Ezikeil sat alone in the dark.
The underground chamber stank of old blood, damp stone, and smoke.
The candles Rian had lit were dying one by one, their flames shrinking to trembling points before guttering out.
Only a faint red glow remained—a reflection of the embers from the ruined village above, seeping through cracks in the stone like distant, angry stars.
His new body rested against the wall, long legs crossed, hands lying loosely on his knees. The skin on his wrists was pale, with a faint ashen tint, and the veins beneath the surface were faintly dark.
To any passerby, he might have looked like a young man in his twenties at most, lean and quiet. Inside, he was counting centuries. He closed his eyes, letting the stillness wrap around him. In that silence, memories came—not drifting, but slicing.
Altars under a storm-black sky. Thousands of cultists kneeling as one, voices rising in harsh hymns to the Heavenly Demon. Crimson banners snapping in the wind. The weight of a cloak soaked in enemy blood.
The oppressive, absolute silence of a throne that no one dared to approach without permission.
The feel of Chong Ma's gaze on his back, colder than any blade, steadier than any mountain.His master's hand, once, on his shoulder."You are quiet," Chong Ma had said, crimson qi swirling lazily around him like a coiled dragon.
"Quiet men are dangerous. They think longer before they kill."Ezikeil remembered the way his younger self was expressionless, blank, while a storm of rage and benevolence burned under his calm.
He remembered the first time he had shattered a battlefield alone. The Divine Cult's enemies had called him monster, calamity, scourge. His disciples had called him hope. He remembered the war—seventy-two years of blood.
The black sea of cultists marching under his command, the sky split by divine flame, the screams, the silence that followed. The enemy leaders' faces as they realised too late that they had created the very demon they feared. And he remembered the end.
Poison. Ten thousand foes. Betrayal and satisfaction intertwined as his teacher's murderers fell with him. Kneeling at the final moment, not in weakness, but in acknowledgement. I have avenged you, Master.
Then darkness.Now, new flesh. New world. Ezikeil opened his eyes. The chamber was empty save for him. The circle was broken, bodies gone—consumed, reshaped. Every trace of Rian and the other sacrifices now lived as muscle, bone, and blood under his command.
The only marks left were stains and the heavy air. He flexed his hand slowly, watching the way tendons shifted under skin. This body was well-constructed. Strong. Balanced. Human in appearance, but far beyond it in density and resilience.
It responded exactly as he expected. But something was missing. He lifted his hand slightly, palm facing upward, and focused. Nothing happened. No familiar warmth coiling in his dantian.
No surge of qi floods his meridians. No roaring river of internal energy waiting to be shaped into techniques. The pathways for qi simply did not exist in this flesh.
It was as if a master musician had been given a perfect instrument with no strings.He felt something else instead.The air around him was thick. It pressed against his skin with weight, almost like invisible water.
Tiny, unseen particles brushed against him constantly, drifting in currents he could not yet fully read. When he focused, he could sense them more clearly—like countless sparks of power floating in the air, seeping from the stone, even radiating faintly from the traces of blood.Magicules.
Rian's explanation returned to him in brief, clipped phrases. Particles of power saturating the world. Monsters feeding on them, evolving from them.
Mages shaping them into spells. Knights hardening their bodies with them.A world without qi, but not without power.Ezikeil lowered his hand, deep in thought.
In his previous life, he had spent more than a century refining the Divine Heavenly Demon Arts, molding his qi into terrifying perfection. His meridians had been reforged, broadened, reinforced again and again until they could carry divine-level power like rivers carrying molten metal.
His body had become both furnace and weapon.This body was new. Fresh. Strong, but untrained in that way. The pathways that once carried qi were gone; the structure was different.But qi itself had always been energy—refined, guided, bound to will.
Energy was energy.If magicules filled this world as qi had filled his old one…He closed his eyes again.He shifted his posture fractionally, straightening his spine. His back pressed lightly to the rough stone wall, chin tucked slightly down, shoulders loose.
Legs remained crossed, feet relaxed, knees low.
His hands rested on his knees, fingers lightly curled, thumb and index almost touching.The first stance of his cultivation art.His breathing slowed, lengthened.
Inhale. Exhale. Each breath quiet, measured, controlled. He emptied his lungs, then filled them slowly, letting his chest rise and fall with deliberate precision.Inhale for four heartbeats.
Pause. Exhale for four. Pause.His mind stilled.The noise of the ruined village above receded. The faint crackle of dying flames, the drip of moisture from the ceiling, even the distant echoes of the world—all slipped to the edge of perception.
He searched inward.In his old body, he would have found a dantian—a central core where qi gathered, swirled, compressed. Now, he found only flesh, blood, bone. Strong, but mundane.
No reservoir. No rivers.He did not frustrate. Frustration wasted time.Instead, he extended his awareness outward, letting his senses brush the invisible particles in the air. Magicules brushed back—cold, wild, unclaimed.
He reached for them.The first attempt failed.Magicules slipped through his grasping will like mist through fingers. They recoiled from him, scattering aimlessly.
He adjusted.Qi had been internal, born of his body and tempered by cultivation. Magicules were external, unbound, flowing through environment. Rather than trying to grab them, he changed his approach.He breathed.
As his lungs filled, he imagined not air, but power. As his chest expanded, he didn't pull, he invited—a subtle difference that mattered.
His will no longer tried to seize magicules, but became a point of quiet gravity.The magicules stirred.
He felt a few of them—tiny sparks of potential—drift closer, drawn to the calm, controlled presence of his spirit. They brushed against his skin, then sank through it, flowing into muscle, blood, bone.
There a faint chill traced down his spine. The sensation was weak, but unmistakable. Something foreign had entered him. Not qi. Cruder, more chaotic. But real.He guided it inward, down, toward the centre of his being.The magicules did not follow his will as obediently as qi once had.
They squirmed, pushed back, tried to disperse. It was like forcing wild animals into a narrow path. But Ezikeil had bent armies and cults beneath his will. A few sparks of power were nothing.He pressed.Slowly, painfully, the magicules gathered.
In his lower abdomen, he felt a faint, fog-like presence condense. Not a dantian. Not yet. But a seed. A nexus where external energy could gather.He opened his eyes.A faint red shimmer flickered around his body, then vanished.
The candles' nearest flame bent toward him for a heartbeat, then straightened.He exhaled."So," he murmured quietly. "It can be done."He could not create qi in a world without it.
But he could treat magicules as a substitute—as input, as fuel. Refining them would be difficult. They were not naturally compatible with the techniques he had built, but his foundation was not some narrow path bound to one world.
It was a doctrine.Cultivate or die.He placed his hands together, fingers weaving into a seal from his old world. It felt strange with this body. The angles were slightly different. The tendons pulled in ways they hadn't before. But the form was correct.He whispered in his heart the name of his art.Divine Heavenly Demon Cultivation.
Magicules stirred again, drawn into his lungs with each breath, slipping under his skin. He guided them along imagined routes—down the spine, across the shoulders, through the arms. The pathways weren't real yet. There were no meridians. But with enough repetition, enough strain, the body would change.It always did.
Pain flickered.Not sharp, but uncomfortable. A wrongness, like forcing a liquid into cracks that weren't there. His muscles tensed involuntarily, protesting. Sweat beaded on his brow. The magicules scraped along nerves, sending tingling discomfort through his limbs.He endured.
This was nothing compared to the tortures he had survived refining himself under demonic flames, or the battle wounds he had fought through without pause.
This was only a body complaining about being reshaped.He ignored it.Minutes stretched. Breath after breath, he lured magicules in, guided them through, forced them to circulate.
The first loop was incomplete. The second, a little smoother. The third, smoother still.A faint warmth bloomed in his chest.He seized it, compressed it, refused to let it diffuse.In his old life, he had refined qi to the brink of divinity.
Here, he was starting again from nothing. A lesser man might have raged. Ezikeil did not waste emotion.He evaluated.After some unknown time, he opened his eyes again. The chamber looked no different.
The blood stains had not faded. The air still smelled like smoke and iron. He flexed his right hand once more.
This time, the movement carried a hint of weight. Not visible to the eye, but tangible to him. The magicules he had gathered responded—sluggishly, imperfectly, but they responded.
He curled his fingers tighter.Bones creaked softly, not from strain, but from power pressing inward. A faint red-black aura flickered around his knuckles, there for only a fraction of a second.
It disappeared.Ezikeil let his hand fall back to his knee."At this level," he said calmly to no one, "I could break a normal human's bones barehanded without effort. But against true monsters or knights, it is nothing."He was not satisfied. Satisfaction was for the weak. But he acknowledged progress.
The problem was clear.His art required vast quantities of refined energy to reach its true form. In his old world, qi had been a sea. Here, magicules were a river—present, but spread thin, and more difficult to control. His new body had not yet adapted to channel them efficiently. Forcing too much too soon would damage it, waste potential.
He needed more magicules. Denser sources. Places where they pooled—forests, caves, monster nests. The stronger the magic around him, the easier it would be to adapt his cultivation.For now, this chamber was the best he had.
The blood, the residual power from the ritual—all of it made the air thicker than normal. It would do for a beginning.He closed his eyes again.
Breathe in. Power in. Breathe out.Impurities out.
He could almost hear Chong Ma's voice, faint, as if carried from another universe."Power is simple," his master had once said. "You polish your spirit. You refine your body. You devour all obstacles between you and your goal. Everything else is an excuse."
Ezikeil's lips did not curve. But his eyes burned faintly brighter behind their closed lids.He adjusted his breathing, making each cycle a fraction longer. Magicules seeped in, fought, yielded.
The seed in his core grew heavier, denser. It was still a candle beside the bonfire his qi had once been, but it was his. It would grow.His mind wandered briefly as his body laboured.This world was not his. Its rules were different.
Its powers are unfamiliar. Its history is unknown. Eight hundred years from now, a slime would rise, a nation would form, and Demon Lords would gather in careful balance—he knew none of this.He had no foreknowledge, no script to lean on.He did not need it.
He had walked through battlefields that rewrote eras. He had killed men and monsters who thought themselves immortal. He had ruled a cult of fanatics by sheer presence.He would learn this world the same way.
Observe. Adapt. Dominate.Time passed without measure.
Sweat soaked his shiand rt, clinging to his back. His muscles trembled faintly with the strain of forcing foreign energy through them. At one point, a sharp, needle-like pain shot through his left arm, making the fingers go briefly numb.
He did not stop.He adjusted the flow, corrected the route, reinforced the fictional meridians he was carving into his flesh. Each repetition made the path a little realer. The body was obedient over time.
If commanded long enough, it changed.Eventually, his breathing slowed further.The flow steadied.He opened his eyes one last time.
For a moment, a thin layer of red-black aura clung to his skin, like the faintest echo of his former demonic qi. It wavered, unstable, then sank back inside."That's enough for now," he said quietly.
His throat was dry. Energy scraped at the edges of his being, demanding more fuel. His body was hungry now, not just for food, but for more magicules, more density, more places to drink from.
He pushed himself to his feet.His legs held steady. No shaking. Good.He rolled his neck slowly, listening to vertebrae pop in controlled sequence.
The faint pressure of gathered magicules lingered in his centre, like a small coal.Low level. Perhaps enough to reproduce the most basic of his martial arts techniques. A fraction of a fraction of what he had once wielded.
But it was a beginning.He looked around the chamber once more. Old blood. Faded symbols. Scattered remnants of the bodies he had used.
Nothing here would grow stronger. This place was a birth point, nothing more.He walked to the stairs leading up.Each step was silent. His body moved with the predator's grace he had always possessed—nothing of that had changed.
Only the resources did.He paused halfway up and lifted a hand, testing something.His fingers cut the air in a straight, precise line—a simple strike, refined over centuries.A faint crack whispered through the stone wall beside him.
A thin gash appeared, clean and narrow, running along the rock.Not much. But not nothing."At this rate," Ezikeil thought, "I can kill ordinary men and weak monsters barehanded.
Against stronger foes, this body will break before they do."He resumed climbing.The ruined village above awaited. The world awaited. Forests rich with magicules. Caves saturated with power.
Monster dens pulsing with raw essence. Places where he could sit and draw the world into himself until this shell resembled the weapon he once was.He stepped out into the night.
The sky here was dark, stars scattered cold and distant. Smoke drifted from the remains of wooden houses, embers still glowing. Ash floated lazily in the air, catching moonlight like falling snow.
He inhaled once.Magicules here were thinner than below, but still present. He would have to move, to travel, to seek denser places.His eyes traced the horizon.He did not spare a thought for the Black Vulture bandits.
Their existence did not interest him beyond the information they represented. He did not care to avenge the dead.
He did not care to comfort the living.Revenge was a tool, not a purpose.
His purpose was the same as always.To live.To grow stronger.To stand at the top of whatever world dared to host him.
Ezikeil took a step forward, the ground crunching softly under his bare feet. His shadow stretched behind him, too dark for the weak moonlight that cast it.
This world would learn his presence eventually.For now, he would do what he had always done in the quiet between wars.He would cultivate.And the Divine Heavenly Demon would rise again—this time, in a world of magicules and monsters, under a sky that had never heard his name.
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A bit longer chapter as i was late today
(Word count:2.6k)
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