– Autumn
The world did not welcome me. It simply was—a living canvas of noise and chill and expectation, none of which I had asked for.
Shadows lengthened in the corridors, damp from recent rains. Crimson leaves rattled against high windows in the grand nursery where I lay, their tapping sound like someone gently knocking farther and farther away. The walls were tall, whitewashed with gold inlays, and the scent of burning lavender drifted through the air. I could hear servants speaking low, their voices hesitant and measured, in a dialect I understood only in fragments: "prince,""precious heir,""born on the eleventh." Their words were soft, curving around the room like invisible threads tying me into expectations.
And I couldn't breathe.
My chest heaved. My lungs convulsed. Every inhale felt like I was trying to swallow fog. The air just wouldn't reach deep enough. It burned, in a crystalline, internal hollowness. Heat rose in my face, sweat beaded at my brow. Panic sharpened its claws inside me.
Goddamnit...was i going to die here?-
Then the light turned harsh and everything faded.
***
Time fractured. The world broken into slivers of recollection—white noise fragments of consciousness. I became stuck inside my own body: a prisoner of infancy, unable to direct a single muscle, unable to form thought fast enough, drowning in heavy silence. I'd thought that being reborn into this body would come with a fussy wail or a struggle—but none of that happened. Just me and the darkness, sitting in the hollow that should've been filled with crying.
Still, at some level, I realized: this wasn't my first life.
Although i had already known that from the fact well now i am a baby, along with the fact that i remember words and a different energy of this world.
I remembered.
Not everything, but enough.
The resonance of a fractured dantian. The sensations of elemental flow. The bleed of Qi under stress. The pressure of a blade weeping through flesh. Taste of iron on my tongue before I collapsed. A flash of red sky reflected in shattered armor. I remembered the ebbing tick of my heart when I died.
And in my lungs, I felt panic once more—not suffocation this time, but betrayal. Of this new vessel, this borrowed soul. My name now was Cassius Valerius Nightborne—but that cascaded over something older, darker, more alive beneath the surface.
DAYS passed. Weeks. I wasn't sure which was which.
Eyes unfocused. Limbs uncooperative. I was tethered to an abyss of unconscious half-awareness, grasping at sensations like a drowning man reaching for splinters of driftwood. Sounds and touches lagged behind my growing consciousness. A rocking crib. A white-gloved hand brushing away tears from a maid's cheek when my crying surfaced, unexpectedly. Flashes of candle flame on pale faces. Dark-browed concern from a man I'd later know as Duke Dorian Valerius, standing solemn at the bedroom door.
But always, the blood memory pulsed beneath it all.
This wasn't real life.
It was a replay.
A delay.
And I knew what came after.
***
Sometimes, when I slept (or what passed for sleep in a body not my own), I could feel the shards of my dantian stirring. They tickled against my bones with cold insistence. Little pulses of power traveled through marrow and sinew. Most nights I'd wake with my fingers curled around my blanket, as though grasping the non-existent hilt of a sword I once wielded.
The names—Cassius, Valerius, Nightborne—sat on me like inherited masks. I felt the weight of them. The legacy. Duke Valerius's boy: steel and strategy. Lady Selene Nightborne's child: politics, shadows, magic. The world moved around me under their perception: nurses cooed. Aristocrats fawned. Courtiers observed every twitch of my eyes, every breath—but none of them saw me. Not yet. Not for who i was. Not for what i was going to be.
Nobody knew I had lived before. That the real me had walked in death, spilled blood, tasted death over and over. But I did.
I watched them study me, waiting. And I studied them back. I learned how to cry just enough. How to smile with soft eyes when they fussed. How to arch a brow at a particular servant to make him dance across the room like a puppet.
Everything was research.
Until the evil seeds of awareness sprouted.
***
I remember the first time I saw my reflection properly. I was standing—shaky, uncertain—on a step stool in front of a silver-framed mirror. I had been crying again, a thick, bitter tear slid down my cheek, and I pressed my palm to the glass to steady myself. Who was I?
A lord by name, by purpose. But beneath the baby blue robes and golden embroidery was someone else. I saw darkness in my eyes. Even then when I wasn't trying to hide it. Calm as a still lake. Cold. Patient. Possessing an intensity that made the nurse step back, startled, even though I was but a newborn.
I recognized that face.
And I remembered my real name, just like that. Not spoken, but felt in the marrow:
This was his face.This was my vessel.This was the seed for what I would become again.
That other disgusting personality..i don't remember it but gods i can tell i wasn't a good man.
I began to meditate. Not as a child, but as a cultivator. I sat cross-legged, eyes closed, fingers delicately tracing an unconscious mudra in the air. Qi hummed in my ears, faint whispers of cosmic structure weaving into dark threads. The world around me slowed. Wordless patterns revealed themselves in the ceiling's frescoes. Rivers of energy passed through the room and I followed them with inner sight, charting ley lines between statues, cracks between floor stone.
Albeit...as much as i wanted to become strong at a young age i simply couldn't become self centered these people around me had become my new family and i was damned sure i wouldn't let them die easy.