.
.
.
Consciousness surfaced from the deep dark without pain.
The pain came after.
Kaelen's body felt as though it had been hurled from the ocean floor and slammed against the shore. The cold arrived first — not the ordinary kind, but something that cut deeper than skin, seeping into marrow, rising from earth that had lain sealed beneath a gravestone for centuries. It found his fingers first. Then his hands. Then his shoulders, his back, his chest. Last of all, it crept where it had no right to go — into the most fragile, most unguarded corners of his soul.
His mind felt like the inside of a shattered lantern. Thoughts careened from place to place, none staying long enough, none offering anything solid to grip. Memories passed like shards of broken glass — disconnected, rootless. A scream. A flame. The demon's eyes — still, curious, untouched even by disappointment.
Am I dead?
He voiced the question inside his mind. No answer came. But his body answered.
He was breathing.
And the breath felt wrong before anything else did.
His lungs tightened. As if something outside was slowly squeezing them — gently, patiently, not to suffocate, only to ration air. With each exhale something pulled taut inside his chest, drove in like a blade, and made the next breath harder still. Breathing hadn't felt like this in his old body. Back then each breath was wide enough to carry the world. He had met storms chest-first, deep and powerful — his lungs were large, his muscles strong, his frame something years had broken down and rebuilt.
Now his lungs were small. Shrunken, narrow, undeveloped.
As though he had been crammed into the body of a child.
He opened his eyes.
At first — nothing.
Only a blurred, shapeless, meaningless grey. As if the world hadn't gathered itself yet. Or as if Kaelen's eyes hadn't learned this body.
He forced his eyelids to blink. Once. Again. The grey slowly separated into forms. Dim light — coming through a window, a crack, impossible to tell — illuminated a wooden ceiling. The planks were split. Deep, long fractures, as though the building had never made peace with itself and had been caving inward through the years. Where the boards joined, moisture had collected and gone yellow. The smells reached him in layers: mold, old paper, and beneath those, very faint, the scent of cold ash.
Somewhere in the distance, wind struck a wooden frame. Again and again. Patient, relentless. As though something outside was searching for an opening wide enough to enter.
Kaelen turned his head.
A rusted nail in the wall. Hanging from it, faded scraps of fabric — perhaps an old shirt, perhaps a sheet, something time refused to let him identify. The edges had yellowed; the centers had lost all color. On the small table beside it sat a broken glass, a dried stain hardened at the bottom of the cup. The table was chaos — books stacked in uneven piles, some having slid over the edge to the floor. The wardrobe door had come loose from its hinge and leaned outward at an angle. More books spilled from inside, their spines facing out, watching him.
Is this a cell?
No. Cells aren't this disorganized. Cells are deliberate — empty, cold, orderly. This was different. This was a place where someone had tried to live and hadn't quite managed. Dirty, but not deliberately so. Cluttered, but not consciously.
This was a home. But it felt like a home no one owned.
Kaelen tried to lift his hands.
And stopped.
As his hands rose toward the ceiling, he felt his mind go entirely blank for a moment. No words. No thoughts. Only eyes that stared and a mind that tried to comprehend.
Thin fingers. Delicate, slender, unused fingers.
His palms — those callus-covered palms that had hardened from holding a sword, that had spent years beneath armor — were gone. In their place: smooth, pale skin, open and unmarked. Perhaps faint ink stains at the fingertips. Nothing beyond that. No trace of battle. No trace of years.
Slowly he brought his fingertips to his face. He touched his forehead. The skin was smooth — those deep lines that furrowed brows had carved over years were gone. He touched his cheek — that sharp, rigid line was gone. He felt his jaw — not sharp, rounded, childlike. He pressed his temple. The firmness there, the tension the muscles beside his ears used to hold — gone.
Old scars. Gone.
Every single one.
As though someone had taken an eraser to everything he had lived. The decades. Dozens of battles. Every mark left on the body — all of it wiped clean.
"No."
The word detonated inside his chest before it ever reached his mouth. It was a feeling first — a constriction, a narrowing, the pressure that made breathing hard. Then it became a word. Single, clipped, hard.
"No."
The panic didn't come gradually.
It landed like a fist.
His heart was hammering as though it meant to shatter through his ribs from the inside — irregular, brutal, blow after blow arriving too fast. He tried to throw himself from the bed. Issued the command to his legs: Stand. Brace. Be ready.
His legs didn't listen.
They buckled like thread and folded beneath him. Kaelen dropped to his knees — onto the hard floor, the dust, the cold. The impact traveled from his knees up through his spine. Dirt filled his mouth. He coughed, and as the coughing shook him, a metallic, sharp taste spread across his tongue. Copper. Fresh blood.
His hand flew reflexively to his mouth.
His fingers were clean. No red.
But the taste was there.
And the taste brought everything with it.
The sky had been alive.
Flames had risen — his flames, fed by the last drops of his mana, the kind from which there was no return. Screams had torn through the air; he'd realized only later that one of them was his own.
The demon had been waiting there.
Calm. Still. As though he weren't watching a battle but a performance. His eyes held curiosity — not the kind people turn on one another, but the kind a child brings to examining an insect. Distant. Heatless.
"Is that all, human?"
His voice was low and tired. Neither angry nor mocking. Worse: not even disappointed. It was only a statement. A fact being logged.
"You fell short of my expectations."
Kaelen had made his final move in that instant. Whatever remained in him — his mana, his selfhood, his name, all those years — he had poured it into that last fireball. He hadn't known what would be left. He hadn't thought anything would be left.
As his body's boundaries dissolved, what he felt at the very end was surprising in its tranquility.
It's over. It's finally over.
As death's cold arms folded around him, he had carried a single thought: At least it was enough. At least it ended here.
But now he was breathing.
Kaelen covered his face with his hands. Through his fingers he exhaled a long, trembling breath. He wanted to pull at his hair — he used to do that, driving his fingers into the thick of it and letting that pressure silence his mind for a moment.
But his hair was short. Light, silky, brief.
A child's hair.
His stomach turned.
Whose body is this?
A deep hollow opened inside him. That feeling — the feeling of being trapped in a stranger's skin — suddenly became solid. As though someone had poured him into a mold while he slept. The soul the same; the body someone else's. Nothing felt right. Moving felt wrong. Breathing felt wrong. Even existing —
A mirror.
There had to be a mirror somewhere.
He grabbed the wall and pulled himself upright.
Every step was an effort. His body didn't recognize his commands — or it did, but lacked the muscle to carry them out. The expected weight wasn't there. The expected height wasn't there. His steps were short, unsteady, lurching. Kaelen felt like a giant crammed into a small child's body.
In the corner of the room stood a mirror.
Its frame had been eaten by rot — part of the wood had decayed, black patches spreading across the surface. The glass was cracked; a long line running from one corner toward the center split the reflection into two unequal halves. But it was enough.
Kaelen stood before the mirror.
And looked.
For a long, silent moment he said nothing. Thought nothing. Only looked.
Jet-black hair, strands falling across his forehead — uncut, unruly, going in every direction. A pale complexion; so pale that the blue-violet lines of veins at his temples and wrists seemed almost visible through the skin. A rounded chin — that sharp, battle-honed line was gone. A childlike expression. Narrow shoulders. Thin arms. Thin was too generous a word for this body — it was the kind of thinness that comes from inadequate nourishment, bones surfacing, muscles undeveloped.
Then the eyes.
Kaelen's gaze caught and held there.
Crimson.
Two vivid, red eyes — as though something inside them was burning but burning on its last reserves. From a distance they might have appeared fully extinguished. But they weren't. Deep within, very deep, a small ember still lived. It hadn't lost its heat, but it was on the verge of doing so.
Kaelen recognized those eyes.
He remembered fifteen years back. The same hair. The same pallor. The same gaze — the one he had carried from that point forward, the one he hadn't known how to carry then.
"Fuck," he said quietly.
His voice came out high-pitched. Fragile. A child's voice.
Hearing it was worse than seeing.
"This… is me." He paused. Spoke it louder, as though testing the weight of each word: "My youth. I've come back to my own youth."
The words hung in the air, heavy and senseless.
He swung his fist at the mirror.
And stopped.
His fist halted a centimeter from the glass. Kaelen's breath caught. He felt his hand shaking — not only from rage, but because this body lacked the control mechanisms needed to execute that motion. The glass could shatter. His hand could shatter. He wouldn't have thought about that before. Before, his body didn't argue with his commands.
Slowly he lowered his hand.
He stared at his palm. It was trembling.
"What kind of spell am I inside?"
He asked himself. No one was there to answer.
He closed his eyes and turned inward — making that movement he had once known so well. He tried to sense his mana core. Once this was easy; sensing the core was like breathing, something that happened without thought. Inside him there had been a volcano. Warmth, power, volume. Felt with every breath. Carrying it wasn't a privilege but a natural state.
Now, in that place: cold, deep, endless void.
He went deeper. Searched more carefully.
Something was there.
Very small. Very weak. Like an ember catching its first spark — one wrong glance and it would die. But it was there.
Kaelen opened his eyes.
A number formed in his mind — not as a feeling but as a hard fact:
Level 1.
Not even worth calling a mage. Zero. Nothing. Everything he had gathered across decades — every lesson, every battle, every price paid — gone.
His teeth ground together. He dug his curled fingers into his palm.
"I've gone back to the beginning?" His voice was shaking. "All those years. All those prices. And now back to this point?"
He looked at the mirror. The child in the mirror did not answer.
The table.
Kaelen walked toward it. He read the spines of the books one by one, ran his hands across them, opened drawers, checked the pockets of the clothes. He was looking for something. He didn't know exactly what. Just a clue. A thing. A single object that would anchor this reality, prove it wasn't a dream.
Book titles passed before his eyes: Mana Training — Beginner Level. First-Year Mana Manipulation. Mana Beasts: A Comprehensive Survey. Absent Heroes.
He knew these books.
He remembered these books.
Back then he hadn't read them yet — or hadn't read them properly, had pushed them aside. Because back then he had kept himself occupied with things he considered more important. Because back then he was impatient, reckless, wanting everything to be what it should be before it was ready to be.
He noticed his knees were trembling.
Then —
Ding.
A thin, sharp sound. It echoed through the room, bounced off the walls, lodged in Kaelen's mind like a needle.
Ding. Ding.
It kept going.
Kaelen went still. That sound — that vibration — loosened something inside him. The heavy fog smothering his mind scattered for a moment. The sound was pulling him to the surface from that dark spiral, from that suffocating depth — just as consciousness had done before.
He noticed his breathing was evening out.
His hands moved slowly to the pillow. A cold, rough surface. His fingers closed around it.
A phone.
An old model with a cracked screen, something that by current standards might qualify as an antique. Kaelen held it in his palm and for a moment only felt it — the weight of that cold metal, its reality. Fifteen years had passed. This phone came from a point before those fifteen years. From the world he had left behind.
The screen lit up.
Dim light illuminated Kaelen's pale face.
A notification sat on the screen.
Prof. Alfia Hall
Kaelen's eyes remained on that name.
A long time.
In his mind a film reel turned — brief, fragmented. A face. Sharp features. Those tired lines beneath the eyes. A voice, hard but honest. Hands that caught you when you walked away without looking back.
He opened the message.
"Entrance exam today, don't forget! If you're late, pick your favorite way to die."
Kaelen gripped the phone tightly.
Then — nothing happened.
No. Something happened. But not the kind he expected. A small trembling began at his fingertips. It spread to his shoulders. A strange tightening formed in his throat. He noticed his eyes had started to burn — it wasn't crying, not quite, but something was there, something wanted to come loose.
And the corner of his mouth curved upward.
It was a small, broken, exhausted smile. But it was real.
"Pffft."
His voice was still high-pitched. Still foreign. But for a moment he didn't care about that.
"Still the same," he whispered. "Nothing has changed."
Ms. Alfia. Harsh, blunt, warm underneath it all. Fifteen years, dozens of battles, a civilization shaken to its core — none of it had changed her. That small, meaningless, threatening little message undid everything Kaelen had been holding together by force until that moment.
And then — then everything collapsed.
He put his back to the wall. Slowly, with the exhaustion of the utterly exhausted, he slid down to the floor. He drew his knees to his chest. He wove his fingers into his hair, rested his head against his knees.
And sat there in silence — aware of everything happening inside him, letting none of it out.
Years.
Decades — wars, mistakes, the people lost. Names, faces, voices. All of them were in front of him now. He had never been able to ignore them; he had only stored them away. In the midst of motion, fixing his eyes on the next target, preparing for the next battle, he hadn't seen them.
Now there was no motion. He couldn't move.
"Can I fix everything?"
The question burned.
It was genuinely burning — not in his stomach but deeper, somewhere he couldn't name. Because he was required to answer it. And he didn't know the answer. He was afraid to know.
He wanted to scream.
He wanted to shout. To drive his fists against these walls until they were soaked in blood. To hurl outward everything piled inside him — the years, the regrets, the weight.
But this body was weak.
This body was not built to carry that load.
And that wild, deep scream — as it passed through his throat, it dissolved. It never became sound. It emerged only as a muffled, strangled, nearly inaudible moan. And that was heavier than a scream.
It took minutes for him to settle.
He drew a deep breath. Held it. Released.
Then he decided.
He raised both hands. Palms open, fingers extended. And slapped himself hard across both cheeks.
His cheeks burned. The pain was instant and clear and real. That reality — that simple, crude reality — was worth far more than the blurred, suffocating dark in his mind. At least this was skin. At least this was pain. And pain was real.
He raised his head.
He looked at the mirror.
The reflection looked back at him. Young, slight, powerless — a body he didn't recognize and knew intimately at the same time. He had lived inside this body. He knew the mistakes this body had made. He knew what this body didn't know, what it hadn't cared about, what it had missed.
But the eyes — those crimson, stubborn eyes that refused to die — were unchanged.
Deep within, a spark still lived.
Small, trembling, needing shelter from the wind — but there. Present.
Kaelen whispered.
"I… came back."
His voice trembled. It was barely audible.
But it was real.
He said it again. This time he rested on every word, drew each one into himself:
"I came back."
The crimson eyes in the mirror shimmered.
And that small spark — that ember — began, once more, to become a flame.
This time, he would not let it die.
This time, the beginning would be different.