Spring, 708 SC
The dual sensations of hard metal against my face and pain coursing through my body woke me from my slumber. As my eyes fluttered awake, I realized that I was laying on the ground in a puddle of blood. My hand instinctually traveled to my head, and I felt that blood was slowly trickling from my nose and mouth.
A dull ache suffused my whole body, but I was still able to stand unaided. My body was still powerful. Lifting myself off the ground was something I could still do, at least.
When I had lifted myself to my feet, I looked around. I was standing in the living room of a penthouse suite on the top of a tall building, and I wore the blue Dao robes of an inner disciple of the Crimson Moon Sect. Wait. How did I know that?
Slowly, I made my way to a window and looked down at a large city that reminded me of New York and Boston. There were a few differences, however, in that most of the older buildings were constructed in a traditional Chinese style, and the large electronic advertisements on the side of the buildings weren't written in English. No, the ads were written in a language that was a mixture of French and German that was called Franconian.
I could read the words on the sides of the buildings with the unerring skill of a native speaker, and the city's skyline was familiar to me. The city was called Eborak, which translated roughly to the Place of the Yew Tree in ancient Franconian. All of this information existed clearly in my mind, yet the world still felt uncanny and strange to me.
Turning my head to the side, I saw an athletic young man with shoulder-length blond hair standing in a nearby full-length mirror. That man was Elias Dietrich de Landau, Phoenix of House Dietrich, Divine Guardian of Eborak, and disciple of the Path of Five Elements. It was my body, yet it wasn't at the same time.
There was another man residing within my mind, a middle-aged doctor from New England called Frank Lassiter. I was no longer merely Elias or Frank. Neither consciousness was strong enough to dominate the other, so both had melded together to form something completely new.
Though I wanted to reconcile the differences between the two individuals in my mind, alarm bells were ringing in my head. I was in danger, and there was no time for me to spend coming to terms with myself.
Despite the distinct awareness I had that there was danger, I had no idea what the danger actually was. The trauma of the past few minutes had made my recollection of the recent past faulty.
I looked around at my immediate surroundings in an attempt to find clues. Immediately, I saw a trail of blood running from my own location to another room. Following this scarlet path stained into the hard metal floor, I soon reached an opulent dining room with a long table in the center.
The giant wooden table in the middle of the dining room had been cracked in half by some great force. Walking over to the center of the table, I saw that the trail of blood originated right where it had been cracked in half.
Some instinct that I didn't fully understand drew my eyes downward, and I saw a small glass object on the ground. I knelt down and picked it up, realizing that the object, half hidden under the debris of the table, was a half-empty wine bottle.
I was beginning to remember. Elias Dietrich, back when he was just one person, was gifted a bottle of rare qi-infused wine by the mortals of Eborak. Naturally, he drank the wine as soon as he returned to his penthouse at the top of the Landau Building.
The wine was poisoned, evidently, and the last sensation Elias felt as a singular entity was the terror of everything he had cultivated over thirty years being destroyed. The poison had targeted his Dantian and ki pathways, pulling him down from the upper-stage of Foundation Establishment (the Second Realm) to the lower-stage of Qi Condensation (the First Realm). Elias was a genius when it came to self-progression, and it took him decades to reach the Foundation Establishment realm. It was only with the sober influence of Frank Lassiter that I was able to stop myself from curling up in a ball and sobbing for three days and three nights.
Putting my hand to my forehead and sucking a breath in through my nose, I asked myself one question. Why had they poisoned me? I was able to deduce that the wine was poisoned, but the broader context behind the poisoning eluded me.
I asked myself a simpler question. Why had they targeted my qi meridians instead of trying to kill me outright? Elias Dietrich knew the answer to that one.
Within the powerful Landau Clan, one in a hundred children was born with a rare bloodline talent called Phoenix Blood. The blood flowing through my veins increased the speed of my self-progression. More importantly, Phoenix Blood allowed me to return from death once every hundred years. Theoretically, I could recharge that ability by using an immense amount of qi all at once, but doing so was far beyond any sorcerer I had met throughout my life.
Hold on. Why had I mentally used the word "sorcerer" there? Frank Lassiter had read a few xianxia novels when he was younger, and they always used the word cultivator. Some half-remembered memory informed me that the Franconians used the word sorcerer in such contexts. The terminology used between the eastern and western schools often diverged.
There was an explosion in the front of the penthouse, and I heard my front door shatter inward as several sets of heavy footsteps marched in.
I sprinted to the door that faced the penthouse's foyer and stuck half of my head out in an attempt to get a good look at the intruders. Six men wearing heavy ballistic armor and carrying submachine guns marched into my home. There it was, the danger that Elias was trying to warn me about.
Two streams of information crashed into one another, and my hands began shaking with fear. Frank Lassiter knew the danger posed by several men with firearms, and Elias Dietrich knew the newfound weakness of my body.
No matter how hard I tried, I couldn't dispel from my mind the image of an avalanche of bullets spewing forth from their guns and tearing through my weakened flesh. Even with my ability to resurrect after death, I wasn't sure that I would be able to survive the next few minutes.