Kael did not sleep.
In the pocket-dimension the world had been gentle at first — lotus lakes and soft winds that would have lulled any ordinary man into complacency. But Kael was not ordinary. After the clone walked out into the world carrying his face and his softer memories, something in him tightened like steel. There was no longer any room for comfort; everything that touchable belonged to other people now. The part of him that had been sent away could laugh and kiss and mend; the remaining half had only duty and a hunger that tasted faintly of iron.
He rose before dawn.
Dreadfang watched him from the ridge as the first silver light seeped into the dimension. The dragon's gaze held no pity, only the patient cruelty of a creature that had been forged by eras of fire. "You will break yourself," Dreadfang warned. "There is no virtue in endless pushing. The Book will not be your nurse."
Kael's hands were already folded into a mudra, fingers pale against the early glow. He did not look up. "I will break myself," he said simply. "And I will mend into something that cannot be unstitched by gods."
For a long time Dreadfang said nothing. The dragon's eyes traced the lines of the boy's shoulders, the rhythm of breath; there was memory there, a recognition a bone-deep thing. "Are you going to use this to fight the gods," the dragon asked at last, the question low as embers, "or are you going to use it to hide?"
Kael inhaled slowly, centering. He had rehearsed this confession in the stillness of the past two days until it had the texture of truth rather than a flayed boast. Now the words formed, quiet as a blade sliding from its sheath.
"For a long time," Kael said, "I kept the past life like a locked room. I thought it belonged to some other version of me — a story I had once been told in dreams. But it is not a story. It is my promise."
Dreadfang's head tilted, molten hair flicking like a banner. "Explain."
Kael let his hands fall to his knees. The last of the night stars peeled away; the lotus lake steamed in the first breath of morning. He looked at the dragon and spoke in a voice that had the weight of someone who had carried whole winters in a single chest.
"Before I regressed," he began, "I was immortal in name and cursed in reality. I was called a sinner by angels and a scourge by priests." He closed his eyes, and the dragon did not interrupt. "I was a regress — not born into new life, but returned with the knowledge of lives I had lived and the ruin I had made. In that life I fought. I fought until my bones were brittle and my spirit had been tempered into a blade. I learned things the scriptures do not teach — how to shred faith like cloth, how to pry the roots of belief from the earth and starve it of worship. I did more than blaspheme; I cut the world's trust in the heavens."
Dreadfang's mouth formed a line. "You say this like a tale," he said. "You are a mortal. How many Tier One gods have you felled with that mortal hand? How could a living thing — especially one who claims to have been merely 'Tier 1B' — cleave the scaffolding of Faith?"
Kael's laugh was thin. "Tier labels are a convenience for those who sleep easy," he said. "In the last loop I built a slow ruin. I did not explode into godhood overnight. I spent centuries — a thousand years of patient work — learning how the fabric of belief binds itself to worshipers. I gathered followers, won their hearts, undermined priests with logic and example, and when I had hollowed a great enough space, I struck. Not with steel, but with proof. I shattered miracle-lists, turned revelation into lie, and made temples into tombs of their own impotence. The gods felt the cracks and tried to mend them with thunder. They failed. They could not kill what had already become a method, a system."
Dreadfang's eyes cooled. "You told me in fragments you had once reached Tier Seven by eighteen in that loop. If that is true—"
"It's true," Kael said. "I did not achieve it quickly in a single lifetime; I labored and was labored upon. When I was eighteen in that old life I had a furnace in my chest, and that made me dangerous. But even that danger was not enough. I never finished; I never accepted a final tier because my cultivation was not a straight ladder. I crawled through centuries, dragging belief like a corpse behind me until I could poison a god's name with doubt. Faith is the invisible architecture the gods live in. Destroy the architecture and the god's grip loosens."
The dragon did not speak for some time. The dimension itself seemed to hold its breath.
"You were destroyed," Dreadfang said finally, the statement more like a hinge closing than a question. "You say they killed you."
"I was ended," Kael admitted. "They killed me for the same reason they kill what threatens the sky—because I knew how to cut their supports. They gathered the heavens and called a judgment upon me. One day they burned the city where I had gathered my few faithful; they summoned heaven's law to unmake me. I was stripped bare of the immortality I had forced into a shell. My family burned with me. My wife—" Kael swallowed and the dragon's gaze flicked with something like sorrow. "My wife did not ascend. The gods used their mercy like a leash and refused to let her break. They took everything. I vowed then that if I ever lived again I would not let their law remain untested."
"You speak of revenge," Dreadfang said simply. "Not of war."
Kael nodded. "Revenge, correction — call it what you must. The gods hold themselves outside of consequence. They have ways to kill those who displease them. It is not merely power that I seek; it is a rebalancing. If they can take away the lives I love because they claim right, then I will take from their right as well. I will show them their law has cracks."
Dreadfang's laugh was like rock grinding. "Even if what you say is true, you are speaking of one thing most mortals cannot conceive: you described a process that required time on the order of mountains. You said you lived a thousand years in your life before. How do you mean to repeat that when the Steward has vowed return and when heaven's hunger grows?"
Kael closed his eyes. "I know I cannot rebuild a millennium in a year," he said. "But I have other tools now. The Immortal Book is one. The Book gives the pattern. It can help reshape flesh toward godhood if the will inside refuses to be trivial. But the Book will not act as a crutch. I must still temper the furnace in my marrow. I must reach further than before."
"Tempering takes patience," the dragon said. "You mean to temper with haste."
"I mean to temper without sleep," Kael corrected. "If gods will hunt in fifty years, they will do so whether I hurry or not. Fifty years will not be enough in the ordinary sense. So I will fold years into cunning." He looked up; his voice sharpened like steel in a whetstone. "This time I have the Book. This time I have tools. This time I have a clone walking the world — eyes and ears on the ground. I will graft a thousand-year slow curve into a narrower needle of progress. I will not stay a mortal's pace."
Dreadfang's expression hardened into the patient, brittle grin of an oldthing that had seen empires burn and still watched their ash rearrange into cities. "You speak as one who accepts the cost. I will not weep when your path takes from you what you cannot afford to lose. But you should know truth plainly: gods remember. The Steward trembled because creation itself breathed upon him. There are beings that are the births of the first exhalations of existence. They do not forget easily. If you intend war on faith itself, you will be measured by things more patient and more terrible than you can imagine."
Kael's chest heaved; a new hunger answered the dragon's warning, not with fear but with iron affection. "Then let them be terrible," he said. "Let the universe show its teeth. I have tasted loss. I have felt the bones of my family placed in cold divans and called holy. I have seen the laws stacked like knives. The gods once considered themselves the only authors. If that is their faith, I will be an editor."
He paused, hearing how far his voice had traveled: an idea of a man who would unweave a sky.
Dreadfang looked at him then, and for a sliver of a breath the dragon's face was not old and contemplative but almost young with the sharpness of one who enjoys an instrument being played perfectly. "Then begin," he said. "We will make the skeleton stronger. You will be taught how to lock the Book's pattern into bone. I will teach you to let power seep like water and not a firestorm. Patience, Kael. Patience in hunger will not be waste, but temper."
"And if I fail?" Kael asked. "If the gods come before I am enough?"
"Then we salvage what remains," Dreadfang replied. "We retreat, we learn, we hide. The pocket-dimension will protect you for a time. But you must not let fear of failure become the reason you never begin."
Kael nodded. The dragon's outline rose against the blazing dawn. He inhaled and felt the Immortal Book at his chest, pulsing like a heartbeat that contained storms.
He opened his eyes and began.
The days in the dimension became a furnace. He meditated for the long watches until his vision thinned and rearranged into symbols that burned the inside of his eyelids. He exercised the lung patterns Dreadfang taught him, cupping qi like water into a cup until the cup overflowed and the excess formed scales on his skin. He forced his meridians open one by one, each breakthrough like splitting the surface of a frozen lake: terrifying cold followed by rushing clarity.
Sometimes, at midnight, he would sit on the ridge with Dreadfang and speak of battles he had never won yet — strategic theories of how to twist belief into something that could be exposed and then fail. The dragon listened, offering stinging observations and suggestions as if reading battle maps in the grain of the air.
He practiced not only blows but manners — how to make his clone speak with just the right degree of compassion, how to make a hint of melancholy ripple across the copy's face so simply that no one would suspect the truth; he had to craft the world's perception of his absence as carefully as a master.
But always, the core work was inside: the slow burn of his dantian into a furnace. He reached into the Book and felt not commands but a reflection; the Book required a will to hold the form it offered. He practiced holding the pattern inside him, folding and refolding the idea of a god-body into mortal tissue without letting it completely consume him.
Sometimes he dreamed, unbidden: of a throne made of light and accusation, of counsel halls that swarmed with noise at the edge of the world, and of hands that were not human. He would wake with his body wet and the taste of smoke in his mouth.
Weeks bled into months. He refused comfort. He refused conversation save the terse exchanges with Dreadfang. He only cultivated and catalogued and burned small things down to ashes — ego, old comforts, the last traces of childish expectation he had ever let himself keep. The price of what he intended to do would be his ordinary life.
On nights when the winds were fragile and the pocket-dimension's stars trembled, he would whisper into the empty dark the promise he had made once in another life: to tear apart the unearned sanctity and return meaning to the small hands he loved.
"Your past life will be a weapon and a wound," Dreadfang said once, voice soft as fallen coal. "Do not let it govern you. Make it a scaffold, not a cage."
Kael's hand closed around the air like a fist. He could already feel the slow remaking under his ribs — a new furnace waiting to be stoked. He had said the words aloud once, to the dragon and to no god. "I will destroy Faith if I must," he murmured.
"Then temper the blade," Dreadfang replied. "And remember: to break the heavens is to stand in the ruins you create. Make sure the thing you build while they fall is worth the ashes."
He bowed his head, feeling the truth of that like a cold wind. The gods were not merely targets. They were the architecture of billions' beliefs. To remove such an edifice would leave a world asking what to anchor itself upon. Kael had not yet entirely faced the moral storm that would follow his vengeance. He only knew one thing: he could not go back to being small.
The pocket-dimension's lotus lake shimmered as though it knew what was coming. Kael rose and set his palms against the water, feeling the pattern of his own pulse align with the Immortal Book. His dantian burned; the Book hummed like a bell in the dark. He closed his eyes and let the cultivation take him until night became a shape he could fold into his pocket.
Outside, the world churned with rumor and rage and plans. Inside, a man who had been a thousand things and had been broken and given second breath began to remold himself into the instrument he would need.
He would reach for heaven. If heaven reached back with teeth, he would meet them.