Darkness.
It was the first thing he felt—dense, suffocating, infinite. Then came the pain. Not sharp or focused, but a dull, endless ache that pulsed through every fiber of his being. It was familiar. Too familiar.
Am I still alive?
The question drifted in his mind like a fading ember. He remembered the hospital. The sterile white walls, the beep of machines counting down his final breaths, the sharp taste of metal when he coughed up blood. Twenty years of fighting, of hoping, of watching dreams dissolve into IV bags and test results. Then… silence.
But this wasn't death.
Cries echoed around him—babies. Harsh voices followed, hurried footsteps, a flurry of motion. He tried to move, but his limbs felt foreign, too soft, too small.
"Congratulations, it's a boy!" someone exclaimed in a language that felt… odd. Not English. Yet he understood every word.
There was no time to ponder it. Cold air touched his wet skin. His vision swam, blurry and useless, but he could feel—the weight of a hand cradling his body, the fabric of rough linen brushing his cheek, the unmistakable presence of spiritual energy in the air. He didn't know how he could sense it, but it was there—like static dancing on his skin.
"You'll name him Keshav?" a woman asked.
A man's voice answered, proud but weary. "Yes. Keshav. May he serve with dignity."
Serve?
The word clung to his newborn mind like thorns. Serve who? What kind of world had he come to?
--
The room was small, stone-walled, and dimly lit by a single flickering lantern. Outside, distant roars of beasts echoed beyond the city walls, their cries a reminder of the wild lands just beyond civilization.
Keshav lay wrapped in cloth, nestled in a wooden crib beside a straw mattress where his new mother sat humming softly. Her face was kind but worn, with lines etched not by age but by years of hard labor. His father, broad-shouldered with a quiet strength, sat sharpening tools by the hearth.
They were servants. That much was clear.
His father worked in the spirit herb gardens, his mother in the laundry of a noble family. Their lives were defined by obedience and routine, by silence and bowed heads. Yet there was love between them. Love, and something else—fear.
Every few nights, a passing cultivator's presence would make the wooden beams creak and the air go still. Keshav felt it before he understood it: the pressure of spiritual power, like gravity pressing down on his bones. His parents always knelt when they passed, eyes lowered, hearts stilled.
As weeks turned into months, Keshav's awareness sharpened. He could not speak, but his thoughts were clear. His body, however, betrayed every expectation he had of infancy.
He healed unnaturally fast. A scratch from a wooden crib rail vanished in seconds. He rarely got sick. But what disturbed him more was the hunger—not for milk, but for energy. Whenever a cultivator passed by and leaked spiritual essence, Keshav's body reacted. It drank the ambient energy, a quiet pull he couldn't control. Once, after a strong cultivator visited the estate, Keshav convulsed in his crib that night, his body glowing faintly under the moonlight as cells beneath his skin multiplied and twisted.
He didn't know it yet, but his body was not normal. Every cell within him carried a memory of the cancer that once ended his life—only now, reborn in a world of energy and spirit, those same cells had become something else. Not disease, not quite. Not yet. But different.
When he turned one, a minor spiritual examination was performed—common among servant children to see if they had any worth for labor in alchemy, farming, or menial spirit work.
The elder conducting it frowned at the result.
"Chaotic energy flow. No stable meridians. His core is… unstable. The child's vessel is flawed."
His mother clutched him tightly, panic blooming in her chest.
The elder waved her off. "He'll live. But don't expect him to do much. Consider yourselves lucky he wasn't born cursed."
Cursed? Keshav thought. If only you knew…
He had no idea what he was yet. Only that he was broken in the eyes of this world.
But he had lived once. He had died once. And now, in this world of cultivation, something deep inside him whispered:
"You were born to grow."