After knocking the masked clown unconscious, Rowan Mercer did not leave right away.
Instead, he stayed hidden, watching how the battle ahead would end.
The creature on the street made his stomach curl. It looked like something stitched together from dozens of rotting bodies, joints mismatched, flesh sagging where it should not. Rowan could have crushed it with a flick of his finger, but its appearance alone was enough to offend his senses.
"Disgusting," he thought flatly. "But… not boring."
His gaze drifted to a matte black metal case that had been thrown aside during the chaos. Something inside it pulsed with a strange, unstable rhythm. Not brute force, but warped intent. Power gone wrong.
Gunfire cracked through the air.
The bullets did nothing.
The man leading the group, a middle-aged figure in a black trench coat with a receding hairline, snapped his head toward a woman beside him. "Lotta," he barked, voice tight, "it's already a walking corpse. Find its weakness. Now."
The woman's pupils drained of color, turning an eerie gray-white as she stared straight at the monster.
From the shadows, Rowan watched and could not resist an internal jab of sarcasm.
"So the fog rolls in, and everyone starts yelling about weak points. Classic."
As the woman searched, the rest of the team unleashed their abilities. One murmured verses that twisted the air, trying to confuse the creature. Another projected an invisible field that slowed its movements. Someone else charged in close, blades flashing, trading blows at arm's length.
And then there was the last one.
A young man who did nothing but fire a handgun.
Miss after miss. No flair. No spectacle. Barely contributing.
Yet Rowan's attention settled on him.
When the woman finally shouted that she had found the weakness, the group moved together and brought the monster down in a brutal, desperate finish. In its death throes, the creature lashed out wildly. Five of them were caught in the backlash, bodies thrown aside, bones shattered. They lay scattered across the street, unconscious or worse, unable to move.
In the confusion, the black metal case tipped over.
The lid burst open.
Something crawled out.
A puppet.
No bigger than a hand, wrapped in filthy brown oil-soaked cloth, its painted grin warped and uneven. The moment it emerged, Rowan felt it. A thin, hidden thread of energy lashed out and wrapped itself around the young man with the handgun.
His body locked up instantly.
The others were down. No one could help him.
The puppet tilted its head, as if listening to something only it could hear.
Just as it was about to take full control, the young man staggered backward, moving in a slow, deliberate counterclockwise circle. His eyes went unfocused. For a split second, his soul tore free from his body and vanished into an unseen space.
Then he snapped back.
The stiffness vanished. Control returned.
Rowan's eyes narrowed, then lit with genuine interest.
"A separate inner space," he murmured to himself. "And not a small one."
He had felt it only faintly, but that realm carried weight. Structure. Authority. Its level was no lower than the world Rowan himself had created.
And it was packed with power.
"I'm starting to like this world."
The young man rushed to aid his fallen teammates, dragging them to safety. That was Rowan's cue.
With the unconscious clown killer slung casually in one hand, Rowan leapt away, vanishing from the battlefield in a few short bounds.
At the edge of Tingen City, deep within a stretch of quiet woodland, Rowan dropped the man onto the dirt.
He snapped a wrist-thick branch from a nearby tree.
The first strike brought the clown awake screaming.
The man's eyes flew open, locking onto the infant standing before him, stick in hand. Memory slammed back into place. Terror followed. He raised his right hand on instinct, trying to fire a compressed blast of air.
He never got the chance.
The branch cracked down on his arm.
Bone snapped clean through.
The scream that followed echoed through the trees.
As a practitioner of tricks and spells, his body was only marginally tougher than a normal human. He was not invulnerable. Not even close.
Rowan did not stop.
Blow after blow rained down, merciless and precise, until the man was little more than a broken, gasping heap.
Only then did Rowan toss the branch aside.
"Now," he said calmly, his presence expanding outward, heavy and absolute, "you will answer my questions. Lie to me, or hide anything, and I will show you what it means to beg for death."
He could not yet rip memories directly from the man's soul. This would have to do.
The pressure alone was overwhelming. It was not fear in the ordinary sense. It was the sensation of standing before something fundamentally above you. Something that did not share the same scale of existence.
The clown killer shook uncontrollably, his mind collapsing under the weight.
In his heart, he could only think one thing.
This thing in front of him… was a god.
An hour later, Rowan twisted the man's neck without ceremony.
As life drained away, something peeled itself free from the corpse. A shimmering essence, humming with strange energy.
Rowan examined it briefly, then swallowed it whole.
"Potions. Paths. Apotheosis," he said softly. "So that's how it works."
In this world, supernatural power came from potions. Ordinary people could drink them and become something more, gaining abilities that defied common sense. The core ingredients were monsters like the one he had seen, refined through rituals and supplementary components.
The weakest practitioners stood at the bottom rung. From there, they advanced step by step, fully digesting each potion before moving on. At the very top stood those who had completed the path entirely.
True gods.
Like the seven worshipped by the major churches of this world.
There were twenty-two such paths in total, each with its own powers, materials, and rites. All of them traced back to a single source.
The First Creator.
The myths were consistent. A being that awakened from chaos, split the darkness, forged the first light, and dissolved into the universe itself, becoming all things.
Rowan found the story familiar. Too familiar.
His gaze lifted toward the unseen barriers that stabilized the world.
"Seven anchors," he mused. "Seven gods."
If that was true, then reaching the end of any one path would grant him full godhood here, along with a massive increase in strength.
And if he could claim more than one…
Rowan smiled.
"Let's see how far this rabbit hole goes."