The alchemical sanctum was no longer a room; it had become a localized pocket of primordial chaos. As Rayn tilted his head back and allowed the shimmering, mercury-like Ichor of Ouroboros to slide down his throat, the world didn't just fade—it detonated into a million shards of agonizing light.
He had chosen the hidden path. The 14th Law. A power that did not exist in Benson's textbooks, a power that whispered from the cracks of the universe.
The moment the liquid touched his gullet, Rayn's physical form collapsed as if his bones had turned to steam. His body hit the cold stone floor, but he felt as though he were falling through a bottomless abyss. This was not the same as the power awakenings he had endured in Aetheleon. In that realm, the trials were fierce, but they followed a predictable logic of heaven and earth. This potion was different. It was an invasive, alien force that sought to rewrite the very blueprint of his existence.
Inside his Dantian, the King DD Core—that magnificent engine of his divinity—was in an uproar. The nineteen powers he had already painstakingly gathered and refined reacted like cornered, feral dragons. They lashed out, their elemental auras flaring in a desperate attempt to deny the entry of the 14th Law.
It was a civil war within his own spirit.
His body became a battlefield of temperature extremes. His meridians, the conduits of his power, were flooded with a heat so intense it felt like liquid stars were being pumped through his veins. Yet, at the very center of his core, where the two unawakened powers sat in their silent, dormant majesty, the air was as cold as the void between galaxies. This juxtaposition—the external inferno and the internal absolute zero—was a torture that transcended the physical.
He remembered the pain of his past disguises. He remembered the sound of his own flesh being sliced away, the wet thud of discarded skin as he grafted new identities onto his frame. He had believed his threshold for pain was absolute. He was wrong. That was the pain of the flesh; this was the Agony of the Origin.
"I will not be unmade," Rayn's consciousness roared, though his lips remained frozen.
He mobilized his Spirit Magic, weaving threads of pure ethereal light to stitch his fracturing soul back together. When the pain threatened to drown his awareness, he did something only a madman or a Sovereign would attempt: he triggered his own Fire Essence, burning his own nerves from the inside to create a secondary, localized agony. He used this sharper, more familiar pain as a tether, a jagged anchor to keep his soul from drifting into the permanent dark.
Slowly, he forced himself to stand—not in the physical world, but in the world of his own awareness.
But as he rose, a new sensation hit him. It wasn't a burn or a cut. It was a rhythmic, soul-shattering vibration. It was as if his very spirit were being struck by a hammer forged in the heart of a dying sun. The Ichor was relentless. Even the immense pressure of the King DD Core could not extinguish this 14th power. It was like a black ink dropping into a clear pool; it didn't matter how large the pool was, the ink would eventually claim the whole.
After fifty seconds of this celestial endurance, the black fog Benson had seen in the physical world began to thicken. Benson, watching from the safety of the laboratory, could only offer a face of profound pity. To the Alchemist, Rayn was a tragic figure who had gambled his life only to awaken a "Void Scourge"—a hollow, useless power.
But Rayn was no longer in the laboratory.
His vision shifted. The darkness was replaced by a horizon of deep, pulsating crimson.
Rayn found himself standing in the center of a vast, infinite pool of blood. The sky above was a bruised, sickly purple, and the air smelled of iron and ancient, forgotten wars. He looked at that place and a man far away from him but, Rayn didn't notice him and that person's hands was not like child but as a great warrior; he was not wearing a black suit like rayn. He was a radiant, white-souled entity draped in a magnificent robe of crimson and black.
He was bound.
Huge, Crimson Chains, each link the size of a mountain peak, were wrapped around his soul's wrists and ankles. They anchored him to the center of the blood pool, pulling him down with the weight of a billion karmic debts.
Rayn began to walk. Every step through the thick, viscous blood sent ripples across the surface, unearthing the detritus of his history. Thousands of corpses floated in this sea. Some were missing limbs; others were merely shattered torsos. He saw faces he felt he should know—generals who had died in his name, lovers he had forgotten, enemies he had pulverized into dust. He felt a strange, jarring excitement. He was not a man who feared blood; he was a man who had been shaped by it.
He stopped suddenly. Floating near his feet was a head, its hair a brilliant, matted blonde. The face was brown from the sun, the eyes closed as if in a peaceful slumber.
A sharp, electric shock traveled through Rayn's heart. He reached out, his fingers trembling as he touched the cold, wet hair. Before he could process the thought, a tear escaped his eye and fell into the crimson sea.
"Why am I crying?" Rayn whispered, his voice echoing in the hollow dimension. "Who is this man? Why does my soul ache at the sight of his silence?"
He wiped his eyes, his confusion deepening. He moved forward, his legs untiring, his breath steady despite the hour of walking. This was his inner world; the rules of the flesh did not apply here.
"You wonder why you do not tire?" a voice boomed. It didn't come from the sky, but from the white-souled figure in the red robe—the figure that was him, yet not him.
"Who are you?" Rayn demanded. "I thought you were my soul. If I am here, then who am I talking to?"
The white soul, its red and black mixed robe billowing in a non-existent wind, looked at him with eyes that were twin pools of crimson fire.
"That is a question of perspective, little Rayn," the soul replied, its voice carrying the weight of aeons. "I am YAO WANG MING. I am the 'Old One.' I am the accumulation of the lives you have lived and the deaths you have suffered. I am your past, and you are my future. I am you."
Rayn's mind flickered to the stories of reincarnation he had read in Earth's web novels. He had always dismissed them as escapist fantasies. But here, in the middle of a sea of his own past blood, the truth was undeniable.
"You were crying for that blonde man," Yao Wang Ming said, his voice softening. "He was our father. A warrior of the Great Sects. We killed him, Rayn. We killed him to break the cycle, to escape the shadow of his path. You are not a soul who randomly fell into a child's body. You were not 'transmigrated' by a whim of some bored god. You were Reborn. You wrote your own fate, ensuring that your essence would survive the passage of the void."
Rayn stared at his past self. "If I am a Sovereign reborn, then why am I so weak? Why are these memories locked away?"
"Because you were the one who locked them," Yao Wang Ming replied with a hollow laugh. "You knew that the weight of a thousand years would crush the mind of a child. You sealed your divinity behind 13 locks. And now, you have chosen the key."
He pointed upward. Floating in the bruised sky was a massive black ball, wreathed in a fog so dark it seemed to suck the light out of the soul realm.
"That is the Void Scourge," Yao Wang Ming explained. "In this world, they think it is a weak power. They are fools. It is the power of Extraction. It is the only force capable of unsealing the memories you buried. But your soul is full, Rayn. You have too many petty powers clashing in your Dantian. You cannot hold the void if you are cluttered with mortal elements."
"Then tell me what to do," Rayn said, his resolve hardening.
"You have 19 powers," Yao Wang Ming commanded. "The Conqueror is your pillar, but the 18 mortal elements are your weights. They are separate, clashing, and inefficient. You must condense them. Sit. Close your eyes. Pour the essence of the fire into the water. Force the earth into the wind."
Rayn followed the instruction, entering a state of deep internal alchemy. He visualized his core—a clockwork of 18 gears. He reached out to the Fire Essence and began to shove it into the Water Essence.
The pain was unspeakable. It felt as though his Dantian was being ground between two tectonic plates. His first attempt was a disaster; the energies recoiled, nearly shattering his internal world.
"Motherfucker!" Yao Wang Ming roared from his mountain-chains. "Are you truly the reincarnation of a me, or some weak-willed freak? Do it again! The price of strength is paid in agony!"
Rayn gritted his teeth, his mental sweat turning into blood. Eleven times he failed. Eleven times his core screamed in rebellion. On the twelfth attempt, he stopped fighting the elements and started guiding them. He stopped seeing them as separate tools and started seeing them as facets of a single, unified truth.
Suddenly, the 18 elements collapsed into each other.
A blinding light erupted in his core. When it faded, the 18 mortal powers were gone. In their place sat a single, magnificent orb that shimmered with every color of the spectrum. It was an Immortal-tier power.
"What is this?" Rayn gasped.
"This is THE CONTROLLER," Yao Wang Ming replied, looking satisfied. "You no longer use fire or water. You use the Will that commands them. It will triple your cultivation speed and allow you to manipulate the environment as if it were an extension of your own hand."
"Now," Yao Wang Ming said, his red eyes turning somber. "Find the Scourge."
Rayn plunged back into his own consciousness. For two days of internal time, he navigated a shifting, shifting maze of shadows. He followed his instincts, ignoring the lures of gold and power that the maze threw at him. Finally, he reached the center.
He reached out and touched the black sphere.
The Void Scourge didn't just enter him; it claimed him. It rushed into his core, a predatory shadow that made even the Conqueror and the Controller tremble in instinctive fear. It didn't fight them; it simply existed behind them, a silent hunter waiting for the word.
Rayn stood before his past self once more. He felt complete. He felt the chains on Yao Wang Ming beginning to rust and crack.
"I have done it," Rayn said, his voice now carrying the resonance of a King. "The Controller is formed. The Scourge is refined. Unseal the memories. Give me back my life."
Yao Wang Ming looked at him, a tragic smile on his face. The mountain-sized chains rattled for the final time.
"The unsealing is not a gift, Rayn," the Sovereign whispered. "It is an exchange. To truly remember what happened to you in your previous life, the boy called Rayn must cease to exist."
The Sovereign's shadow leaned forward, his eyes burning with a terrifying light.
"The final step is simple, my other self. To truly live again... You have to die."