First, a funeral of fire.
The roar was deafening. Not the roar of a mythical beast from the dungeons that plagued this new, savage world, but the mundane, terrifying roar of a grease fire turned inferno. Flames, orange and predatory, licked across the stainless-steel counters of what had once been the most celebrated kitchen on Earth. The air, once filled with the divine aromas of saffron and white truffle, was now a toxic, black smoke that seared the lungs.
He lay pinned under a fallen support beam, his leg crushed beyond recognition. His world was reduced to searing heat and suffocating darkness. He was Muyeong, the youngest chef to ever earn three Michelin stars, a culinary genius who could command kings with a single dish. Now, he was just meat, slowly cooking in his own tomb.
His gaze fell upon the kitchen's emergency exit, now blocked by a pile of rubble. And he saw him. His sous-chef, his most trusted student, the man he had treated like a brother. He wasn't trapped. He was on the other side, his face a pale mask of selfish terror. Their eyes met through the shimmering heat. There was a moment—a single, heartbeat-long moment—where he could have helped.
Instead, the sous-chef turned and fled, his own survival erasing eighteen years of shared struggle and loyalty. It was the final betrayal in a life built on a foundation of them.
As the ceiling groaned above, a single thought, cold and clear as ice, cut through Muyeong's agony. Harmony is a lie. Trust is for fools. In the end, everyone saves only themselves.
Then, the world collapsed into fire and blackness. His first life was over.
Next, a funeral of silence.
The room was small, damp, and cold. It smelled of mildew and the slow, quiet rot of despair. A single, bare lightbulb flickered from the ceiling, its inconsistent light a cruel mockery of the sun. This was the world of another boy, also named Muyeong. For eighteen years, this was all he had ever known.
He sat on the edge of a thin, lumpy mattress. He was a ghost in his own life, a boy whose name was a curse.
"Traitor's son." The words echoed in the silence, not from outside, but from within. They were the chisel that had carved his life into a shape of pain. The jeers on the street, the rocks thrown by other children, the disgusted sneers from the NHA officials. His parents, the Vile Traitors, had sought a power that rivaled the gods and had left him to drown in the wake of their sins, a forgotten piece of collateral damage.
Tomorrow was his eighteenth birthday. Tomorrow was his Awakening Ceremony.
He knew what would happen. He would stand before the entire city, and the System, the god of this world, would pronounce his worthlessness for all to see. Another failure. Another reason for them to point, to whisper, to hate. He had endured the whispers for eighteen years. He could not endure a lifetime of them, shouted from a stage. There was no escape.
A single, hot tear traced a path down his gaunt cheek. It was the last one he would ever shed.
His decision was not made in passion, but with the cold, logical calculus of a soul that had weighed all the options and found them wanting. If the world would not grant him peace, he would find it himself.
There was no grand gesture. There was only the quiet, desperate finality of a boy who could not bear to see another sunrise. The flickering lightbulb was the last thing he ever saw.
Finally, a birth.
A gasp.
Air flooded into lungs that had, a moment ago, been filled with fire. A searing, soul-deep headache ripped through his consciousness.
Where... am I?
He sat up, his movements stiff and unfamiliar. This wasn't a hospital. This was a cold, concrete box. He looked down at his hands. They were not his own. They were the thin, pale hands of a boy.
Memories, alien and agonizing, flooded his mind. Eighteen years of scorn, of loneliness, of being called "traitor's son." The crushing weight of a despair so absolute it had snuffed out a life. The final, silent act.
He... he killed himself.
The chef's soul, the reincarnated Muyeong, looked around the miserable room. He was in the body of a pariah, in a world of monsters and magic he didn't understand, on the eve of a public humiliation that had driven its previous owner to suicide. Panic, cold and sharp, threatened to shatter his sanity.
But then, his final thought from his previous life echoed, a mantra of cold steel: Trust is for fools. In the end, everyone saves only themselves.
The panic subsided, burned away by a lifetime of ruthless pragmatism. The soul of the master chef looked at his new, grim reality not with despair, but with the cold, analytical eye of a professional assessing a new, incredibly hostile kitchen.
He stood up, the boy's body unsteady. He needed resources. He needed a plan. As his mind raced, a ghostly memory fragment flickered into existence. It was the memory of a much younger Muyeong, the original one, hiding in this very room, watching his parents pry open a loose floorboard. They had placed a small, lead-lined box inside. An escape fund.
Driven by a desperate impulse, he crossed the room, found the loose board, and pried it open. Inside sat a small, dark box. He opened it.
Within lay several stacks of Aurum coins and two, low-grade, red-colored potions. It wasn't a fortune, but it was more than nothing. It was capital. It was a start. He knew instantly the potions were crude and would sell for more than they were worth in utility.
He closed the box, his course now clear. The original Muyeong was dead. His life had been a failed recipe.
But he, the new occupant, was a master chef. And he would not fail. He would take the broken ingredients of this miserable life—the hated name, the frail body, this small stash of traitor's gold—and forge them into a masterpiece of power and control.
He looked at the cheap, cracked mirror on the wall, at the face of the boy who shared his name.
"Your life is over," he whispered, his new voice raspy. "Mine begins now."