Kaelen remained perfectly still, a statue of calm amidst the squalor of the tiny apartment. The frantic, aggressive banging on the door was a foreign stimulus, a sound from a life he had never lived. In his ten millennia of existence, no being had ever dared to approach his sanctum uninvited, let alone with such crude violence. The very concept was an insult.
His sovereign mind, a consciousness that could process the gravitational data of a star cluster in a nanosecond, was now forced to contend with the panicked, fragmented memories of the boy whose body he now inhabited. The memories flooded him, not as clean data, but as a tidal wave of raw, primal fear. He felt the phantom sensation of a racing heart, the cold sweat of terror, the desperate, animalistic urge to hide under the bed like a frightened child.
He ruthlessly suppressed the inherited emotions, walling them off with the iron discipline of his will. He was Kaelen, the Celestial Sovereign, not Kaelen Vance, the terrified student. He sifted through the boy's chaotic memories, seeking not emotion, but information. The faces of the men outside slowly came into focus, dredged up from the depths of the boy's past encounters. Marco. Pike. Low-level enforcers for a local loan shark named Viktor. They were muscle for hire, creatures who operated on a simple binary of violence and intimidation. They were, in the grand cosmic scheme, less than insects.
And yet, in his current state, they were a genuine threat. This frail body, this cage of weak flesh and brittle bone, could be broken by their brutish hands.
CRACK!
The sound of splintering wood ripped through the apartment. The cheap lock, no match for a solid kick, gave way with a pathetic groan. The door flew open, slamming against the interior wall and shaking the whole room.
Two figures filled the doorway, their large frames blocking the dim light from the hallway. They swaggered in, bringing with them the smell of cheap cigarettes and stale beer. The first, Marco, was a bull of a man, with a thick neck and a face ruddy from alcohol. His knuckles were scarred, and his eyes held a look of bored cruelty. The second, Pike, was leaner, with a weasel-like face and shifty eyes that darted around the room, cataloging every worthless possession with a predatory gleam. He cracked his knuckles, a slow, deliberate sound that was clearly meant to intimidate.
"Well, well," Marco grunted, his voice a low rumble. "Look who's home. Playing hide-and-seek, were we, college boy?"
Pike's thin lips twisted into a sneer. "Nice place you got here, Vance. A real palace." He kicked over a small stack of books, sending them scattering across the floor. "Viktor's getting real tired of your excuses. The interest has piled up. Time to pay the piper."
Kaelen remained seated on the edge of the lumpy mattress, his posture relaxed, his hands resting lightly on his knees. He watched them with a profound sense of detachment, as a scientist might observe microbes under a microscope. Their posturing, their attempts at intimidation, were so predictable, so utterly mortal.
His calmness was the first thing that threw them off. They had expected pleading, begging, or terrified sobbing. The previous Kaelen Vance had given them all three on their last visit. This version, however, just watched them, his expression unreadable, his stillness unnerving.
"What's the matter, kid? Cat got your tongue?" Marco took a heavy step forward, his shadow falling over Kaelen. "Look, we can do this easy, or we can do this hard. Viktor wants his ten grand. Now. If you don't have the cash, we start taking collateral." He gestured vaguely at Kaelen's arm. "A broken leg makes for a good down payment. A real good reminder to pay on time."
It was in that moment, as the threat of crude physical violence became imminent, that the blue, ethereal screen of the System flickered in Kaelen's vision.
[Ambient Miasma Detected.]
[Source: Residual emotions of Fear, Despair, and Greed within the immediate vicinity.]
[Convert available Miasma to 0.0001 units of Primordial Chaos Energy? Y/N]
Kaelen's mind seized on the notification. He didn't know the full extent of this System's capabilities, but he knew Chaos Energy. It was the fundamental power of creation, the energy from which all other forms were derived. Even an infinitesimal amount of it was infinitely more potent than the crude spiritual energy of this backwater world.
His will, sharp and absolute, selected Yes.
He felt a subtle shift in the room's atmosphere. An almost undetectable wisp of dark, psychic residue—the lingering emotional filth left by the previous tenant's misery and the thugs' own avarice—was drawn into his body. It was a foul, unclean energy, but the moment it entered his system, it was met by the divine spark of his sovereign soul and the logic of the System. A miraculous process of refinement occurred, burning away the impurities and leaving behind a single, pure, impossibly potent droplet of golden energy.
It was the first real power he had felt since his rebirth.
It was not enough to shatter mountains, not enough to boil oceans. It was barely enough to be considered energy at all. But it was his.
He didn't hesitate. He channeled the entire, minuscule amount of Primordial Chaos Energy not to his limbs, not to his core, but directly to his eyes.
Marco raised his hand to grab Kaelen's shoulder, his patience finally at an end. "Alright, kid, you asked for it…"
Kaelen looked up.
His eyes met Marco's, and the thug froze, his hand stopping inches from its target. The boy's eyes were different. The fear, the despair, the weakness—it was all gone. In its place was something else, something terrifying. The pupils seemed to have deepened into endless, black voids, and within their depths swirled a faint, golden light, like distant, dying stars. It was a gaze that held the weight of millennia, the cold, unblinking authority of a being who had witnessed the birth and death of worlds. It was the gaze of a god.
"Your daughter, Lily," Kaelen said, his voice quiet but carrying an impossible, echoing weight that filled the tiny room. "She has a small, pink piggy bank on her dresser. She thinks she is saving up for a new bicycle."
Marco's face, which had been a mask of brutish confidence, instantly went slack with shock. How could this worthless student possibly know about his daughter?
Kaelen continued, his voice dropping into a soft, conspiratorial whisper. "She doesn't know that you sneak into her room at night, when you think she is asleep. She doesn't know you steal the crumpled bills from it to pay for your gambling problem."
The detail was so specific, so secret, so deeply shameful. It was a piece of information gleaned from a fragmented memory—the previous Kaelen had once overheard a frantic, whispered phone call Marco had made in the hallway. In the boy's mind, it was just a random piece of trivia. In the hands of a sovereign, it became a devastating weapon.
Marco's face drained of all color. He stumbled back a step, his mind reeling.
Kaelen then focused his immense will, that unshakeable sense of self that had been forged over eons, and pushed it outwards, amplifying it with the last traces of the Chaos Energy. He wasn't projecting force; he was asserting his very nature. The air in the room grew thick and heavy, pressing down on the two thugs. It wasn't a physical pressure, but a psychic one. They suddenly found it hard to breathe, their hearts hammering in their chests. Their primal, animal instincts screamed at them that they were no longer in the presence of prey. They were trapped in a cage with a predator of a kind they couldn't possibly comprehend.
Pike, who had been sneering from the sidelines, now looked around the room in a panic, his face beaded with sweat. "What... what is this?" he stammered, his bravado gone. "What are you?"
Kaelen slowly rose from the bed, his movements fluid and deliberate. He did not look powerful—his body was still frail, his clothes still shabby—but the aura of absolute authority around him was suffocating.
"Return to your master," Kaelen commanded, his voice no longer a whisper, but a clear, cold edict that permitted no disobedience. "Tell Viktor... I will grace him with my presence tomorrow to resolve this tedious matter."
He turned his back on them, a deliberate, final act of dismissal, and walked towards the small, grime-covered window, looking out at the city below as if the two thugs no longer existed.
That was the final straw. Their minds, already reeling from the psychological assault, broke completely. They scrambled over each other to get out of the apartment, their panicked footsteps echoing down the hallway as they fled.
The moment the sound of their running faded, the immense strain of the confrontation hit Kaelen's new body like a tidal wave. The sovereign will was infinite, but the mortal vessel was fragile. The golden light faded from his eyes. The oppressive pressure in the room vanished. He staggered, a violent, wracking cough tearing through his chest. He clutched his ribs as a wave of dizziness washed over him, and a warm, metallic taste filled his mouth. He looked down at his hand. A single, bright trickle of crimson blood stained his pale skin.
The effort of intimidating two mortal insects had nearly broken him.
He looked out the window at the endless city, a world teeming with pathetic creatures, any one of whom could kill him with a simple, primitive weapon. His path back to the heavens was not just long; it was paved with a weakness more profound than any he had ever imagined.
But as he stood there, feeling the pain and the fragility, a cold, dangerous smile touched his lips for the first time since his rebirth. It was a smile that promised retribution, a smile that held the cold fire of a billion dying stars.
This world might be a cage, but even a caged sovereign was still a sovereign. And he would teach these insects to fear his name once more.