*NNT — INSIDE THE O-MYŌJI CRYPT — TIME WITHOUT MEASURE**
The dark starlight fell from the sarcophagus like dying rain.
Each drop of that alien luminescence hit the stone floor with a sound like glass breaking underwater. The air around Raghoul shifted, became something thicker than oxygen—something that scraped against his throat when he tried to breathe. His chest tightened, and for a moment he wondered if this was how drowning felt, except instead of water filling his lungs, it was starlight. Cold, bitter starlight that tasted of copper and forgotten prayers.
Then the memories hit him.
Not gentle waves lapping at the shore of consciousness, but a tsunami of recollection that crashed through every barrier he'd built in his mind. The desert monastery materialized around him like a fever dream—wind-carved stones still warm from the day's heat, the scent of burning sage mixing with his own sweat. The Abbot's voice cut through time itself, those words he'd tried so hard to forget: "You become the wound that births the flame."
Back then, he'd been just a boy. Scared, angry, small. The first time that blood-red fire had erupted from his knuckles, he'd screamed—not from pain, but from the terrible understanding that he was no longer entirely human. The frost had melted under his touch, hissing like something alive and dying all at once.
Now those same flames danced under his skin again, and he could feel every nerve ending lighting up like a map of agony.
His legs gave out. The sarcophagus's edge bit into his palms as he gripped it, knuckles white against the black stone. Reality wasn't just warping around him—it was unraveling, thread by thread, showing him glimpses of lives he'd lived but somehow forgotten. Justin's face flickered in the darkness, hunched over lines of code in some Nigerian Apartment while the world continued poutside his window. Masashi's gentle smile, tinged with sadness: "Burn for something worth remembering, brother."
All these fragments of himself crashed together in his skull like shattered glass trying to reassemble into a mirror. He wasn't just Raghoul the mercenary, the blade-wielder with blood under his fingernails and death on his breath. He was something larger, something that had lived across worlds and lifetimes, collecting scars and stories like other men collected coins.
The realization should have felt liberating. Instead, it felt like being skinned alive.
---
His knees hit the stone floor hard enough to crack something—maybe the ground, maybe his bones. The impact sent shockwaves up through his spine, but that pain was nothing compared to what came next. The runes beneath him started glowing, responding to the chaos in his blood like iron filings drawn to a magnet.
Then his skin began to burn.
Not regular fire—this was something colder and more vicious. Spectral wounds opened across his torso, each one a perfect circle of agony that looked like frostbite but felt like molten lead. The paradox of it made his brain stutter. Ice-cold to the touch, but searing through muscle and bone like he'd been dipped in liquid starlight.
He could smell his own flesh cooking.
From each wound, flames blossomed. Crimson tendrils that twisted around his arms and legs like living things, caressing his skin without burning it. They buzzed incessantly secrets in languages he didn't recognize but somehow understood. Each flicker was a memory—every moment of pain he'd ever endured, every drop of blood he'd spilled, every night he'd lain awake wondering if he was still human or just pretending to be.
His reflection in the polished stone showed eyes that weren't entirely his own anymore. Two points of light burned in their depths, reflecting that damned red star that had haunted his dreams. But deeper than that, he could see galaxies spinning in the darkness behind his pupils. Entire universes being born and dying in the space between heartbeats.
The chains holding the sarcophagus shut began to move. Not breaking—transforming. Metal became liquid light, flowing like water that remembered being fire. The carved seals on the walls rippled, their ancient symbols rearranging themselves into patterns that hurt to look at directly. Reality itself was bending around him, and all he could think was how much it reminded him of broken ribs grinding against each other.
Voices filled the crypt. Not one or two, but thousands—maybe millions. Ancient chants that predated human language, mixed with the sound of cosmic wind and the screaming of stars as they died. It was beautiful and terrible, a hymn sung by the universe itself as it watched one of its children tear himself apart and rebuild from the pieces.
He wanted to cover his ears, but his hands wouldn't obey him, besides even if he could, the voice sounded deep in his head.
"Ughhh".
Every muscle in his body was locked in spasm, caught between agony and ecstasy as power poured through him like acid through his veins.
---
When he finally managed to stand, his legs shook like a newborn colt's. But there was something different about the trembling now—not weakness, but barely contained energy. Like holding lightning in a bottle made of flesh and bone.
The moment his feet found solid ground, his vision exploded.
He was no longer in the crypt. He was floating in deep space, surrounded by nothing but vacuum and starlight and the slow dance of celestial bodies. In front of him, suspended in the void like some impossible sculpture, was the corpse of a titan.
It had to be miles long—maybe hundreds of miles, he couldn't tell. Its skin was obsidian black, polished to a mirror shine that reflected nebulae and dying suns. Tentacles thicker than city blocks wound around its limbs, and its hair flowed like the Nile if the Nile had been made of liquid darkness and regret. Even dead, even frozen in the cold between stars, it radiated a presence that made his bones ache with recognition.
This thing had been a god once. Maybe still was.
Around it, visible at the edge of perception, angelic forms moved through dimensions his eyes weren't built to see. Not the ones shown in churches. Their wings folded reality in ways that made his brain scream warnings about things that shouldn't exist. Looking at them directly felt like staring into the sun, if the sun could think and the sun hated you personally.
Beyond even those impossibilities, Eldritchs sentinel shapes loomed at the edges of cosmic abysses. Guardians of spaces between spaces, so large and ancient that they made the titan's corpse look like a child's toy. They watched him with attention that felt like being dissected by interested surgeons.
Standing there, floating in the presence of such overwhelming power, Raghoul felt something he hadn't experienced in years: humility. Not the learned humility of monastery teachings or the one he learnt during Sunday school in his life as Justin, but the raw, primal understanding that he was less than nothing in the face of true infinity. His vendettas, his anger, his carefully cultivated reputation as a killer—all of it was just cosmic dust settling on the lens of eternity.
He was nobody. He was nothing.
Then something yanked him back into his body with the violence of a car crash.
---
The return to flesh was like being dropped from a great height onto broken glass. Every nerve fired at once, sending cascades of pain through his system that made the spectral burns feel like gentle kisses by comparison. He hit the crypt floor hard, tasting blood where he'd bitten through his tongue.
But even as his body screamed its protests, something new was taking root in his chest. Not just power—purpose. The cosmic perspective hadn't diminished him; it had shown him exactly how much room there was to grow.
He struggled to his feet, each movement sending fresh waves of agony through muscles that felt like they'd been torn apart and hastily stitched back together. The ember-glow under his skin pulsed with each heartbeat, and he could feel the change settling into his bones like infection. He wasn't the same man who'd entered this crypt. Hell, he wasn't sure he was still a man at all.
Vengeance had been his north star for so long he'd forgotten there were other directions to travel. But standing there in the aftermath of rebirth, surrounded by the scattered light of broken seals and dying magic.
"I've been thinking too small"
Why settle for hunting down the people who'd wronged him when he could reshape the cosmic order itself?
The sun had always seemed so powerful, so untouchable. But he'd seen things in that vision that made stars look like candles flickering in a hurricane. If gods could die—and he'd seen the proof floating in the void—then nothing was truly immortal. Nothing was beyond his reach, given enough time and fury to make it happen.
He would become something new. Not just a mercenary with a talent for violence, but an executioner of divine will. The Blasphemer who stood above the conflagration of dying worlds. Stronger than solar fire, prouder than the destruction of galaxies.
The thought should have terrified him. Instead, it felt like coming home.
---
Power gathered in his hands without conscious effort. Not the crude fire he'd wielded before, but something refined—distilled from the essence of collapsing stars and crystallized fury. It formed a sphere between his palms, pulsing with the rhythm of his heartbeat and glowing like a captive supernova. The light it cast made the shadows dance like living things, reaching toward him with what looked almost like hunger.
The crypt responded to his presence. The old seals flared one last time, their light reflecting off the blood and sweat on his skin, before settling into permanent darkness. The stones themselves seemed to hold their breath, waiting to see what he would do with all this newborn power coursing through his veins.
He looked at the sarcophagus—that black coffin that had started this whole transformation—and smiled. It wasn't a pleasant expression. Too many teeth, too much gum, like a predator sizing up prey that had no idea it was being hunted.
"Time to break some chains," he whispered, and drove the orb of living fire straight into the sarcophagus's heart.
The explosion wasn't loud—it was the opposite of sound, a silence so complete it made his ears ring. Light and darkness wrestled for dominance above the shattered stone, casting impossible shadows that moved independently of their sources. When the afterimage finally faded from his retinas, nothing remained of the ancient coffin but obsidian dust that sparkled once before dissolving into nothingness.
---
Silence fell over the crypt like a burial shroud.
Then, as if the world itself had been holding its breath, dawn light began seeping through cracks in the stone above. Pale, tentative rays that looked almost apologetic after everything that had just transpired. The contrast was jarring—cosmic rebirth followed by something as mundane as sunrise, as if the universe was trying to pretend that nothing had changed.
But everything had changed. Raghoul could feel it in the way the air moved around him, the way gravity seemed just slightly less insistent than before. Reality had been fundamentally altered by his transformation, and there was no going back to the man he'd been an hour ago.
He stepped through the widening fissure in the crypt wall, leaving behind the broken chains and scattered stone dust of his former limitations. The world outside greeted him with the scent of morning dew and the distant sound of birds pretending that their world wasn't balanced on the edge of transformation.
Above him, that red star pulsed one final time—a cosmic farewell, or maybe a benediction—before fading into the growing light of day. In its place, ordinary sunlight painted the landscape in shades of gold and amber, beautiful and fragile as spun glass.
"Let my flame be the reckoning that surpasses the sun," he said to the empty morning air. His voice carried further than it should have, echoing off distant mountains and stone walls that had no business hearing his words. "Let my name shatter the chains of creation itself."