Years ago, a catalytic event occurred—one that was vital to my rebirth.
I remember opening my eyes, vision smeared with fog, my thoughts slow and disoriented, like old film dragging across rusted reels. The first thing I saw wasn't light, or sound, or even form. It was darkness—deep, rotting, absolute. A damp weight pressed against every inch of my flesh, cloying and thick like soaked cloth. I was trapped. Buried. Surrounded by the scent of rot, and not metaphorically.
I was inside a corpse.
I could feel the slick wetness of decomposition sliding across my skin. The tissue surrounding me was bloated, rubbery, collapsing inward like it had already begun feeding itself. The cold of death gripped me like chains, not just outside but within. It clung to the marrow of my bones—if I still had bones. My limbs were like threads, my heartbeat a whisper. I felt small—unbelievably, horrifyingly small. I was the size of an ant, barely larger than the maggots that nestled in beside me.
And yet I was conscious.
My cultivation was gone—shattered, broken down to a level I hadn't experienced since childhood, and even then, never this fragile. But my mind was untouched. Whole. Mature. Unaged. I remembered the feeling of cycling energy through my dantian, of letting spiritual currents flow through my meridians. The sensation of standing still while the world moved beneath my feet. And though I could not grasp specifics—names, places, faces—I remembered the essence of power. The pressure of it. The discipline.
And beneath that—something I could not name. Something I'd locked away. Chosen not to remember.
I tried to speak.
Nothing came out. My throat constricted like someone was wringing it shut. My chest locked, spasming for air, every breath shallow and forced. Panic didn't come. Just awareness. Dispassionate, surgical awareness. My body wasn't broken, just... incomplete. Something else was wrong.
Then I looked down.
Just for an instant, I caught a reflection in the blackened fluid pooling around me. A weapon—thin and gleaming—protruded from my throat. Buried to the hilt. My neck had been pierced straight through.
Suddenly, a flash—like memory jolting out of sequence.
The corpse fell away, the tomb of decay replaced by endless carnage. A battlefield. I was no longer trapped—I was standing. Towering above a hill of corpses, my blade dragging behind me, soaked in blood too thick to drip. Men. Women. Monsters. Beasts of steel and bone. All dead.
The sky above was blood-red and swirling. The air buzzed with residue—ashes of magic, fragments of willpower burned into the wind. I stood there alone, surrounded by what I could only describe as a perfect chaos. A masterwork of death. And for some reason, it was beautiful. In that moment, I could finally understand what people meant when they said, "There's beauty in chaos." It wasn't a metaphor. It was real. This battlefield, this massacre—it sang.
I was the last one alive. The last to fall.
And then I saw it.
A narrow column of white light broke through the thick clouds above, shining down like a divine spotlight upon the broken earth. It touched only me. It burned, but it didn't harm. As I lifted my gaze toward it, my vision blurred again—static over memory.
I closed my eyes—
And I awoke.
But I wasn't on a battlefield anymore.
And I wasn't even in a body.
I was swimming.
Not through water, not through blood, but through something thicker. Something alive. My movements were sluggish but determined. The world around me was warm, luminous, rippling with abstract color. I couldn't understand it at first. I thought I'd been sealed into some divine womb, a void between realms, a purgatory for reincarnation.
But I remembered my studies. The anatomy texts. The spiritual diagrams. The metaphysical scrolls that compared rebirth to the cycles of cosmic compression.
I was a sperm.
A soul compressed into its lowest physical form—biological essence. I was racing forward, guided by a will that felt both foreign and ancient. My dantian was gone, fractured into stardust, but even in this form, I could feel tiny flecks of energy vibrating within me. It was weak—infinitesimal—but it was mine. I wasn't like the rest. I wasn't just a carrier of genetic information. I was a survivor. I was a remnant.
Was this fate?
Was this the punishment or the reward?
I didn't know.
I surged ahead, passing the others. They were countless. But I was faster. Sharper. Hungrier. When I reached the egg, I felt a force like gravity and lightning pull me in. The moment I touched it—time stopped. Everything turned to silence.
I couldn't move.
But I was growing.
A heartbeat. Then another. Time unfurled in slow waves. My body began to form. My limbs, my spine, my organs. And still I was conscious. Still aware. A silent spectator to my own creation.
But more importantly—my energy returned.
Not all at once, and not with glory. But piece by piece, thread by thread. The stars I'd once used to shatter districts now twinkled like grains of dust inside me. They circled slowly, fusing again in the dark. I felt my dantian begin to reform. My core, my flow—rebuilt from nothing. No longer pure cultivation. It was... different. This world used mana. Its laws were foreign.
And yet, I adapted.
Because no matter the system or the energy, no matter the language of power—I was born to master it.
I was born to conquer.
And so, in a new cradle of life, I was reborn.