Fate Cien woke from his nap with confused, ancient eyes that didn’t belong on a thirteen-year-old’s face.
He looked around the classroom slowly, as if seeing his classmates for the first time. Dust motes drifted gold through slanted afternoon light. The smell of old parchment and chalk dust hung thick in the air.
“Did you have a good nap, Fate?” his teacher, Efi-tin, asked, disgust plain on his face.
He didn’t wait for an answer. In his opinion, he’d already wasted more attention on the boy than he deserved.
He ignored Fate, as always, and kept talking.
“After Lord Rexanti established his power as the most powerful necromancer in the world, he took the land of the former kingdom of Cintia and governed it for the next five years. There were many wars with neighbouring kingdoms — all of which he won, thanks to his unstoppable army of undead. Then the Quilliam Empire stepped in to stop him. Even with all their resources, they couldn’t defeat him. After two years of battle, throwing everything they had and not winning a single fight, they named Rexanti the first Demon Lord. They struck a deal — as long as he lived, they’d never cross his borders again.”
Old memory slid back into place inside Fate’s skull like a key finding its lock. The confusion drained out of his face.
As Efi-tin prepared to move on, Fate asked, polite and certain the man would answer even through his contempt.
“Why do we fight the demon race, then? If Quilliam struck a deal with them, shouldn’t we be at peace instead of fighting all this time?”
Heads turned. Surprised looks landed on him — first time he’d spoken in class in a year.
Efi-tin looked more annoyed than surprised. Exactly as Fate expected. He answered anyway.
“After seventy-three years of ruling, Rexanti vanished under unknown circumstances, giving Quilliam a free hand. During his reign, though, he built the most powerful kingdom in the world. Seven hundred and thirty-five years have passed since the First Crusade War. The demon kingdom isn’t as powerful as it was under Rexanti — but it’s still too strong to destroy completely. The Empire and the kingdoms rebuild their armies no matter how many times they’re broken, before the final battle comes. Eight hundred years. Many wars. Fewer than three hundred years of peace between the two strongest powers in the world.”
After class, Fate walked the corridor toward his room, stone floor bleeding cold through his boots.
He needed time to sort through everything — to figure out what had happened to him. He never got the chance.
Someone tackled him from behind. He hit the ground before he even registered movement.
“Did your brother just grow his balls and start ignoring me, or is he tired of life?” Dar sneered, standing over him.
A heavy boot pinned Fate’s shoulder to the stone. A cluster of boys laughed. The corridor stayed full of foot traffic — students weaving past on either side, none of them stopping. Those who noticed simply looked away.
“I think he just gets trapped in his fantasy world,” Asin said, flashing a grin that made passing girls slow their steps despite themselves. “Thinks he’s the main hero of some story he can’t see past. Some people call it daydreaming. We call it escaping reality.”
His friends howled. They circled Fate as he struggled up, and every time he made it halfway, a boot sent him back down onto the stone.
After a few minutes, Dar hauled him up by the collar, knuckles white against the fabric.
“Stay down when we’re speaking to you, loser,” he snarled, “or I’ll smash your face in!”
“Stop, Dar.” Asin’s voice sharpened. “Not where we can be seen, or we’ll get in trouble. No matter how much of a loser he is, they won’t ignore visible marks on a knight’s student.”
He caught Dar’s raised fist before it could fall.
Dar drove a boot into Fate’s stomach instead, then rounded on his friend.
“What, conscience finally hit you? Weren’t you the first one to start and the last one to stop?”
“Not conscience. I just don’t want trouble.” Asin’s voice stayed flat. “The Knights of Light and the Fire Wizard Department aren’t on good terms right now, and even a loser like him could become a trigger. As long as you don’t leave marks, I’m fine with it. But I won’t take a punishment for this loser — no matter how satisfying it’d be to break his face.”
Dar smirked and drove a few more blows into Fate’s stomach and ribs, each landing with a dull, wet thud.
Then someone yelled, “Teacher!”
They scattered.
Fate lay curled on the cold stone as Efi-tin and a few other teachers walked past, unhurried, robes swishing. No one stopped. No one asked. One glance was enough for them to dismiss him and keep walking.
Fate pushed himself upright, ribs screaming with every breath.
This time he didn’t head back to his room. He walked outside instead. Hours later he found himself deep in the thick forest the knights used for survival training, dense canopy swallowing the daylight overhead.
He settled into a quiet corner, open space around him, and began to meditate.
First, he organized his memories — a chaotic storm that had swirled behind his eyes ever since they’d come flooding back that morning in class. Then he began absorbing rough mana, not in the careful, structured way the academy taught, but in an older method, forgotten for hundreds of years.
His way.
After a long stretch of silence, he opened his eyes deep in the night and drew one final breath, deep and full of something that felt almost alive.
Within a two-meter radius around him, every blade of grass and every low shrub had withered brown, curling in on itself like it had aged a decade in an instant.
He examined his own body and felt a flicker of real surprise. His mana pool had unlocked. Raw. Small. Weak. But undeniably there.
Ki, the energy knights relied on, was clearly born from the same root as the mana mages drew on — just refined over and over, distilled down into something more concentrated. More potent.
In my time, when you needed more power, you simply drew on more mana rather than strengthening what was already stored in your body, he thought. This dantian is a strange space too, similar to a mana pool — but while the mana pool is only a shadow cast onto the astral sphere, the dantian actually exists. Real. Physical. Present.
Fate turned the thought over, pulling on the accumulated knowledge of two full lifetimes. Slowly, understanding built. But his grasp of the dantian and ki stayed elementary at best. Neither concept had existed at all during his first life.
From lectures he vaguely remembered, he knew the knights’ ki technique had been invented in the aftermath of the terrible losses suffered during the First Crusade War. That invention, along with the basics of cultivation, had directly led to the Second Crusade War six hundred years later.
That, and little else, was the sum of what he actually knew.
Fate — second son of a minor noble house — had been formally accepted as a knight into the Knight and Wizard Academy of the Gate Kingdom.
No one had ever bothered training him.
In an entire year, he’d learned barely more than the basics taught in his very first week.
Once he’d shown no discernible talent for fighting or magic, the teachers stopped bothering with the scrawny twelve-year-old altogether — not even requiring his attendance in most classes. His father had already paid three years of tuition, fulfilling his noble obligation to see his son educated until he came of age. After that, his father discarded him with the same casual indifference as everyone else.
This life of mine is really quite pathetic, Fate thought, testing the ache in his ribs. But no wonder this body’s so weak, if its roots were left to wither like this. If I do nothing, I’ll probably be dead before I turn thirty.
Fate spent the following hours constructing a complicated matrix — an inner spell built to stay permanently active until he chose to deactivate it, or until death did it for him.
It didn’t form on any psychic plane. It took shape on the astral sphere, nestled directly inside his own mana pool.
The original version of this spell was the very one that had once let him alter destiny itself.
Now, he decided, it was time to change destiny again.
When he finally opened his eyes, morning light filtered weakly through the canopy above, and the dead zone around him had spread to a full six meters. Every old injury on his body had vanished completely. Even his cracked ribs had knitted back together, seamless and whole.
Still, he didn’t plan on returning to the academy. Not yet.
Instead, Fate decided to push his matrix to its maximum, testing its limits properly for the first time.
Wherever he walked, the surrounding plants and small animals turned faintly sluggish, faintly lifeless — a subtle, creeping exhaustion trailing in his wake.
But it wasn’t fresh plant life he was hunting for.
It was life itself.
The surrounding woods stayed nearly pristine, kept clean by their proximity to the academy, populated mostly by noble students whose families prized so-called “sport” hunting. He found a small, still lake, rigged together an improvised fishing rod, and began to fish.
He didn’t eat what he caught.
Instead, he dug a shallow pond beside the lake and kept the fish there, one leg submerged in the cold water the entire time as he sat beside it, watching.
The Matrix stood as Fate’s greatest creation, but it wasn’t the only brilliant, terrible thing he’d built. It was, without question, one of the cruelest spells ever devised by human hands — built for one purpose alone.
Stealing life itself.
Fate returned to the academy three days after he’d vanished from it.
He didn’t deactivate the matrix entirely — just throttled it down to its lowest setting, quiet enough that no one would sense it. He’d given the decision serious thought on the walk back. He’d never once used the matrix on a living human being before.
He calculated how long it had taken him to drain the life from a handful of simple fish. Fueled partly by the sharp, reckless anger only youth could provide, Fate decided to break his own rule.
New life, new rules, he thought grimly, boots crunching over fallen leaves as the academy walls came into view. I never promised anyone I wouldn’t.
At another point in his existence, the thought would have felt wrong.
Now it simply felt right — settled and certain in his chest.
He knew, on some level, that the anger was doing the talking for him.
That was fine.
He let it speak.
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