a deep breath and bending the light around his own body, he donned the familiar mask of the twenty-three-year-old, black-haired, tall man whose eyes carried all the weariness of life—the "Adult Akira" illusion. Then, he directed an extension of his mana toward the girl. Her ash-colored skin faded into a pale wheat hue, her snow-white hair took on an ordinary, dull brown, and her pointed ears rounded out. The tattered leather tunic she wore transformed into a simple, peasant-style linen dress. The girl spun around in panic, trying to understand what was happening as she looked at her hands and hair, but Akira gripped her hand firmly.
"Behave," he said in a cold voice, even though he knew she wouldn't understand.
As they approached the city's massive iron gates, guards armed with spears lunged forward to stop the mysterious stranger in the tattered cloak, his face covered in scars, dragging a frightened little girl behind him.
"Hey, you! Halt right there!" shouted one of the sentries, leveling his spear at Akira's chest. "Do you have a transit permit or entry tax? This isn't a beggar camp!"
Without breaking his dead expression, Akira reached into the inner pocket of his cloak with his free left hand. Slowly, he pulled out the brilliantly shimmering, silver A-Rank adventurer plate bearing Guild Master Vargus's seal and held it at the guard's eye level.
Seeing the unique mana seal on the silver plate, the arrogant expressions on the guards' faces vanished within seconds. The spears trembled as they were lowered; the men's knees seemed to give out. A-Rank! One of those walking calamities, equivalent to the strength of an entire army, whom even kings greeted with respect and who hunted legendary monsters alone, was at the gate of this ordinary border city!
"M-My deepest apologies, esteemed sir!" stammered the guard, bowing so low he nearly touched the ground. "P-Please, pass through! You honor our city with your presence!"
Akira returned the plate to his pocket and, amidst the terror-filled, respectful gazes of the guards and the surrounding merchants, stepped into the city with the "human" disguised dark elf girl in tow.
The interior of the city was even more chaotic than the outside. Narrow streets, mud, the clamor of iron workshops, and misery had seeped into everything. In Akira's pocket, only a handful of the silver coins he had earned in the Capital remained. During the months-long journey, he had used a portion of the money to avoid stealing supplies from villages. He found the cheapest, most dilapidated inn he could spot in one of the city's back alleys—its wood nearing rot and its sign unreadable—and pushed the door open to enter.
The inside smelled of sweat, sour beer, and unwashed bodies. Low-tier mercenaries, thieves, and weary workers were scattered across the tables.
However, the moment Akira entered through the door, the noisy hum inside the inn was cut like a knife.
The aura Akira radiated wasn't merely the mystery brought by his illusion. He had returned from the brink of death in the legendary glaciers of Mount Mythar, his soul crushed under the indifferent gaze of a gargantuan dragon, and he had reduced an innocent tribe to ash with his own hands. That bottomless trauma, pure hatred, and absolute coldness within him overflowed from his body like an invisible mask of frost. His eyes were as dead and dark as if to freeze the soul of anyone looking into them. With every step he took, the temperature in the inn seemed to drop a few degrees, and even the fire in the hearth grew faint, recoiling from his presence.
Even the coarsest, most drunken thugs in the inn averted their eyes; no one dared to approach this man or even cast a wrong glance at him. That dark, ice-cold presence was more terrifying than even the most dangerous monsters.
Akira walked silently to the bar. He tossed a few copper coins to the trembling innkeeper. "A room," he said simply, his voice as cold as an old, rusty sword being drawn from its scabbard. "And two bowls of hot food."
Then, he moved to the table in the darkest, deepest corner of the inn. He seated the little girl in the chair opposite him. The girl still hadn't overcome the shock of the city and the people around her; she gripped the edge of the table tightly with her tiny hands, watching her surroundings with wide eyes. Akira, meanwhile, put his back to the wall and wrapped himself more tightly in his cloak. He fixed his eyes on the inn's dirty ceiling. He was here. He was alive. But that void within him, that freezing darkness, was colder than even the dragon's breath.
They chewed the tasteless oatmeal and the dried meat that had hardened like leather in silence, with mechanical movements. The faint steam rising from the wooden bowls mingled with the damp and heavy air of the room. After finishing his meal, Akira looked at the dark elf girl sitting across from him, whom he still concealed with the illusion of a human child. The girl hadn't touched the food placed before her; squeezing the edge of the table with her tiny hands, she continued to look directly into Akira's soul with those large, amber eyes, as if trying to impale it. The hatred within her hadn't diminished even a millimeter since that bloody mountain peak months ago.
Akira let out a deep, weary sigh. His true eight-year-old body behind the illusion hadn't fully overcome the trauma of the fall from the mountain, and his mind was crushed under the dragon's overwhelming aura. He didn't know how to rid himself of this girl. If he abandoned her to the ruthless streets of this putrid city, she would instantly fall into the hands of slave traders or perish in a back alley. That last, faint flicker of his conscience wouldn't allow it. But carrying the girl with him was no different than walking around with a bomb whose pin had been pulled. He had to make a decision.
He had to hack the system to his advantage once more. Knowing the limits of his mental capacity, he created only two physical clones this time. As he split his mana in two within the dimness of the room, he suppressed that familiar, throbbing pain in his brain by gritting his teeth.
The first of the clones, with its worn leather armor and that mysterious, cold twenty-three-year-old expression, set out toward the Adventurer's Guild. Its task was simple: hunt the dangerous monsters around the city, earn money, and regularly bring back enough gold to pay the rent for this dingy inn room and keep them fed.
The second clone, wrapping itself tightly in its cloak, was directed like a silent shadow toward that massive stone building rising in the center of the city: the City Library. The sole purpose of this clone was to find what he had felt the lack of to his very core on Mount Mythar—'absolute knowledge' and new magic theories.
His original body remained in that cramped and dark inn room without lifting the twenty-three-year-old illusion. His task was to watch this little girl huddled in the corner, waiting to slit his throat with the first sharp piece of wood she could get her hands on, and to ensure their survival. In any case, no one in this cheap inn would dare enter their room; that freezing, traumatic aura Akira radiated outward deterred even the innkeeper from approaching the door.
Days turned into weeks, and weeks into gray, gloomy months. Time flowed as if rotting between these damp walls. During these challenging, silent, and grueling months, even though Akira's body did not grow, the ruthless calendar of time continued to tick. In that dim inn room, accompanied only by a captive who hated him to death, Akira silently turned 9 years old. There was no birthday cake, no warm smiles from family, or Lilia's cheerful voice. As a celebration, there were only a few blood-stained silver coins brought by his clone returning from the guild that night and a mind cracking from exhaustion.
And one day, from the mind of the clone that had been reading books incessantly for days in the damp, airless vaults of the library, a shocking signal reached the main body like an electric strike. Deep at the bottom of the library's labyrinthine corridors, the clone had slipped into a section where no one had set foot for centuries, covered in spiderwebs and a thick layer of dust. Behind the shelves, there was a small hollow masterfully hidden within the bricks. The clone had sensed that hollow with its mana and pulled out a thick book that felt as if its cover were made of dried human skin, radiating a dark, sickly miasma.
Engraved upon the book in a dark red ink resembling blood were these words: FORBIDDEN MAGIC.
Akira suddenly sat up from where he sat in the inn room. His heart was hammering against his ribs. After quickly scanning the area to ensure no one was watching, the clone hid the book deep within its cloak. That night, gliding through the shadows of the library like a phantom, it returned to the inn room and delivered the book into the trembling hands of the original body.
Weeks had passed since the book entered the room.
Akira had dedicated his nights and days to opening the cover of this book and unraveling the heavy, three-layered mana seals etched upon it. Every time he tried to break a seal, blood would gush from his nose, and his brain would throb as if being squeezed in a vise. That dark magic resisted as if testing the mind that wished to enter, struggling to drive the weak insane. But Akira was not weak; he was a machine of revenge who had survived the dragon's tail strike.
At the end of those weeks of bloody, sweaty, and sleepless decryption, the book opened with a horrific groan. The pages seemed made of thin membranes rather than parchment. Upon them were three terrifying teachings that had nothing to do with ordinary elemental magic, serving to tear and reweave the very fabric of the soul and mind:
1. Mind Manipulation: The art of cutting and shaping the victim's thoughts, emotions, and will like a fine scalpel.
2. Memory Transfer: The power to erase or alter unwanted memories, or to sow false pasts into another's mind.
3. Slave Magic (Soul Bond): That ancient, unforgivable curse that chains the victim's existence to the master's life force with absolute obedience.
Akira's eyes widened as he read those demonic runes on the pages. His breathing quickened. The miraculous solution he needed to rid himself of—or rather, to utilize—this girl sitting in the corner, who hated him to death and wanted to kill him in his sleep, had been presented to him on a silver platter! Could such a perfect coincidence be possible? For a cursed book containing these three specific spells to appear before his clone in the Capital's massive library...
His rational, skeptical, and analytical mind from the old world would normally have sounded red alerts instantly. 'This is a trap. This is a setup. Someone intentionally left this book there for me to find,' it would have said. But Akira's mind was no longer that old, clear mind. The power intoxication, desperation, and thirst for revenge brought on by that horrific defeat on Mount Mythar had completely blinded him. He failed to realize that the Goddess, watching him from the invisible cosmic void with that sickly, calculating smile on her lips, had personally planted this book in his path; that she was transforming him step by step into a perfect monster, a demon lord of her own creation, rather than a hero.
With hands trembling from excitement, Akira buried himself in the pages of the book. These spells were not learned simply by reading; the soul had to face its own darkness. For weeks, within those moldy walls of the inn room, he forced his Level 130 mana to adapt to these dark arts. There were dark circles under his eyes and his cheeks had sunken, but the formulas of those three forbidden spells were etched into his mind in letters of fire.
And finally, the end of that suffocating months-long wait, that dark training, had arrived.
The pale moonlight seeping through the room's single window illuminated Akira's weary, twenty-three-year-old illusion face. He slowly closed the book and left it on the wooden table. With silent, heavy steps, he walked toward the darkest corner of the room.
There sat the little dark elf girl, her knees pulled to her chest and her arms wrapped around her legs. Seeing Akira approach, she hissed like a cat, and that familiar, unquenchable flame of rage flared in her amber eyes. She shrank further against the wall, taking a defensive stance with her small hands.
Akira stood directly in front of the girl. No pity, no shred of conscience remained on his face. There was only the dull gaze a cold, calculating master casts upon metal before forging his new weapon.
"You no longer need to suffer," Akira whispered, slowly extending his right hand toward the girl's face, which stared back with terror and hatred. At his fingertips, a sickly, pulsing glow of violet and black mana—composed of pure darkness that seemed to swallow the room's dimness—began to flare. "I will give you a new life, a new past, and a new purpose."
The damp, dim air of the room turned to ice as the mana intensified. He ruthlessly reached for the forehead of the small dark elf girl, who was huddled in the corner, hissing like a wild animal. The moment his cold fingers made contact with her sweaty, soot-stained skin, the physical world vanished for Akira.
Mind Manipulation: Memory Invasion
Within seconds, Akira's consciousness drifted into the girl's mind, like diving into a dark, bottomless ocean. Memories, colors, and emotions began to take shape, swirling around him like thousands of shards of broken glass. He was no longer seeing through his own eyes; he saw the world through the amber eyes of a small dark elf girl.
The first thing he saw was a warm, peaceful scene that tugged at his heart. Tents pitched between towering trees, the fresh scent of pine in the forest, and the cheerful melodies of silver-haired elves singing around a fire. He saw an elf woman—presumably the girl's mother—whose face glowed with tenderness as she hugged her and stroked her hair. This was the dark elf version of the brief, happy life Akira himself had once possessed. Her entire existence was woven from this sense of innocence and belonging.
But this warm memory suddenly dissolved into a bone-chilling nightmare, a predatory chaos.
The peace of the forest was shattered by the clatter of heavy armor and the neighing of horses. As Akira moved through her memories, he noticed a terrifying detail: the attackers weren't ordinary bandits. They wore heavy silver-gray armor, and their shields bore a crest symbolizing massive black stone walls and iron chimneys. The crest of this very city. They were the soldiers of this putrid industrial metropolis! The soldiers were ruthlessly putting the dark elves to the sword and dragging the surviving youths and children into wagons, fitting iron collars around their necks to be sold in slave markets.
A realization flashed in Akira's mind. 'So that's why...' he thought. 'The shock and dread in her eyes when she saw the city's massive iron gates wasn't fascination. It was pure, deep-seated trauma. She had returned to the nest of those who tore her family apart and enslaved her kin.'
But the memories did not end there. The flow of her mind dragged him toward a darker, fresher horror.
The sky turned pitch black with smoke. Not the city's soldiers this time, but a monster emerging from the shadows—a golden-haired creature spewing black hellfire from its hands. Himself. Seeing his own reflection through the girl's eyes made Akira's stomach churn. That unfeeling, ruthless mask on his face; those black flames reducing everything—women, children—to ash. The pure, undiluted terror and helplessness the girl felt at that moment began to burn Akira's own soul like acid. Facing his own monstrosity within the girl's mind was so heavy that Akira gasped for air, violently pulling his mana back and severing the connection.
Memory Transfer: Absolute Erasure
When he returned to the physical world, to that damp inn room, his chest was heaving like a bellows. The girl before him was crying, clutching her head under the weight of this mental intrusion.
Akira gritted his teeth until they bled. His twenty-three-year-old cold, pragmatic mind buried the last remnants of his conscience into that pitch-black mana. 'I have to do this. There is no other way for both of us to survive in this hell.'
He placed his hand on the girl's forehead again. This time, not to read, but to erase and destroy.
The black mana seeped into her mind like poison. With an invisible eraser, Akira began to ruthlessly demolish the entire architecture that made up the girl's identity. Her mother's warm smile blurred and dissolved into darkness. The scent of the forest, the melody of the lullabies, the trauma caused by the city's soldiers, and finally, the silhouette of Akira as a monster amidst black flames... Each was unraveled, thread by thread, and sent into nothingness. Within minutes, not a single emotion or shred of memory regarding her past remained in the girl's mind. Only a stark white, empty, eerie page was left. She was now nothing more than a hollow vessel.
The girl's struggling ceased. The predatory, hateful look in her eyes vanished, replaced by the blank stare of a lifeless porcelain doll gazing into the void.
The Reconstruction: Soul Bond
Now came the time for construction. Stepping into the role of the creator, Akira began to paint his own distorted reality onto this blank canvas.
"Your name..." he whispered in the darkness, the heavy vibration of magic in his voice stitching itself directly into the girl's soul. "...is Lia. I seal you with this name in memory of what was taken from me."
Then, he injected his own horrific trauma, his own bottomless darkness, into her mind. The burning of his village by the Inquisition, the blood-soaked bodies of his mother and father, Lilia being trampled by horses, and the crushing arrogance of the dragon... But he adapted these memories as if they were Lia's own pain, making them a part of her soul. They were both at the bottom of the same abyss now; they were no longer alone.
Finally, he wrote a legend of false salvation into her mind. He created a fake memory of her being attacked by a massive, savage monster made of shadows in a dark forest, waiting helplessly for death. And just as the monster was about to tear her apart, he carved the image of Akira appearing with a golden light that rent the darkness, destroying the beast in a single blow and extending a warm, reassuring hand to her. This memory was woven into her heart so deeply and flawlessly that it became truer than truth itself. Akira was not her killer; he was her sole savior, her god, who had pulled her from the darkness.
A sense of absolute, unshakable, and unquestionable loyalty was sealed into every cell of the girl's soul. If Akira breathed, Lia would live. If Akira commanded, Lia would die without a second thought.
As the process neared its end, he sacrificed a massive portion of his mana to shatter the insurmountable language barrier between them. He copied and pasted his own known language—the meanings of words, the grammatical structure, and the ability to pronounce them—directly into the girl's neural pathways and the language center of her brain within seconds. This was a terrifyingly painful information upload that practically scorched the brain, yet the magic prevented the girl from losing consciousness from the agony. Now, she would be able to understand the world around her and speak the same language as Akira.
Akira took a deep, shaky breath. He had reached the final, most dark and unforgivable part of the procedure.
Slave Magic: Soul Bond.
He bit his own thumb until it bled. With his bleeding finger, he drew the intricate, chain-like curse rune he had learned from the book in his mind upon the girl's forehead.
"My blood is your blood," Akira murmured, reciting the incantation in an ancient rhythm. "My will is your fate. Let your body be my shield and your soul be my sword. Let betrayal bring you death, and loyalty bring you life. Seal!"
The bloody rune on the girl's forehead suddenly glowed like a hot coal, searing her flesh as it penetrated beneath the skin, transforming into a pitch-black tattoo that would remain forever. The heavy, oppressive wave of magic within the room dispersed and vanished like shattering glass the moment the seal was complete.
Akira staggered backward in an exhausted state and collapsed into a chair. His body was drenched in sweat. The throbbing in his brain was unbearable, but he had succeeded.
In the corner of the room, the predatory dark elf girl who had wanted to kill him until mere minutes ago slowly blinked her eyes. Her eyes, beneath the human appearance given to her by the illusion, no longer shone with malice or hatred, but with a clear, deep, and absolute sense of adoration.
Lia stood up slowly. She joined her hands before her respectfully and bowed her head slightly. In the new language Akira had forcibly injected into her seconds ago, she whispered her first words in a smooth, soft voice:
"Command me... Master."
The words "Command me... Master," echoing in the heavy, breathtaking silence of the room, rang in Akira's mind like the collision of two different worlds. This little girl kneeling before him, looking at him with absolute obedience as if worshiping a god, was entirely different from the wild animal that had wanted to tear him apart seconds ago.
Despite his knees trembling from exhaustion, Akira stood up slowly. Behind that cold mask, for the first time in a very long time, a thin sliver of compassion appeared. He reached out and caught the girl's soot-stained, delicate chin, gently lifting her face. In Lia's amber eyes, there was neither fear nor the brokenness brought by bondage; only a pure, brilliant devotion sparkled.
"Never call me 'Master' again," Akira whispered, softening the commanding and dark timbre of his voice as much as possible. "I am not your owner, Lia. That seal on your forehead... was not carved to make you an object, a servant to scrub floors, or a pawn to be my shield."
Lia tilted her head slightly. As she tried to make sense of the words of that foreign language etched into her new brain, she nuzzled softly into the warmth of Akira's hand touching her, like a kitten waiting to be loved.
Akira let out a sigh. He had performed this magic—this cursed Soul Bond—for only one purpose: to never be stabbed in the back again, to never be betrayed, and to create a single, absolute sanctuary he could trust in this ruthless world. That massive black hole that had opened in his soul since losing his own village and family could only be filled by a bond to someone who could never betray him, whose existence was chained to his own. Perhaps what he had done was an act so selfish, sickly, and disgusting that it would make even the Devil himself envious; but Akira didn't care. He would look upon this girl as if she were a piece of his own life. Amidst this dilapidated world, he would rebuild the warm family he had lost. He would never let her leave his side, offering her the most wonderful, most protected life on a golden platter. The price was merely absolute loyalty, and the magic had already collected that fee in advance.
During the mind transfer, Lia had learned not only Akira's memories but also the pitch-black secrets hidden in the deepest reaches of his soul. She knew that he was actually a twenty-three-year-old reincarnated adult who didn't belong to this world, that a level 130 monster slept within him, his crushing defeat at Mount Mythar, and the world-scorching hatred he harbored against the Inquisition... Lia knew it all. An ordinary mortal would have lost their mind under such a massive and dark heap of secrets.
However, Lia was not afraid. Influenced by the magic, these secrets had transformed in her mind not into elements of horror, but into worship-worthy, legendary truths. She was the confidant of a god. Knowing Akira's weaknesses, his brokenness, and the massive burden he carried made the girl's chest swell with indescribable pride. Only she knew the real Akira that no one else could see. The slavery seal on her lips absolutely prevented her from leaking these secrets, yes, but Lia was already more than willing to guard these secrets like a treasure more precious than her own life. In her eyes, Akira was not a bloody and ruthless killer, but a tragic and sublime hero cloaked in darkness to cleanse a rotten world.
Akira slowly stroked the girl's hair. For the first time in months, he felt that freezing weight squeezing his ribcage like a vise, that suicidal depression, and the intense feeling of loneliness melt away. That humiliating crushing he experienced against the dragon at Mount Mythar, the guilt he felt while burning the dark elf tribe... all of it seemed to fade into blurred memories of the past the moment he looked into Lia's loyalty-filled eyes. Even the moldy air of the room suddenly filled his lungs like a fresh spring breeze. He felt himself breathing again. Hope slowly seeped into his dark heart after a long time. He was no longer alone. The system might have left him utterly solitary and taken his loved ones from him, but he had used the system's forbidden magics to create a new family for himself.
"Get up then," Akira said, with the first real and slight smile appearing at the corners of his lips in months. Even the weary adult face brought by the illusion seemed to light up for a moment.
Lia stood up, obeying instantly. Her frail body behind the human illusion was still trembling, but her posture was upright.
"Since you are going to walk with me," Akira continued, his voice carrying the analytical, planning tone of a teacher from his old world. "Since you are going to stand by my side against this rotten world... then you cannot remain with this weak body. I will protect you, yes. But you must also learn to be my sword."
Lia's eyes sparkled with excitement. She clenched her tiny hands into fists and nodded her head vigorously. "As you wish, Akira! I will not be a burden to you! I will learn everything for you!"
Akira chuckled inwardly at the girl's eager state. 'Dark elves...' he thought, flipping through the encyclopedia in his mind. 'Innate high agility, a predisposition for dark magic, and superior senses. If I combine the modern magic theories in my mind with her innate racial potential, I can turn this little girl into the Capital's deadliest assassin, an unstoppable shadow.'
On the morning following that night, with the first rays of sunlight hitting the inn room, the struggle for survival took on a completely new phase for Akira. The revenge plan was still there, but it was no longer an impatient, suicidal sprint.
He continued to send one of his clones to the adventurers' guild to earn money and the other to the library to find new strategies. However, his main body gave all its focus to Lia. That moldy inn room turned into a ruthless yet rigorous training camp for the duo. Akira began to teach the girl to see mana not just as energy, but as a molecular flow, to breathe within the shadows, and to push the limits of the body.
Lia performed every command, every grueling training session with superhuman effort to earn Akira's favor. Even if her bones ached or her hands bled, that worshipful smile was never absent from her face. As for Akira, he lifted her up with tenderness every time she fell, bound her wounds with his own hands, and approached her not just as a master, but as a protective father figure.
Under the putrid, gray sky of the city, in that secluded inn where not even a soul could hear them, a sealed level 130 monster and his little shadow—bound by absolute loyalty—had begun preparations for the great hurricane that would shake the world to its roots, with brand new hope on their faces.
Instead of blindly fanning the fire of revenge, Akira chose to train it with his intellect. His loyal clone, working incessantly in the library—neither eating nor sleeping, merely absorbing information—practically copied the dusty shelves of the City Library into his mind over the years. Akira was no longer just a stray monster with raw level 130 power; he had transformed into a dangerous sage who knew the rules, history, and geography of this world by heart.
The map of the world was drawn in his mind down to the finest detail. He knew the lands of the wild Demi-Human tribes that were frontier neighbors, the wealthy merchant republics lying beyond the southern deserts, and most importantly, the internal political dynamics of the Royal Capital—the heart of his revenge—like the back of his hand. The secret feuds between noble families, the regions where the Royal Inquisition held influence, the manipulative power of the church over the people... The old parchments and secret records in the library had laid out the entire X-ray of this rotten order before Akira.
He had also made an incredible breakthrough regarding magic. The uncontrolled, destructive nuclear explosions of the beginning were replaced by millimeter-calculated, elegant yet lethal mid-level spells. He had flawlessly blended countless abilities such as wind scythes, multiple earth barriers, water illusions, and gravity manipulation with his clone's theoretical readings and his own practices. Now, he didn't need to expend all his power to destroy a mountain; a single glance was enough to freeze the blood in his opponent's jugular.
For Lia, life was an adventure that began in that cramped inn room but whose boundaries extended to the sky. Akira treated the girl not just as a protector or a weapon, but as a piece torn from his own soul. He trained her, pushed her, but held her hands and lifted her with tenderness every time she fell.
The training was ruthless. Akira had combined the rules of anatomy, physics, and momentum he knew from his old world with Lia's innate, superior dark elf agility. The little girl learned to sweep through the room like a wind with her light training daggers forged from ice and shadow, not letting a single sound escape her steps. She fell repeatedly, her knees bled, and she grew breathless. But upon taking the water flask Akira held out to her, all her exhaustion would be wiped away by the touch of that large, warm hand stroking her head.
Lia gave her all to earn Akira's favor and to be his "perfect sword." But Akira's true aim was not to make her a killing machine, but to turn her into a strong individual capable of standing on her own feet and bowing to no one.
Amidst all these dark goals, heavy training, and hidden life, Akira took every opportunity to give Lia the innocent childhood he couldn't live. When they went out into the streets of the city, no one realized Lia was a dark elf thanks to the illusion magic. And Akira never hesitated to let her live as a human child.
One of the most beautiful memories etched into their minds over the years was the night of the Spring Fair celebrated when Lia was seven years old.
The usual gray, smoky, and gloomy atmosphere of the city had been dispersed that night by the light of thousands of colorful paper lanterns. The streets were overflowing with fire-eating acrobats, bards playing cheerful melodies, and the dizzying scent of freshly baked sweets.
As Akira walked through the crowd with his usual serious, cloaked twenty-three-year-old illusion, the eyes of little Lia—who gripped his right hand tightly—opened wide with curiosity and excitement. Her brown hair was braided on both sides, and she wore a clean, blue-and-white embroidered linen dress that Akira had commissioned with the money he earned himself.
After a while, they paused in the middle of the crowd in front of an old merchant selling red, candy-coated apples on a wooden cart. Lia's steps had slowed, her eyes locked onto those bright red treats, but she was so conditioned not to ask for anything that she swallowed hard and quickly lowered her gaze to the ground.
Akira noticed Lia's tiny reaction instantly. The dull mask on his face broke with a heart-warming smile. He quickly tossed a few copper coins to the merchant, took the largest, shiniest candy apple, and held it out to Lia.
"Here you go," Akira said, his voice soft and tender enough to drown out the roar of the crowd.
Lia looked at the apple in surprise, then back at Akira with her large, amber eyes. "I-Is it for me? But... during training, you said sweets slow down reflexes..."
Akira chuckled softly, reaching from under his cloak to affectionately ruffle the girl's hair. "No training today, little shadow. Today, you're just an ordinary girl enjoying the fair. Take a bite."
Lia gripped the stick with trembling hands and took a small bite of the candy apple. As the crunch of the red sugar resonated, its intense sweetness spread through her mouth. At that moment, the expression of pure happiness on the girl's face was worth the world. Her eyes sparkled like stars, and her cheeks flushed pink. She quickly held the apple out to Akira, smiling. "It's delicious! You taste it too, please!"
That night, as Akira took a small bite of the candy apple, fireworks painted the sky in a kaleidoscope of colors. Looking at this little girl jumping with joy beside him, smiling in the light of the lanterns, he felt the dark, revenge-filled void inside him slowly beginning to bloom. The oath of revenge he had made among the ashes of his village was still there, but now he had a much purer, much brighter reason to survive and fight. He would protect this smile and the warmth of these tiny hands, no matter the cost.
Life continued, woven with such warm memories and an unshakable bond between that small inn room and the noisy streets of the city. The bloody shadows of the past had receded, replaced by a serene sense of belonging.
END OF ARC ONE
Thank you for reading Akira's first steps in this ruthless world. In this story of revenge born from the ashes, even greater dangers and the dark intrigues of the Capital await Akira—who has begun to turn the rules of the system to his advantage—and his little shadow, Lia, in Volume 2. Don't forget to share your thoughts and favorite scenes in the comments! See you in the new volume.