Kael's death was, by any reasonable measure, embarrassing.
No battlefield. No final stand. No last words that would echo through history.
Just a sandwich. A curb. And a number 47 bus that had absolutely no respect for narrative timing.
One second he was chewing. The next second the universe decided it had better plans for him and executed those plans at approximately thirty-eight miles per hour directly into his face.
He didn't even feel it. One moment: sandwich. Next moment: nothing.
His very last thought — the final output of a brain that had spent twenty-six years accumulating opinions, memories, and an impressive collection of unfinished goals — was:
*I was literally in the middle of eating.*
The universe did not care.
---
He woke up to a wooden ceiling and immediately knew something was wrong.
Mostly because he was supposed to be dead.
He laid there blinking at the ceiling for a solid minute, running a quick internal diagnostic. Arms: present. Legs: present. Heartbeat: going. Brain: mostly functional, pending further review.
He sat up.
Small room. Straw mattress that had clearly been through some things. Walls with cracks in them that suggested the building and structural integrity had a complicated relationship. A bowl of water on the floor that looked personally defeated.
He looked at his hands.
They were tiny.
Not just small. *Tiny.* The hands of a child. Thin fingers, bony knuckles, not a callus in sight.
He stared at them for a long time.
*Okay,* he thought slowly. *So I died. And now I'm... small. In a room. That smells like hay.*
He looked around again just to make sure he hadn't missed something. Nope. Still a depressing little room. Still tiny hands.
*Reincarnation,* he concluded. *Actual, literal reincarnation. Into a child. In what appears to be the medieval era.*
He thought about having a crisis. Decided against it. The ceiling wasn't going to give him any answers and a crisis wouldn't either.
Memories started surfacing — the previous kid's memories, floating up like debris after a shipwreck. The boy's name had been Kael. His name. Same name. As if the universe hadn't already done enough to him today and decided to throw in a little cosmic joke for free.
Orphan. No parents. A farmer named Torben. A village called Emrath. A world called Valdris.
He filed all of it away and laid back down.
*I'll deal with this tomorrow,* he decided. *Today I'm processing.*
He went back to sleep.
It was the most productive decision he made all year.
---
Four years.
Four years of farming, listening, observing, and pretending to be a completely normal child with no unusual thoughts or suspiciously modern instincts.
He was, if he said so himself, excellent at it.
Torben never questioned why his orphan farmhand was unusually good at estimating crop yields or occasionally said things that were weirdly insightful for an eleven-year-old. Torben was not a man who asked questions when the work was getting done. Kael respected that about him.
What Kael spent those four years actually doing was learning everything he possibly could about Valdris without tipping anyone off that he was doing it.
And here's what Valdris was:
A world that ran entirely on talent.
Not kindness. Not hard work. Not personality — though having a good one helped you get further than you deserved, which Kael noted with professional interest.
*Talent.* The kind that cracked open at fifteen during the Awakening Ceremony. The moment the stone told you what element lived in your blood and what your body was built to do with it. Fire and strength. Lightning and speed. Ice and endurance. Wind and precision. Those two things together — your element, your physique — became everything. Your rank. Your prospects. Your entire future mapped out in a single glowing stone.
And the ranks went: Mortal, Mystic, Arcane, Sovereign, Divine, Transcendent, Primordial.
Most people lived and died in Mortal and had perfectly acceptable lives. Mystic was impressive. Arcane made you genuinely dangerous. Sovereign meant cities reconsidered their architecture when you walked through the gate just in case you decided to demolish something.
Above Sovereign was basically mythology. People talked about Divine and Transcendent the way people talked about weather — technically real but not something you expected to personally encounter.
And Primordial?
Kael asked about Primordial once, casually, while helping Torben's neighbor Grast patch a fence.
Grast — a retired Mystic-tier fighter with a bad knee and a lot of opinions — put down his hammer and looked at Kael with the specific expression of an adult who doesn't know how to explain something to a child without lying.
"Primordials," Grast said finally, "are the reason certain territories don't have maps."
Kael decided not to ask follow-up questions.
He also learned about the races. Humans everywhere in the middle kingdoms, politically ambitious and deeply invested in the talent system because it leveled a playing field that biology otherwise tilted against them. Elves in the eastern forests — graceful, ancient, deeply unbothered by human opinion. Dwarves in the northern mountains — stubborn in the way only things shaped by geological time can be. Beastkin in the southern plains — physically gifted in ways that made human Mystics nervous.
Demons in the Ashlands. Which nobody discussed at normal volume.
And vampires.
Vampires had the Crimson Territory. A vast domain of dark castles, perpetual twilight and citizens who'd developed a cultural habit of not asking where the nobility sourced their meals. Ancient. Untouchable. Entirely self-governing.
Their ruler's name had reached Kael's ears exactly twice in four years, both times in the hushed tones people reserved for things that could theoretically hear you from very far away.
Lady Seraphine Voss.
*Vampire Overlord. Ancient beyond counting. Elegant. Terrifying. Does not lose.*
Kael filed that under: *Interesting. Completely irrelevant to my life.*
He had exactly one concern right now and it was coming up in three days.
---
The Awakening Ceremony was a village holiday.
People came from the outlying farms. Someone set up a food stall. Children who'd been quietly panicking for months channeled it into festive energy because the alternative was throwing up in public.
Kael stood in line with eleven other fifteen-year-olds and looked completely calm.
He was not completely calm.
He was calm *on the outside*, which is a different and significantly more exhausting thing. On the inside he was running rapid calculations. Four years of preparation. Four years of being in this body, training it, pushing it, learning its limits. Something had to be there. Some spark. Some tiny sliver of affinity the stone would find and announce and then he could get on with his life.
*It'll be fine,* he told himself. *Something will show up.*
The Awakening Stone sat in the center of the square — flat, grey, ancient, radiating the quiet authority of something that had never once been wrong about a person and wasn't planning to start.
Kael did not find this reassuring.
Aric went first. Blacksmith's kid, built like someone had assembled him from spare parts meant for a much larger person. He walked up to the stone with the confidence of someone who already knew — the way some people just *know* — and pressed his palm down hard.
The stone detonated orange-red.
Not glowed. *Detonated.* Deep blazing fire that lit up the whole square for a moment like a small sunrise. The crowd erupted. Aric pumped his fist. His father made a sound that was definitely crying but would be referred to for the rest of his life as "something in my eye."
Fire affinity. Strength physique. Already a small legend at fifteen.
*Great,* Kael thought. *Good for Aric.*
Next girl: cool blue-white, sharp and clean. Ice and endurance. Her mother screamed with joy loud enough to startle a nearby horse.
One by one. Lightning — the crowd gasped. Earth — solid approval. Wind — excited murmuring. Water — polite enthusiasm.
Every single one of them lit that stone up like they'd been born knowing exactly how.
Which, Kael reflected grimly, they sort of had.
His turn came.
He walked up to the stone. Rolled his shoulders. Pressed his palm flat against the surface.
The stone did absolutely nothing.
He waited.
Nothing.
Around him the square had gone very quiet — the kind of quiet that has texture to it, that you can feel pressing against your ears.
He pressed harder. Focused. Tried to feel *something* in his blood, some warmth, some tingle, some microscopic hint that his body had any opinions about magic whatsoever.
The stone: unmoved. Unimpressed. Silent.
The elder leaned forward and squinted at the stone like perhaps it had said something very quietly and he'd missed it.
"Sometimes," the elder said carefully, "it takes a moment."
He said it the way you say things you've never had to say before and aren't sure are true.
One minute passed.
Then two.
*Come on,* Kael thought at his own blood. *Anything. Fire, ice, wind, I don't care. A small spark. A little warmth. The elemental equivalent of a polite cough.*
His blood, apparently, had nothing to say.
Three minutes.
Then — on minute four, right when the silence had become genuinely painful — the stone flickered.
The tiniest flicker. A single dim pulse of light so faint that three people in the crowd later argued about whether they'd actually seen it or imagined it out of secondhand embarrassment. There for half a second. Then gone completely.
The elder straightened up very slowly.
The square held its breath.
"No affinity," the elder said. "No physique."
The silence that followed was the loudest thing Kael had ever heard.
He stood there for a moment. Looked at the stone that had just announced to his entire village that he was, by every measurable standard this world cared about, worth nothing.
Then he turned around and faced the crowd.
Eleven families with newly awakened children. His farmer guardian with an unreadable expression. Grast in the back row looking at his boots. Thirty other villagers cycling through the emotional stages of witnessing a public failure — pity, relief, discomfort, more relief.
Kael put on his best smile.
"Well," he said pleasantly. "That's not great."
A child near the front started to say something. Their parent grabbed them.
Kael walked back to his spot in line, stood there for the rest of the ceremony, applauded politely for everyone else, and spent the entire time thinking very loudly in a direction the universe hopefully couldn't hear.
*Four years,* he thought. *Four years I've been in this body and it couldn't produce one single element. Not even a bad one. Not even something embarrassing like mud or mild warmth.*
*I got nothing.*
*Again.*
---
The weeks after were exactly as fun as he'd expected.
People didn't know how to act around the talentless. It wasn't cruelty exactly — more like the awkward choreography of people trying to be kind while also very clearly glad they weren't him. Conversations got shorter. Invitations stopped coming. Torben said nothing and communicated everything by reducing dinner and increasing morning chores simultaneously.
Kael absorbed it all and kept smiling.
On the inside he was composing a strongly worded letter to whatever cosmic administrator had decided this was a fair second chance.
*Dear Reincarnation Department,* he thought while mucking out the barn one morning. *I would like to raise several concerns about the quality of this assignment. First—*
He cut his hand on a rusted nail.
Deep. Palm. The kind of cut that should have bled for a good while.
He held it up and watched.
The blood that welled up was wrong.
Not a little wrong. Significantly, undeniably wrong. It came out nearly black — dark as ink for a moment before shifting into a deep crimson so saturated it looked almost solid. And it moved differently. Slower. Thicker. Like it had weight to it that normal blood didn't. It caught the light from the barn door and for a second it almost seemed to *shimmer.*
It healed in under a minute.
Not gradually. Not slowly sealing. It just... closed. Clean, like it had never been there.
Kael stood in the barn holding his unmarked hand and stared at it for a long time.
*Okay,* he thought. *So the stone said no affinity. But something is definitely going on in there.*
He pressed his thumbnail into his palm hard enough to break the skin. Same result. Dark blood, strange movement, gone in seconds.
He filed this information away very carefully and went back to work.
He told nobody.
But the world, it turned out, had already noticed.
Animals went still when he passed. Not scared — just frozen, watching him with a focused attention that animals didn't normally give to humans. Maren the old herbalist started appearing in her doorway every time he walked past the edge of the village, watching him with narrow eyes and saying nothing. A merchant's horse reared when the cart rolled too close to Kael on the road, and the merchant spent a full minute looking around for the source of whatever had spooked the animal before shaking his head and moving on.
Kael smiled at all of them.
He started paying closer attention.
Three months after the ceremony Torben sent him on an errand to Crest — the nearest proper town, half a morning's walk, big enough to have a market worth visiting and small enough that strangers still got noticed.
He was at the grain stalls, doing absolutely nothing suspicious, when the back of his neck told him someone was watching.
He'd had that instinct in his previous life — city-trained paranoia, the kind you develop after enough years of urban survival. He trusted it completely.
He took his time. Bought the grain. Moved stalls. Used a merchant's polished copper display to get a clean look behind him without turning around.
Two men. Forgettable clothes. Patient eyes. They'd already switched positions twice since the grain stalls which meant they were professionals who'd been doing this long enough to be bored by it.
Kael kept moving. Let them follow. Took a left into a narrow alley between a bakery and a tanner's shop and walked to the middle of it and stopped.
Turned around.
Crossed his arms.
Waited.
The two men appeared at the entrance thirty seconds later and stopped when they saw him just standing there looking at them with the expression of someone who'd been expecting this.
An awkward pause.
"So," Kael said. "Two hours. You've been on me since the grain stalls, you switched positions four times, you're good at what you do, and I'm genuinely curious what I did to deserve this level of professional attention." He tilted his head. "What do you want?"
The men exchanged a glance.
One of them reached into his coat.
He produced a small glass vial. Held it up. Dark liquid inside — dense, slow-moving, catching the light in that strange heavy way.
The exact shade of Kael's blood.
"We want you," the man said. Not aggressive. Almost conversational. The tone of someone stating a business proposition they expected to close. "Specifically, what runs through your veins."
Kael looked at the vial.
He looked at the men.
He processed the footsteps behind him — two more, appearing at the far end of the alley, cutting off any thought of retreat.
Four professionals. Him: fifteen years old, zero combat affinity, holding a bag of grain.
He set the grain down carefully against the wall.
"I would like," Kael said slowly, to no one in particular, "to file an urgent formal complaint with the department responsible for the quality of my reincarnation." He paused. "This is the second time in one lifetime I've been ambushed with absolutely no ability to do anything about it and I feel that represents a systemic failure."
The men did not appear moved by this.
They moved instead toward him — quickly, professionally, with the economy of motion that came from doing this many times before.
The cloth came down over his face. Chemical smell. Fast.
Kael had exactly one second of consciousness left and he used it to think:
*Slave merchants. Underground ones. Of course.*
*Of course that's what's happening.*
*At least it's not the bus again.*
And then darkness, complete and absolute, swallowed him whole.
---
**End of Chapter 1 — ~2,800 words**
Author's Note:
Hey everyone! Thanks for picking up From Slave to Blood God — I genuinely hope Kael's terrible luck made you smile at least once.
So yeah. The man survived death just to get kidnapped on a grain errand. Honestly respect the consistency of the universe at this point.
If you're enjoying the story so far, please leave a comment, throw some power stones, and add it to your library — it genuinely helps more than you'd think and keeps me motivated to pump out chapters.
See you in Chapter 2. 🩸
— Author