Consciousness returned in fragments.
First came sensation—cold. Not the sharp bite of winter air or the clean chill of mountain wind, but something deeper. The kind of cold that lived in bones and refused to leave, that suggested prolonged exposure to conditions the human body wasn't designed to survive. Kami's—no, not his body, but the body he was currently inhabiting—felt heavy in ways that had nothing to do with muscle fatigue. This was the heaviness of malnutrition, of a frame that had been systematically deprived of basic nutritional requirements for extended periods.
Second came the realization of breathing. Each inhalation required conscious effort, lungs pulling in air that tasted like mildew and something organic left too long in darkness. The rhythm was wrong—shallow and rapid, the breathing pattern of someone whose body was conserving energy, operating in survival mode.
Third came the attempt to see.
Kami opened his eyes—or thought he did. The sensation of eyelids lifting was there, the slight pull of dried matter at the corners breaking as lashes separated. But the darkness didn't change. No gradual adjustment as pupils dilated. No shapes emerging from shadow. Just absolute, uncompromising blackness that remained identical whether his eyes were open or closed.
His right hand moved to his face automatically, fingers finding his eyes and confirming they were open. The eyes themselves felt normal—no pain, no obvious damage, lids functioning correctly. But the visual cortex received nothing. No light. No color. No spatial information that the human brain could translate into sight.
Panic tried to rise—immediate and primal, the kind of fear that came from suddenly losing a primary sense. Kami forced it down through pure discipline, the same mental control he'd used to stay conscious while drowning in the ocean depths. Panic was useless. Panic consumed resources and provided nothing in return. He needed information, needed to understand what had happened between falling through the dark water and waking up in this body that couldn't see.
He tried to sit up. His arms shook with the effort, muscles responding sluggishly to neural commands. He made it maybe thirty centimeters before his strength gave out and he collapsed back onto whatever surface he was lying on. The impact sent pain signals through his spine—not the sharp agony of fresh injury, but the dull ache of existing damage, bruises layered on bruises, the kind of accumulated trauma that suggested regular beatings.
"Easy." The voice came from his left, maybe two meters away. Male, young—late teens or early twenties from the vocal register. The accent was rural, vowels stretched and consonants softened in the pattern common to agricultural regions. "You move too much, you'll tear something. Body like yours can't handle sudden movement."
Kami turned his head toward the voice. Saw nothing. The darkness remained absolute.
"Who—" His own voice surprised him. It was higher than he remembered, younger, and weak. The vocal cords were underdeveloped, suggesting this body was perhaps twelve or thirteen years old. "Where am I?"
"Slave quarters." The voice stated it as simple fact, no particular emotion attached. "North wing of the Brennick estate. Been here three days now, you and me both. Though you been unconscious most of that time."
Slave quarters. The words triggered memory—not his memories, but something else. Fragments of information that belonged to this body, to whoever had inhabited it before Kami arrived. Images without visual component, more like conceptual understanding than actual recall. Being sold. Money changing hands. Parents who wouldn't meet eyes that couldn't see them anyway.
"My parents sold me." The words came out flat, testing whether the statement matched the fragmented understanding.
"Yeah." The voice shifted, suggesting the speaker was adjusting position. "Three days back. Saw it happen—your mother did the talking, your father just stood there. Got twenty silver for you. Twenty. That's below market rate for a healthy child, but you're..." The voice paused, searching for diplomatic phrasing. "You're blind. So twenty was probably generous."
Kami processed that. Twenty silver. The currency suggested he was still in the same general economic system he remembered from before—silver as mid-tier currency, below gold but above copper. Twenty silver would buy maybe two months of basic food supplies for a small family. His parents—no, not his parents, the parents of this body—had sold their blind son for two months of food.
"You thought I was dead." Kami's fingers explored the surface he was lying on. Rough fabric over something that might have been straw. A sleeping mat, the kind provided to livestock or slaves when keeping them alive was marginally more cost-effective than replacing them.
"Last night, yeah." The voice was matter-of-fact. "You were cold. Not cold like winter cold—cold like dead cold. Skin like ice, no breath I could see. Figured you'd frozen during the night. Was gonna tell the overseer in the morning, let them dispose of the body." A pause. "But then you started breathing again around dawn. Shallow at first, then regular. Thought maybe I'd been wrong about the dead part."
The casualness with which the voice discussed death struck Kami as notable. Not callous exactly, but practical. Death was apparently common enough in this environment that checking if someone had died overnight was routine, and being wrong about it was just a minor miscalculation rather than something remarkable.
Which suggested this body probably had died. The cold the voice described matched what Kami remembered of his own near-death in the ocean—the deep cold that shut down peripheral systems, that made the body conserve heat at the core while extremities became expendable. This body had died from exposure, and in that moment of vacancy, Kami's consciousness had found it.
Reincarnation. Or transmigration. Or whatever term applied to a consciousness forcibly relocated from one body to another. The mechanics didn't matter. What mattered was that Kami Van Hellsin, former deity candidate who'd been stabbed and cast down from Zenith Thronos, was now inhabiting the body of a blind child slave who'd frozen to death in a storage room.
The irony was not lost on him.
"What's your name?" The voice asked. "Don't think I heard it when they brought you in."
Kami considered lying. Considered inventing a new identity, becoming whoever this body was supposed to be. But the name Kami Van Hellsin carried power—even five hundred years removed from when he'd challenged the Supreme Gods, the name itself was architecture he'd built over centuries. Abandoning it felt like conceding defeat.
"Kami." He said it clearly, letting the syllables carry properly. "Kami Van Hellsin."
The silence that followed was different than before. Kami couldn't see the speaker's reaction, but he could hear the shift in breathing pattern, the slight intake of breath that suggested surprise or shock or recognition.
Then the voice laughed. Not mockery exactly, but the kind of laughter that came from hearing something so absurd it bypassed normal social filters. "Van Hellsin. Your parents named you Van Hellsin." Another laugh, shorter this time. "They must've really hated you. Like, really hated you. Bad enough they sold you for twenty silver, but before that they named you after the devil himself?"
Kami's thought process, which had been working through the tactical implications of his new situation, stopped entirely. "What?"
"Van Hellsin." The voice said it like the name itself was cursed. "The Fallen God. The one who tried to overthrow the Supreme Eight five hundred years back and got cast down for it. The devil who started the God Wars that killed millions before the Supreme Eight finally sealed him at the bottom of the ocean." The voice was still carrying traces of amusement. "That's who they named you after. That's the name you're carrying around."
Five hundred years.
The God Wars.
Sealed at the bottom of the ocean.
Kami's understanding of his own history began reorganizing itself around information he hadn't possessed. Five hundred years had passed since his fall—five centuries while he was trapped in that water, consciousness barely holding together, body too weak to do anything but sink. And during those centuries, the Supreme Gods had apparently rewritten history.
He wasn't remembered as someone who challenged them for a throne. He was remembered as the devil. As the villain who'd started wars. As something that needed to be sealed away to protect the world.
The Supreme Gods had won more than just the battle. They'd won the narrative. They'd transformed Kami Van Hellsin from threat into cautionary tale, from competitor into monster. And now, five hundred years later, his name was synonymous with evil.
Parents who would name their child Van Hellsin weren't honoring anything. They were cursing him. Marking him as unwanted from birth.
Kami lay on the straw mat in a body that couldn't see, processing the magnitude of how thoroughly he'd been erased and rewritten. His hands—these new, weak hands that trembled with malnutrition—slowly curled into fists.
"Yeah," the voice continued, misinterpreting Kami's silence as shame. "Parents who'd name their kid after the devil and then sell him when he turns out blind... that's a special kind of cruel. I'm sorry about that. Really."
Kami said nothing. His mind was too occupied cataloguing implications.
The Supreme Gods had five hundred years to consolidate power. Five hundred years to build systems and structures that kept them secure. Five hundred years to ensure that even if Kami somehow returned, he'd be starting from absolute zero—no resources, no allies, no reputation except as a historical villain.
They'd been thorough.
But they'd made one critical mistake.
They'd let him come back.
Whatever mechanism had brought his consciousness into this body, whatever cosmic accounting had allowed him to return after five centuries of imprisonment, it meant the sealing wasn't perfect. Meant there was a way back. Meant that everything he'd vowed while sinking into darkness—the promise to restart, to do whatever it took, to climb back to Zenith Thronos and take what was his—was still possible.
Just significantly more complicated than he'd anticipated.
Starting from scratch was one thing. Starting from scratch in the body of a blind child slave in a world that remembered him as the devil was another thing entirely.
But Kami Van Hellsin hadn't survived six centuries of single-minded ascension by accepting limitations. And he certainly wasn't going to let five hundred years of propaganda stop him now.
He took a breath. Let it out slowly. Felt the cold air enter weak lungs and exit again. Felt the heavy wrongness of a body that didn't belong to him but was now his only tool.
Then he smiled. The expression felt strange on a face this young, with muscles this underdeveloped. But the sentiment behind it was ancient and familiar.
Let them remember him as the devil.
He'd show them exactly what the devil could do.